BROKEN WINDOW NUCLEAR POLICING:

Reshaping Nuclear Pact: Bush Seeks to Close Loopholes: One goal behind President Bush's shift in dealing with Iran is to rewrite the main treaty governing the spread of nuclear technology. (DAVID E. SANGER, 3/15/05, NY Times)

Behind President Bush's recent shift in dealing with Iran's nuclear program lies a less visible goal: to rewrite, in effect, the main treaty governing the spread of nuclear technology, without actually renegotiating it.

In their public statements and background briefings in recent days, Mr. Bush's aides have acknowledged that Iran appears to have the right - on paper, at least - to enrich uranium to produce electric power. But Mr. Bush has managed to convince his reluctant European allies that the only acceptable outcome of their negotiations with Iran is that it must give up that right.

In what amounts to a reinterpretation of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, Mr. Bush now argues that there is a new class of nations that simply cannot be trusted with the technology to produce nuclear material even if the treaty itself makes no such distinction.

So far the administration has not declared publicly that its larger goal beyond Iran is to remake a treaty whose intellectual roots date back to the Eisenhower administration, under the cold war banner of "Atoms for Peace." To state publicly that Iran is really a test case of Mr. Bush's broader effort, one senior administration official said, "would complicate what's already a pretty messy negotiation."

Realistically, the only sure way to stop nuclear proliferation is to launch pre-emptive strikes against everyone who tries producing nukes.

Posted by Orrin Judd at March 14, 2005 11:39 PM