Is Nuclear Proliferation Back?

Preparations are already underway at the United Nations for the 2026 Review Conference of the Parties to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT), which was originally signed in 1968. Many expect a contentious event. Some countries are having second thoughts about the principle of non-proliferation, because they wonder if Russia would have invaded Ukraine in 2022 if the latter had kept the nuclear weapons it inherited from the Soviet Union. Such counterfactuals, in turn, have renewed others’ fears of nuclear proliferation.

These concerns are not new, of course. In my memoir, A Life in the American Century, I revisit an equally contentious period in the 1970s, when I was in charge of US President Jimmy Carter’s non-proliferation policy. Following the 1973 oil crisis, the conventional wisdom was that the world was running out of oil and needed to turn to nuclear energy. However, it was also widely — and wrongly — believed that the world was running out of uranium and therefore would have to rely instead on reprocessed plutonium (a byproduct of the uranium used in nuclear reactors).

According to some forecasts at the time, as many as 46 countries would be reprocessing plutonium by 1990. The problem, of course, was that plutonium is a weapons-usable material. A world awash in the trade of plutonium would be at much greater risk of nuclear proliferation and nuclear terrorism.

In 1974, India became the first country beyond the five listed in the NPT (China, France, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States) to launch what it euphemistically called a “peaceful nuclear explosion.” It used plutonium reprocessed from American and Canadian uranium, which had been provided on the condition that it would be used for peaceful purposes only. France then agreed to sell a plutonium-reprocessing plant to Pakistan, whose prime minister, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, had said the country would eat grass before letting India develop a nuclear monopoly in South Asia. Meanwhile, in Latin America, Germany was selling a uranium-enrichment plant to Brazil, and Argentina was exploring its options for using plutonium. With other countries quietly doing the same, an incipient nuclear arms race was developing….