TWENTY years ago last week, when the world's first nuclear explosion seared the pre-dawn sky over New Mexico, one awed spectator felt that he was witnessing "what the first man would have seen at that moment in creation when God said, 'Let there be light.' " To another observer, Harvard Chemistry Professor George Kistiakowsky, the blast suggested the last impression of "the last man in the last millisecond of the earth's existence." In reality, of course, the road from Alamogordo has led neither to Eden nor to Armageddon but to atomic stalemate, to a world in which the superpowers between them have ten tons of nuclear destruction for every human being on earth.
In the third nuclear decade, the world faces a new kind of threat. Even as the likelihood of all-out war between the U.S. and Russia recedes, the danger now and for years to come is not only that Communist China will develop and deploy an atomic arsenal, but that a succession of smaller nations will be under increasing and perhaps irresistible pressure to join the nuclear arms race. Britain's Disarmament Minister, Lord Chalfont, described this prospect last week as "the principal and most urgent problem facing us today." Chalfont thus echoed his opposite number, William C. Foster, director of the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, who writes in the current Foreign Affairs that the spread of nuclear weapons is "likely to be at least as significant" as any change in relations between the superpowers.
Some 16 non-nuclear states already have the industrial and technological resources for nuclear weaponry. India, which has good reason to fear China's intentions, could produce an atomic bomb in 18 months. Experts predict that Israel may follow India into the nuclear club. Next may come Japan, which could manufacture nuclear weapons in two years or so, well before the early 1970s, when Red China is expected to have intermediate-range missiles for its warheads. The race could then return to Europe, where the whole process of proliferation started, and continue on to South Africa and South America.
It is ultimately conceivable, as Robert Kennedy speculated in a recent speech, that "nuclear weapons might be used between Greeks and Turks over Cyprus, between Arabs and Israelis over the Gaza Strip, between India and Pakistan in the Rann of Kutch." Defense experts such as Alastair Buchan, director of Britain's respected Institute of Strategic Studies, take a more sober view of the possibilities of proliferation but foresee, nonetheless, that the number of nuclear powers may well grow from five to 15 in the next 20 years.
Keeping Up with the Joneses