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Foreign Affairs
The Folly of Arms Control
By Jonathan Schell
Ten years after the end of the Cold War, nuclear danger is rising. Jonathan Schell, author of The Fate of the Earth, argues that Washington seeks to stop nuclear proliferation while holding on to its own arsenal indefinitely. These contradictory policies cannot work. As nuclear restrictions falter-battered by India's and Pakistan's tests, Iraq's defiance, North Korea's missiles, and the U.S. missile-defense plan-the untenable nature of that policy is becoming apparent. Holding on to nuclear arms is now not a deterrent but a "proliferant" that goads others to join the club. Arms control has become a way of avoiding a fateful and inevitable choice between a world of uncontrolled proliferation and a world with no nuclear weapons at all.
These real alternatives are, on the one hand, the unrestricted proliferation of nuclear weapons and, on the other, the abolition of nuclear weapons by international agreement. The current American policy is to try to stop proliferation while simultaneously continuing to hold on to its own nuclear arsenal indefinitely. But these objectives are contradictory.The current policy is a way of avoiding choice-a policy without traction in the world as it really is. Meanwhile, as in the earlier dilemmas, both the danger and the cost of dealing with it mount. For in the absence of a decision, events are drifting toward one of the real possible outcomes, namely, uncontrolled proliferation. In politics as in physics, entropy is a recipe for anarchy.