ABSTRACT
The spread of nuclear weapons has finally become a central item on the foreign policy agenda. The superpowers’ possession of nuclear weapons makes their argument against acquisition by other sovereign states morally hollow, but strategic realities make the have nots’ moral arguments against the superpowers irrelevant. The energy crisis led many observers to see the essential threat as weapons proliferation flowing almost offhandedly from the inevitable proliferation of nuclear energy generating facilities. The incremental costs of a bomb program, once plutonium is available, are also not dissuasive for a proliferation candidate. Nonproliferation policy, however, should focus on those incentives that are manipulable more than those that are not. Too much frenetic nonproliferation drum beating has been a search for the philosophers’ stone. Israel is the one country for which a new alliance commitment might be domestically acceptable, but Israel is almost certainly beyond the nuclear candidate stage anyway.
