Fatal Choice: Nuclear Weapons and the Illusion of Missile Defense

The man who led the United Nations' failed effort to eliminate Iraq's weapons of mass destruction in the late 1990s says the world must make a decision "to survive nuclear weapons or be sentenced by them." Richard Butler describes the current situation in understandably stark terms: "These weapons are the singular human invention capable of destroying the earth and all that lives on it." He believes the planet faces no greater challenge than figuring out how to contain them. Global nonproliferation efforts have succeeded over the last several decades, he writes, but not completely: countries such as India, Pakistan, and possibly Iraq now have access to the bomb. President Bush's plans to build a national missile-defense system are especially misguided, in his view, because they would spur a new arms race. By pushing forward, the United States will ensure "the realization of its own nightmare." Butler proposes a series of arms-control measures--Senate confirmation of the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, a bilateral agreement between the United States and Russia to reduce their nuclear stockpiles, the creation of an international Council on Weapons of Mass Destruction--but the main draw of Fatal Choice may be its moral fervor. Policymakers, Butler writes, "have a clear choice: to build a world free from the greatest of all threats to life, or to prepare for the next stage of nuclear bondage and terrorism." --John Miller