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U.S.-Soviet arms control was the Everest of earthly problems," says Roger Molander, a nuclear expert formerly with the U.S. National Security Council, who now heads the Washington-based Roosevelt Center for American Policy Studies. "But that was before I understood nuclear proliferation. It makes the superpower arms race look like a comparatively minor league problem." Says Charles Ebinger of Georgetown University's Center for Strategic and International Studies: "It's probably the most pessimistic issue I've ever dealt with. Nobody seems to come up with any solutions, myself included."
The spread of nuclear technology over the past four decades is both an impressive and a daunting achievement. Five countries formally possess nuclear weapons (the U.S., the Soviet Union, Britain, France and China); India's 1974 test explosion shows that it has at least mastered the capacity to build them. All told, about 345 commercial nuclear power reactors are in operation in 26 countries, and some 52 nations have nuclear research facilities. At least eleven nations possess facilities for the reprocessing of nuclear fuels, all yielding varying amounts of plutonium. Large enrichment facilities to turn uranium into nuclear fuel, or bomb-grade material, exist in the U.S., the Soviet Union, the Netherlands, France and China. Commercial reprocessing plants to extract plutonium from used reactor fuel are located or planned in France, Britain, West Germany, Japan, India and the Soviet Union. Programs involving breeder reactors are under way in the Soviet Union, India, France, West Germany and Japan. (In 1983, the U.S. canceled its $4 billion Clinch River breeder facility, located at Oak Ridge, Tenn., because of long construction delays, steep cost increases and a declining need for additional nuclear power installations.)
The rate of proliferation could grow rapidly worse. Small, easily concealed new technologies for producing nuclear explosives are becoming available in world markets. Among them: high-speed centrifuges and still experimental laser systems for enriched-uranium production. Such systems could be engineered to produce the explosives needed to build the Bomb. Says Paul Leventhal, president of the Nuclear Control Institute, a Washington-based think tank: "History demonstrates that in the nuclear field, any technology ultimately is exported -- and Third World countries will get it."
Despite the overall pessimism that the proliferation issue inspires, there are some grounds for guarded hope. Since World War II, no atomic weapon has been used in warfare; nor have nations rushed to develop nuclear weapons in the numbers that were predicted even 20 years ago. In the early 1960s, it was feared that within a decade ten or more countries might have produced atomic arsenals. In the eleven years since India's nuclear test, no additional country, as far as can be confirmed, has succeeded in following suit.
That record, says Richard T. Kennedy, the Reagan Administration's ambassador- at-large for nonproliferation issues, provides grounds for both "cautious optimism and vigilance." Says he: "The situation ought not to give us a sense of great comfort for the future. But thus far (the nonproliferation system) has worked pretty well. Extraordinary vigilance and extraordinary effort just might give us another 20 years of the same."