(5 of 5)
U.S. and British efforts to persuade China to stop its promiscuous peddling of nuclear assistance have so far hit a brick wall. When Secretary of State James Baker visited Beijing last month, China promised to at last sign the nonproliferation treaty before April 1992. Yet it has refused to promise that it will stop anything it is now doing. But some U.S. politicians think a credible threat by Washington to do away with favorable tariff treatment for Chinese goods might be effective. The theory is that China would lose more money because of lower exports to the U.S. than it would gain through further nuclear sales. Democratic Senator Joseph Biden of Delaware goes so far as to say that "we must, in extremis, be prepared to use force to stop dangerous dictators from obtaining nuclear weapons" -- which apparently means bombing North Korea if all else fails.
That may be extreme, but all other measures are fully justified. Until recently, nonproliferation efforts achieved considerable success. Membership in the nuclear club has held steady for about a decade (Pakistan entered but South Africa dropped out); such nations as Taiwan and South Korea, in addition to Brazil and Argentina, ended once flourishing nuclear programs; France, Germany and Argentina became much more discriminating in the kind of nuclear technology they would approve for sale and to whom. But all this progress could be easily reversed. The thought of North Korea's Stalinist regime brandishing atom bombs, for instance, could easily frighten Japan and South Korea into developing their own nukes. It would be a terrible irony if the early 21st century revived a dread that the end of the cold war in the 20th had seemed to put to rest: the fear that almost any local or regional conflict could set off an escalating nuclear war.
FOOTNOTE: *Declared nuclear powers: the U.S., Soviet Union, Britain, France, China. Undeclared but known: Israel, India, Pakistan.
CHART: NOT AVAILABLE
CREDIT: TIME Graphic by Joe Lertola
CAPTION: SCAMBLE FOR THE BOMB