ABSTRACT
The dangerous future world of a proliferation of weapons of mass destruction may indeed require some preemptive or preventive war attacks. One can thus hardly support the goals of non-proliferation without being more than a little sympathetic to the general logic of preemption and preventive action. Non-proliferation involves looking ahead with a globally minded worst-case analysis. The United States may find it necessary and inevitable that the prerogative of "preemption" or preventive war be enunciated, in face of the damage that a hostile state or non-state actor could inflict with weapons of mass destruction. The three major supporters of United States naval expansion, Alfred Thayer Mahan, Henry Cabot Lodge, and Theodore Roosevelt, has thus all been hostile to British naval power in one way or another at the beginning of the 1890s.
