The Scramble For The Bomb

Kim Jong Il's nuclear blast in North Korea signaled an unsettling new era in the nuclear-arms race. The rules of the cold war have been replaced with a crude survival-of-the-fittest code. Many readers blamed the U.S. for misplaced attention on Iraq, allowing the North Korean threat to increase

"When outlaws get the bomb" [Oct. 23], on the aftermath of North Korea's nuclear-weapons test, overlooked the significance of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT), the only binding, multilateral commitment to the goal of disarmament by nuclear-weapons states. Signatories are obligated to negotiate and achieve the elimination of nuclear arms. To...