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Whenever I give a public talk for a general audience, I always focus on the question, “Why is it okay for some countries to have nuclear weapons, but not for others?”

Someone asked that question this morning on The Diane Rehm Show today in reference to Iran — note to the caller, it is not a stupid question — and former Undersecretary of State Nick Burns tried to answer it.

He flubbed it, badly.

Burns basically asserted that the five permanent members of the Security Council won World War II and wrote the Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT). (I was driving, but I expect the transcript will be on the Diane Rehm Show website.) I nearly drove off the road.

This is both wrong and, I happen to think, a stupid answer.

The fact that the five permanent members (P5) of the Security Council also happen to be the five “nuclear weapon states” (NWS) under the NPT is an unhappy accident.

Recall that the Security Council was created in 1946, when the Chinese seat was occupied by the government we know today as Taiwan (The Republic of China). Most analysts, if they worried about the spread of nuclear weapons in 1946, assumed that the determining factor would be technological capability, and no one put “Red China” near the top of list of likely aspirants.

The Nonproliferation Treaty wasn’t opened for signature for another twenty-two years — in July 1968. There is a long story for another time about how the US came to support nonproliferation as a foreign policy goal, but a fair summary is that the Chinese bomb really got people’s attention. It seemed many countries were going nuclear. There was a sense, expressed in the Gilpatric Report, that this madness needed to stop. As a result, the NPT drew a temporal boundary: The formal criteria that it stated for recognition of being a weapons states was having “manufactured and exploded a nuclear weapon or other nuclear explosive device prior to 1 January 1967.”

It’s like BC and AD, but the crucial event is a negotiation, rather than some supernatural phenomenon in or around a manger.

The fact that, today, the P5 and the NWS are the same is just an unfortunate coincidence. If Israel had tested the nuclear weapon it almost certainly had in 1966, it would have been “in” the club. Same for India, had it moved more expeditiously. Moreover, France may have been a Security Council member and nuclear-armed in 1968, but it refused to sign the NPT until 1992. And although “China” signed, it was still the Republic of China. The PRC, which tested a nuclear weapon in 1964 and took its UNSC seat in 1971, also refused to sign the NPT (just like France) until 1992.

As you can see, the arbitrary distinction had nothing to do with Security Council membership — indeed, one of the better arguments for Security Council reform is that the unfortunate coincidence of the P5 also being the NPT nuclear weapons states gives rather the wrong impression.

Apparently, the coincidence can mislead seasoned professionals like Burns — he was the third ranking official in the State Department, for Christ’s sake! And, of course, the coincidence feeds the tendentious argument out of places like Tehran that we used to hear from Paris and Beijing — that the NPT is a just a victor’s peace or a naked atomic power grab. It’s kind of a bummer to learn that Burns believes that drivel.

On the other hand, this does explain Burns’s advocacy of the US-India nuclear deal. If the NPT is just some victor’s peace, why not make room for India?

Of course, the argument against the US-India nuclear deal, and for the NPT, was that some line had to be drawn. It is hardly ideal, but can you think of another taxonomy that doesn’t result in dozens of nuclear-armed countries?

Which is the answer Burns should have given: Early on, we thought nuclear weapons were good if our allies had them, bad if our enemies had them. Then we figured out this would lead to a world where everyone had nuclear weapons, which seemed like a bad idea when Mao joined the club. Since it was already too late — some states already had nuclear weapons — the obvious bargain (among others) was that no more nuclear weapons states would be permitted after the NPT, while those that had come before would make good faith efforts toward disarmament.

It’s imperfect, but I struggle to think of a better approach. Each civilization gets one nuclear-armed representative? Each language group? Each continent? The ten most populous countries? The ten richest? Nope, January 1, 1967, anno nonproliferata. Sure, maybe a date certain for disarmament might have been a nice touch, but the NPT was negotiated at the height of the Cold War when the whole Global Zero crowd still believed in nuclear deterrence.

Although there have been cheaters, holdouts and too little progress on disarmament, overall the treaty has worked very well as part of a broader international effort to restrain the further spread of nuclear weapons. The treaty itself has attained almost universal adherence (189 down, 3 to go†) and there is a strong norm against nuclear acquisition and use, something deeply in the US interest. If the NPT didn’t exist, we’d be feverishly trying to negotiate it.

I could understand if Burns simply disagreed about the success of the treaty, or doubted its longevity, or really wanted to build an alliance with India to contain China. These are dubious propositions, but hardy perennials for a certain type of Washington geopolitician skeptical of the value of institutions. But to blow a giant hole in the NPT without the slightest clue to what it is all about or how it came to be? That fairly galls me.

† Let’s just not get into counting North Korean and whether we recognize Pyonyang’s withdrawal.

Update | 10:34 pm 15 June 2010 You can listen to the segment here.