ABSTRACT
This chapter examines current non-proliferation guidelines, but which pose potentially significant strategic obstacles to future US military missions. These cases suggest that non-proliferation policy should not focus exclusively on 'weapons of mass destruction'. Policy makers must reconnect non-proliferation policy with military perspectives on emerging strategic threats to US national security interests. In other words, the United States must re-evaluate the meaning of strategic threats, and incorporate those assessments into its non-proliferation and arms control efforts. Early efforts to control the spread of 'strategic' weapons focused on specific and predictable threats, and the most menacing forms of potential war. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that nuclear weapons have been a serious concern for the United States since the beginning of the Cold War. In the late Cold War era, analysts viewed the proliferation of nuclear, biological and chemical (NBC) weapons as a threat because regional conflicts between NBC-armed opponents might escalate, deliberately or accidentally, into a superpower nuclear exchange.
