ABSTRACT
How are we to understand the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and the dangers posed by their acquisition and use in the twenty-first century? A great deal of post-cold war discussion and debate in the United States has focused on the threat to international security posed by the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. The United States today happily lacks a major nation-state competitor in the international system that focuses American attention as the Soviet Union had during the cold war. The absence of a “clear and present danger” in the form of a nation-state, though, inhibits the development of a grand strategy analogous to that of containment. With the end of the cold war in the last century, many observers and commentators seized on the counter-proliferation of weapons of mass destruction as the intellectual centerpiece that would replace the organizing cold war concept of containment in American national security policy. For many, countering the proliferation of chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons is the missing piece that completes the mosaic of post-cold war American national security strategy.
