There is no madness like nuclear madness. That was the conceit of the Cold War’s greatest comedy, “Dr. Strangelove,” and it was the conceit of North Korea’s recent rocket-launch extravaganza. By testing a missile that might one day be able to reach Alaska, Kim Jong Il tried again to win the United States’ attention by appearing to be barmy—a gambit aided by the fact that he almost certainly is. That his rocket fizzled over the Pacific seemed to offer only modest consolation, at a time when the nuclear smuggler A. Q. Khan is running his own Web site from Pakistan, and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, in Iran, is ramping up a reëlection campaign steeped in nuclear nationalism.

Illustration by Tom Bachtell

Along with two unfinished wars and economic freefall, President Barack Obama has inherited a less visible crisis, which may, in time, trump the others: the deterioration of the global nuclear-nonproliferation regime, which has lately reached its most fragile state of disrepair since the nineteen-eighties. At that time, South Africa became an undeclared nuclear-weapons power, and other newly industrialized nations (Taiwan, South Korea, Brazil, and Argentina, among them) quietly pursued hedging strategies that would allow them to build their own atomic weapons quickly, if they saw the need. Today, a similar but more dangerous competition—not yet an open nuclear-arms race, but a race for nuclear options—is gaining momentum in the Middle East.

Like many Israeli leaders, Iran’s Arab neighbors fear that Tehran’s drive to acquire nuclear weapons may now be irreversible. Some of these countries, such as Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, possess weak militaries, big oil reserves, and congenital fears of Iranian aggression. They have recently announced plans to buy their own notionally peaceful nuclear capabilities—plans that might later provide a hedge to keep weapons options open, or to encourage the United States to shield them. A few years ago, Syria reportedly received a plutonium-production reactor from North Korea. (Israel, which already has a nuclear arsenal, destroyed the suspect facility in a bombing raid, in 2007.) Egypt, too, is discussing bids from nuclear-power companies. In all this lies the outline of a nightmare scenario, perhaps just ten or twenty years away—a crisscrossing regime of hair-trigger nuclear deterrence among unstable governments, some of which have collaborated with religiously motivated militias and terrorists.

President Obama appears to recognize the seriousness of these trends. On his inaugural trip abroad, he dedicated an important foreign-policy address—delivered in Prague’s Hradcany Square—to the challenge of nuclear proliferation. Obama reaffirmed the obligation of the United States, as a party to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, to seek, as he put it, “the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons.” He added:

Some argue that the spread of these weapons cannot be stopped. . . . Such fatalism is a deadly adversary. For if we believe that the spread of nuclear weapons is inevitable, then in some way we are admitting to ourselves that the use of nuclear weapons is inevitable.

Ronald Reagan, Henry Kissinger, George Shultz, and Sam Nunn are among the Cold War-era defense hawks who have preceded Obama to an embrace of nuclear abolition. Even so, it is commonplace to criticize this vision as naïve, since the goal is unlikely to be achievable anytime soon. This criticism distorts the abolitionist movement’s work; its supporters do not generally waste time on speculative debates about when and how a world containing precisely zero nuclear weapons might eventually be created. Instead, they want to drive down the world’s nine nuclear arsenals to much smaller sizes as quickly as possible—perhaps to the tens or low hundreds of weapons, in the case of the United States—and, while doing so, to make nuclear weapons as illegitimate and impractical as possible.

For the time being, even cynical realists might recognize that Obama’s endorsement of the goal of abolition enhances America’s negotiating position within the nonproliferation system without imposing any practical constraints on American power. In fact, the Prague speech was not especially notable for its idealism; its significance lies in Obama’s comprehensive, pragmatic accounting of the nuclear-diplomacy mess that he was handed by his predecessor.

The current disorder is hardly all the fault of the Bush Administration, which had a few successes in nonproliferation, such as the dismantling of Libya’s fledgling nuclear program and the partial roll-up of the A. Q. Khan network. Yet George W. Bush and Dick Cheney disdained and undermined the international treaties and negotiations on which the nonproliferation regime is based. (Perhaps Iran, Syria, and North Korea would have accelerated their nuclear programs even if the United States had not invaded Iraq and announced a doctrine of preëmptive war; we’ll never know.) What can be observed reliably is that since the late nineteen-nineties, when India and Pakistan tested bombs, the perceived value of acquiring nuclear weapons around the world has increased, the cost of rule breaking has declined, and none of this has evolved to America’s benefit.

It may be impossible to prevent nuclear gridlock in the Middle East. Under an umbrella of Russian protection, Iran does not fear speeches. Still, it is inarguably in the United States’ interests to employ aggressive and creative diplomacy to attempt to revise Tehran’s perception of the costs and benefits of its nuclear program. Obama understands what is at stake: Iranian recalcitrance, he said, could produce “a potential nuclear-arms race in the region that will increase insecurity for all.” Last Wednesday, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton joined a European-led initiative to re-start nuclear negotiations with Tehran. In a reversal of Bush Administration policy, she said that the United States would be a “full participant” in the talks.

The Obama Administration, in its early foreign-policy decisions, has sought to prioritize the most difficult problems in its in-box, and, in doing so, to define the hard facts and choices. This approach certainly describes Obama’s foreign-policy review on Afghanistan and Pakistan, which was issued late last month. The review process bore down on the discouraging details of the revitalizing Taliban insurgency in a way that Bush and his perennially divided advisers never were able to do.

On April 5th, also as a result of a decision by the Obama Administration, television cameras recorded the arrival at Dover Air Force Base of a casket containing the remains of Staff Sergeant Phillip Myers, of Hopewell, Virginia, who was killed in Afghanistan. For the past eighteen years, the military has banned the media from witnessing the arrival home of a soldier killed overseas, even if the soldier’s family wished otherwise. No more. These caskets, too, are Obama’s inheritance. Gradually, the President is fashioning a turn in national-security policy—by insisting, first of all, on an end to denial. ♦