Democratization there [Egypt], like democratization of Iran, could thwart the ideologies and fear that move poor countries to spend fortunes on nuclear weapons. ~Marc Reuel Gerecht

There is a great deal in Gerecht’s op-ed to criticize, but I found this to be the most forced and ridiculous of all of his claims. Why would anyone conclude that democratization could thwart “the ideologies and fear that move poor countries to spend fortunes on nuclear weapons”? Democratic governments are no more immune to irrational fear of foreign threats, and sometimes it seems as if democratic publics are strangely prone to panicking about threats to their security. If anything, new democracies may be even more susceptible to the lure of pursuing an ideological foreign policy, and new democracies are more vulnerable to the kind of nationalist demagoguery and fearmongering that supporters of arms build-ups use to advance their policies. Despite Gerecht’s best efforts to minimize concerns about the Muslim Brotherhood in the rest of the op-ed, he must know that it was just a few years ago that this group was urging the Egyptian government to develop a nuclear deterrent:

The most well-organized Egyptian political opposition and the most likely to assault the Cairo regime would be the Muslim Brotherhood, which in July 2006 publicly called on the Mubarak regime to develop a nuclear deterrent.

This suggests that a nuclear weapons capability would be high on the policy agenda for a Muslim Brotherhood–led government in Cairo.

That suggests that democratization in Egypt is likely to empower those forces that are more interested in a nuclear arsenal than the current government. Far from thwarting proliferation, democratization might indirectly facilitate it. Counting North Korea, there are nine nuclear-armed states, and just three of these acquired their nuclear weapons while governed by communist regimes. All of the other six acquired and tested their weapons with the blessing and authorization of their democratically-elected governments. Israel, India, and Pakistan were hardly abundantly wealthy nations when their governments started building their nuclear arsenals. That doesn’t mean that a future Egyptian government will try to build nuclear weapons, and it certainly doesn’t guarantee that such an attempt would be successful, but we should understand that regime type is no safeguard against proliferation or ideology. If the government of Egypt or Iran believes it has a strategic interest in building its own nuclear arsenal, it won’t matter if its government is a democratic one or not.