Just about any nuclear program can be negotiated away. Iraq gave up its nuclear program (as well as its other WMD programs) years before the U.S. invasion of 2003. Libya began steps to give up its nascent program as early as 2001, and completed them in 2003. Iran suspended its program in 2003, and North Korea, after years of diplomatic ineptitude on both sides, decided to give up its program (if not necessarily all of its weapons) earlier this year. The lesson seems to be that states considering nuclear proliferation also consider those programs to be negotiable. The North Korean program may, in fact, have been intended as a negotiating position from the start. The Libyans gave up their program in return for full re-integration with international society, and the Iranians appear to have suspended theirs because the program was found wanting after the weighing of costs and benefits. Iraq probably wouldn't have given up its program absent the resolution of the 1991 war, but even there it's clear that Hussein didn't believe that nukes were critical to regime survival. With the exception of Iraq, all of the states gave up weapons absent the explicit threat of force. The reason there aren't many nuclear states, and that nuclear aspirants are so willing to negotiate their weapons away (Ukraine and South Africa also did so in the 1990s) is that nuclear weapons are expensive for lower and middle income states, don't offer much of a return on investment, and trigger and institutionalized international response. Alarmist analyses on weapons proliferation most often depend on one of two assumptions; the proliferator is insane and cannot be deterred from attacking target x (Japan, U.S., South Korea, Israel), or the proliferator can use weapons as leverage to win concessions from the international community. The former logic has been ascribed to every nuclear aspirant since the Soviet Union, and has yet to approach plausibility. The latter argument depends on a fundamentally inept analysis of how states and international markets actually behave, and again has minimal empirical support. This isn't to say that every nuclear program can be negotiated away; it would have been very hard, I think, to convince either Pakistan or India to give up their programs in the context of superpower competition. But these programs are far more contingent than hawks seem to believe. --Robert Farley
