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A discussion involving some other interveners followed in which Polanyi made the point that each new nuclear military power after the United States — the U.S.S.R., the U.K., France, China, Israel, India, Pakistan and South Africa (which renounced nuclear weapons after the accession to government of Nelson Mandela and the African National Congress) — was simply admitted to the slowly expanding group of nuclear powers, and all have proved responsible in nuclear military matters. He focused on Stalin and Mao Tse-tung as illustrative of people who were egomaniacal, belligerent totalitarians, yet had not misused nuclear military capability. Stalin was, in fact, quite cautious about going to war, and only initiated hostilities in one limited (though outrageous) incursion in Finland when most of the rest of Europe was already at war in 1939. Chou En-lai confirmed to Richard Nixon in 1972 that Stalin had not lifted a finger to help China in the Korean War. And Mao made absurd comments about China’s immense population enabling it to endure a nuclear war before China had such a military capability, but not afterward. I thought Pakistan, given its political instability and patronage of some terrorist groups, was a greater danger, but so far, so good.

The entire non-proliferation regime has been a fraud from the start

My view is that the entire non-proliferation regime has been a fraud from the start. The nuclear genie can never be put back in the bottle, and the pledge of the nuclear powers to attempt to negotiate nuclear disarmament between themselves while discouraging other countries from becoming nuclear powers is essentially hypocrisy. They have not disarmed, can not, and it is not desirable that they do, because if they did the whole world would be subject to blackmail from any irresponsible despot who applied the well-known and accessible knowledge of how to assemble and deliver a nuclear weapon. In this one point, the mad theocrats of Tehran are correct: the nuclear non-proliferation regime is just a club of states monopolizing the power and influence of a nuclear arsenal, while piously scolding other countries to abjure nuclear weapons.