Reporter Philip Taubman writes in the NY Times Magazine on "The Trouble With Zero": nuclear abolitionism raises serious practical problems:
One solution suggested by abolition advocates would be a form of latent or virtual deterrence, based not on weapons all but ready to launch, but on the ability to reassemble or rebuild them.
If arsenals are drastically reduced, the next steps toward abolition could be even trickier. Since scientific and engineering knowledge cannot be expunged from mankind’s memory, the potential to build weapons will always exist. Efforts to hide a few weapons may be difficult to detect and prevent. And any nation able to enrich uranium usable in nuclear power plants, like Iran, has a capacity to produce highly enriched fuel for weapons. Nuclear arms experts have been analyzing these issues intently and have come up with plans to address them. The steps include improvements in the tools used to monitor and verify compliance with treaties and new ways to prevent cheating, including more intrusive inspections.
The enrichment problem, they say, could be solved by limiting the production of enriched uranium to internationally controlled fuel banks that would supply power reactors in places like Iran, eliminating the need for national enrichment plants.
Bottom Line. We could not verify nuclear progress in North Korea, nor could we find all the WMD in Iraq in the 1990s, nor could we discover that Saddam had disposed of his WMD before the March 2003 Iraq invasion. It simply strains credulity to sees abolition as achievable until verifications advances to vastly improved levels. All serious proponents of ultimate nuclear abolition understand this. But those who do not may see a carpe diem moment with an idealistic administration, susceptible to Utopian visions. Stay tuned.
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