Ross describes the nuclear proliferation panel in Aspen in this post, in which he says:

And nobody seemed willing to consider the notion that deterrence might be a viable strategic option in a world with, say, fifteen nuclear powers; the likelihood that “it’s not just Ahmadinejad getting the bomb, it’s Hezbollah getting the bomb,” in Carter’s phrase, was taken as a given. 

Having looked over the bios of the panelists, I can’t say that I am surprised.  When you have two academics who have circulated in upper echelon DoD circles for a long time, Jane Harman and James Woolsey (because every discredited foreign policy approach needed to be represented, I guess), you are going to get some pretty predictable–and bad–answers.  It is the predictability of the panel’s uniform “Armageddon” response is what is noteworthy here: at a convivium where ideas would be, one assumes from the festive name, celebrated and encouraged, here is a panel on one of the more compelling issues of our time and all it can produce is rather haggard, reflexive alarmism.  If the “ideas” on display involve recycling the “nuke hand-off” argument, there is not much to celebrate.  This business about “Ahmadinejad getting the bomb” is the sort of thing I would expect from amateurs and unoriginal pundits.  Even as a shorthand, it is misleading.  Ahmadinejad isn’t getting the bomb in the event of a successful test.  Vajpayee didn’t get the bomb when India acquired their nukes–he doesn’t get to take it with him when he leaves office.  If they are successful, the Iranian government and military will be getting the bomb.  Contrary to apparently common perceptions, there are actually more than three or four people in the political and military apparatus of Iran.  They might have a few things to say about how the government might use, or not use, said bomb.  There will be more and less aggressive elements in government and military circles, but sufficiently few basiji fanatics that the prospects of a regime bent on a suicide attack on any other country are not good.   

For the panelists, judging from Ross’ description, it all seems so clear: Ahmadinejad (who, the unspoken subtext tells us, is just like Hitler or some equally despicable figure) is a crazy man who will start lobbing nukes around the minute “he” gets “his” hands on them.  He will, of course, probably be out of power come 2009 come the next presidential election, barring a significant change in his relative domestic popularity and in the economic woes he was elected to address.  Note that no one in the West would have ever said that they feared “Khatami getting the bomb.”  Khatami was powerless, almost a nonentity as far as real foreign policy was concerned, and he held the very same position as the ever-threatening loon in the open-neck white shirt.  Once Ahmadinejad is gone, as he likely will be in just two years, it will be a good deal harder to psychoanalyse his successor and personalise the Iranian nuclear program as the plaything of a madman.  It is impossible not to notice that this is the exactly identical sort of argumentation that people made about Hussein and Iraq, and events have shown that they didn’t know what they were talking about then, either.  Why does anyone continue to listen to these fantasies?  (To his credit, Ross wasn’t buying any of this.)

One of the consistently craziest claims that interventionists and many realists make about the dangers of proliferation is this very “hand-off” argument.  Deterrence works, so alarmists have to find loopholes and exceptions.  “But what about the hand-off to terrorists?” they ask.  In this view, transfers of nuclear weapons will just happen between states and their proxy armies as a matter of course.  This makes no sense.  Nuclear weapons states do not make it a habit to hand over one of the most powerful weapons on earth to the relatively more lunatic people with AKs whom they use as cat’s paws.  Having seen last summer what Hizbullah did with the conventional weapons Iran had given them, why would Tehran hand over a nuke?  It is ludicrous.  In fact, the “hand-off” has never happened in over sixty years since the invention of nuclear weapons.  That’s because it is a crazy idea, and it is one that no government, especially the paranoid, control-obsessed and authoritarian kinds, would ever consider seriously.  The reasons are pretty clear.  First, it means giving up a valuable national security asset that you have invested significant money, time and manpower into developing.  Next, it means that you have handed over a weapon that can be traced back to you and retain no control over how it is used.  Perhaps most importantly, it means subtracting from your own power and increasing the power of your proxy, thus making the proxy less dependent on you.  

The real fear with Pakistan, for example, is not that its government will actually consciously deliver a nuke to a jihadi group (it would not, for all of the reasons outlined above), but that the government is so unstable that jihadi-friendly elements in the security and military forces might be able to seize power by force or gain access to the nukes that Pakistan has.  The main danger of future proliferation, which is the largest danger of the present moment as well, is not that there will be more nukes, but that more nukes may be poorly secured and accounted for.      

The really weird thing about the standard nonproliferation argument is the way in which it regards the acquisition of these weapons by American allies as even more threatening than their acquisition by a few tinpot despotisms.  The list of probable proliferators in the event of a successful North Korean or Iranian nuclear test is mainly a list of U.S. allied or subsidised countries.  In their arguments, the nonproliferation activists seem to be almost as focused on the danger of Taiwan and South Korea acquiring these weapons as they are on the dangers of Iran and North Korea acquiring them.  Is it just a coincidence that the development of independent nuclear deterrents by our Asian allies would make the U.S. nuclear shield irrelevant to the security alliance between our countries, or do American nonproliferation activists actually fear a world in which our Asian allies are fully capable of providing for their own security?