Viewpoint: Proliferation and Nonproliferation in the 1990s: Looking for the Right Lessons

Brad Roberts is a member of the research staff at the Institute for Defense Analyses in Alexandria, Virginia, and a member of the editorial board of The Nonproliferation Review. He also chairs the research advisory council of the Chemical and Biological Arms Control Institute. The views expressed here are his own and should not be attributed to any of the institutions with which he is affiliated or their sponsors. Some aspects of the arguments presented here have been published in other venues, including principally Weapons Proliferation and World Order After the Cold War (Kluwer Press, 1996). Early in the 1990s, pundits claimed that proliferation would prove to be little more than a passing fancy of security specialists and the Clinton administration. It didn’t work out that way. Today, the problem is broadly seen as one of enduring importance for US national security and global stability in the post-Cold War era. Accordingly, we have worked for roughly a decade now to come to terms with the proliferation problem without the Cold War as context. As a community of policymakers and analysts, we have had a rough time doing so. We began with what we thought we knew, which turned out to be not enough. We reinvigorated traditional policy approaches, only to have to improvise and innovate as the world changed. Moreover, our community has steadily expanded, as the proliferation issue has begun to cut across an ever broader array of foreign and defense policy interests and as more and more people— many with very different backgrounds—have had to learn about the proliferation of nuclear, biological, and chemical (NBC) weapons and their missile delivery systems.