Proliferant (n): a country possessing nuclear weapons.
Intended to enhance security or prestige, nuclear weapons instead make humanity less secure, and brand their possessors as dangerous – hardly the kind of prestige most people would aspire to in their personal lives. If decontructing means identifying internal contradictions, nuclear bombs are a good example. Let’s examine nuclear proliferation a little more closely.
The first country to go nuclear was the US, with a test explosion in 1945. The Soviet Union tested their first device in 1949, followed by the U.K. in 1952, France (1960), China (1964), India (1974), Israel (probable in 1979), South Africa (probable in 1979), Pakistan (1998), and North Korea (2006). Regardless of the uncertainty of a 1979 test, South Africa definitely did develop nuclear weapons which they later destroyed, and few if any dispute that Israel has them although the government will not confirm it. Thus we see development occurring 10x in 65 years as of 2010 (averaging once per 6.5 years), with intervals ranging from 0 to 19 years. Since 8 of 9 intervals are 10 years or less, as of this writing the next country to explode a nuclear device will most likely do so by 2016.
With less than a dozen members of the nuclear club so far, there is insufficient data draw accurate statistical conclusions about future proliferation based on first test explosions alone. Additional data can be obtained by integrating data on the times and intervals of test explosions of pure fission bombs, which rely on nuclear fission (splitting of heavy atoms into lighter ones), with times and intervals for other types of milestones. Some of these are first tests of fusion-boosted bombs, of the more powerful two-stage thermonuclear bombs, and of neutron bombs.
Of course, times of first test explosions are not the only useful data. Times of acquisition of other technologies used in weapon manufacture, development budgets, treaties and their associated dates, times of other social and political events, and development and deployment of monitoring technologies are other relevant times. Additional times that could be folded into a more complete analysis include accounting for countries owning weapons that they did not develop. For example, after the breakup of the Soviet Union the Ukraine was third in number of nuclear weapons, until they were sent back to Russia (reminding us that disarmament also provides relevant time points). Countries can and do also host weapons that are controlled by other countries. This is of more than only academic interest. Cuba’s status as such a country brought the world close to a second nuclear war in 1962 (hence the term “Cuban missile crisis”; the first nuclear war was of course the US attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki).
What can be done.
To better predict what the future holds for nuclear proliferation if historical trends continue, we need to better understand, statistically, what the historical trends really are. A metric based on integrating the data points outlined above would go a long way toward reaching that goal. We already know that by 2016 the next country to go nuclear will probably have tested a device (Though the statistics don’t say, you might like to guess what country that will be). This rough conclusion is a start, and more analysis would produce more conclusions.
Statistics is not destiny. One reason is that statistics does not uncover causes. Thus we can buck the statistics, and prevent or reduce proliferation if we get at and modify the causes. The best way to start is to identify the ‘pressure points’ of the system (yes, Virginia, you can fight the system, if you do it right). Key causes include the incentive structure that exists: desires to be able to (a) attack, (b) retaliate to attack, (c) threaten attack, (d) reduce threat of attack, (e) sell, (f) gain prestige, (g) etc. Change the incentive structure and you could eliminate the causes of proliferation.
The need to know. If knowledge is power, then better understanding of proliferation will lead to more power to control it. Former US Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger was once asked in a televised news conference by a concerned listener why more research was not done on the reasons for nuclear proliferation. His response: new papers were simply repeating existing papers, and what is the point of more research when it would just be redundant? The foolishness of this reply, surprising in one chosen by his country to be responsible for its safety, is clear: if progress in understanding such a vital problem is too slow, it is far better to direct more research to the question of why it is so slow than to simply throw up one’s hands and accept lack of understanding as inevitable. As Spinoza, the great classical philosopher might have said, there are reasons for everything, those reasons can be found, and no effort should be spared to find them. Whether suppressing an activity so important to the existence of the human race makes Weinberger one of Satan’s soldiers is a question left to the reader.
