By Zachary Keck
The US foreign policy community is far less concerned with existing nuclear arsenals than potential future ones.
Although I’m admittedly often perplexed by U.S. foreign policy, perhaps nothing puzzles me quite as much as America’s obsession with ONLY hypothetical nuclear weapons. That is, U.S. policymakers and pundits seem to have an inordinate fear of nuclear weapons, until they become real.
The U.S. has quite rightly been concerned with the spread of nuclear weapons since they first burst on the scene at the end of WWII. Thus, as early as 1954 President Dwight Eisenhower exclaimed, “Soon even little countries will have a stockpile of these bombs, and then we will be in a mess.” Similarly, during the 1960 Presidential campaign John F. Kennedy predicted that as many as 20 countries might have nuclear weapons by the time of the 1964 election.
Nor were politicians alone in holding this fear. In 1957, the Central Intelligence Agency predicted that 10 countries would build nuclear weapons over the following decade; by 1975, it predicted that “logically” proliferation would only end when “all political actors, state and non-state, are equipped with nuclear armaments.” Similarly dire predictions have surfaced nearly every time a new country approaches the nuclear threshold, from China in the early 1960s to Iran today.
Read the full story at The Diplomat