Sidney D. Drell is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and professor emeritus of theoretical physics at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, Stanford University. This article is adapted from The Gravest Danger: Nuclear Weapons, coauthored with James E. Goodby (Hoover Institution Press).
It starts out good and gets better:
A Cold War success
During the darkest days of the Cold War, we were successful in limiting the spread of nuclear weapons to no more than a handful of nations. A norm of nonpossession of these weapons was established, as was a norm of their nonuse in military combat that has extended over 60 turbulent years. This record belies a view frequently expressed by those who disparage the value of international cooperation and arms-control treaties and who consider continuing negotiating efforts against nuclear proliferation to be futile.
Today only eight nations are confirmed nuclear-weapon states: the United States, the United Kingdom, Russia, China, France, India, Pakistan, and Israel, a nondeclared nuclear-weapon state (see Figure 1). The evidence is unclear in the case of North Korea, though its government has the fuel for nuclear bombs and wishes the world to worry that it has them. Iran has been aggressively building a nuclear infrastructure. This number of eight nuclear weapons states is much smaller than was anticipated in the early 1960s; President Kennedy predicted 16 by the end of that decade. And the number hasnÂ’t grown over the past two decades.
This is all the more impressive when one recalls the many nations that flirted with the idea of going nuclear — and those that, in fact, started down the path to nuclear weapons and turned back. These include Argentina, Brazil, Taiwan, South Korea, and Sweden; and South Africa, Belarus, Ukraine, and Kazakhstan, which gave them up. But we are reminded daily by events in North Korea, Iran, and Pakistan — with its precarious arsenal and the extensive nuclear-supplier network created by Dr. Abdul Qadeer Khan — that the nuclear-restraint regime is facing tough challenges.
[..]