Interesting historical parallels from Steve Coll in the always essential New Yorker:

The election season required a shouting match about whose negotiating tactics with North Korea were the most doomed. Certainly the Bush Administration contributed more than its share to the final result. By invading Iraq and failing there, it depleted every variety of American power fighting one enemy that possessed no nuclear weapons, while emboldening a second that was building a store of them, and a third, Iran, that has evidently decided that it must get some, and soon.

Nice codpiece ya got there, Commander!

The Administration’s fitful attempts at nuclear diplomacy have been undermined by its proud contempt for multilateral-treaty regimes. Its arms-control specialists, such as John Bolton, fantasize that they can stop nuclear proliferation the way the British Navy once tried to stop the slave trade: through military force and interdiction at sea. Moral suasion and sustained bargaining, the proven mechanisms of nuclear restraint in addition to deterrence, interest this Administration much less. Perhaps North Korea would have tested its nuclear bomb even if Bush had, from the outset of his Presidency, embraced the vision of nuclear abolition articulated by Ronald Reagan, or if he had advanced the policies of his father, and of Bill Clinton, by using American influence to negotiate actively to diminish the role of nuclear arms as instruments of state power. We’ll never know.

The more important question now is whether we are witnessing the end of the formal nuclear order defined by the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, which was opened for signature in 1968.

Well, who cares? When we put nukes and other wunderwaffen in space (see the PNAC) "we"--and by "we," I do not mean us--can do whatever the fuck we want! Right?

That agreement proscribes all but five countries—the United States, Russia, China, Britain, and France—from possessing nuclear weapons, in exchange for a pledge from the five to eliminate their own stockpiles at some unspecified future time. The International Atomic Energy Agency is the treaty’s enforcement arm; other nuclear agreements often serve, in effect, as codicils.

A decade ago, the N.P.T. system, although hardly flawless (burdened, for instance, by Israel’s defiance of the regime), looked to be in fairly ruddy health. As the Soviet Union broke up, Bush’s father stripped thousands of targets from secret nuclear war plans, endorsed a large reduction in the size of the U.S. arsenal, and helped insure that Kazakhstan, Ukraine, and Belarus would surrender any bombs they inherited. Arduous diplomacy in the first years of the Clinton Administration confirmed these commitments; South Africa, Brazil, and Argentina also voluntarily gave up their nuclear weapons programs; and the five acknowledged nuclear powers signed a test-ban treaty. These decisions, by such disparate governments, seemed to show that atomic arsenals were of increasingly marginal value.

India’s Hindu nationalist leaders shattered this momentum when they tested nuclear weapons, without provocation, in 1998. Clinton offered extraordinary amounts of aid to Pakistan’s dim Prime Minister, Nawaz Sharif, if he would refrain from reciprocal tests; he went ahead anyway. Neither Pakistan nor India paid a serious price. North Korea’s and Iran’s leaders discovered through these examples that a full-blown weapons program could become, at a minimum, a source of leverage. China coddled North Korea and pushed its own nuclear modernization without penalty. Bin Laden announced his nuclear ambitions.

When President Bush came to office, he showed little interest in the non-proliferation regime or its goals. His axis-of-evil formulation and his invasion of Iraq stoked the paranoia of the regimes in Pyongyang and Tehran, yet Bush had no strategy to talk them down from the nuclear ledge. Libya did agree to abandon its nuclear program, but that has been overwhelmed by other failures. On Bush’s watch, atomic weapons have been revalued—not quite to the point of legitimacy, perhaps, but certainly upward, as sources of influence, national pride, and anti-American defiance.

The global system that encourages states to acquire nuclear weapons is complex and difficult to manipulate. So was the system that girded the colonial slave trade. Both are immoral. The only solution to the problem of nuclear proliferation is to engage in the daunting, dull, and entirely plausible project of steadily making such weapons marginal, illegitimate, and very difficult to acquire, inspired by a final vision of enforceable abolition. The N.P.T. is the only realistic framework for such work. It is like no other treaty regime ever enacted—a blend of idealism and ruthless realpolitik, global in scope, with a large police force, at the I.A.E.A., already in place. The treaty is eroding, but to turn away from its principles now would be far more irrational than any calculation Kim Jong Il has yet made.

Nuclear proliferation as the moral equivalent of slavery. Nice equation, and true. Where's the upside of incinerating millions of ... Unbelievers and bringing on the Rapture? Sorry I answered that...