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The sad truth is that "proliferation cannot be stopped," says Gotz Neuneck, a physicist at the Institute for Peace Research and Security Policy in Hamburg. "If a country wants to develop these weapons, it can do it." Even slowing the spread is difficult. The nuclear nonproliferation treaty bars development by or transfer of the weapons to non-nuclear states. It has done some good, but it has not prevented additional states from acquiring the bomb. Several, including India, Pakistan and Israel, simply refused to sign. Iraq, on the other hand, signed the treaty but cheated. Iran and North Korea signed and have gone ahead with development.
Treaties also ban chemical and biological weapons but at least 18 countries stockpile either or both. An agreement among major supplying countries, most of them Western, limits the sale of ballistic missile systems. There are no enforcement provisions and North Korea pays no attention to it, while China promised Washington to obey the rules but continues to break them.
A major obstacle to controlling the spread of these weapons is that even medium-size countries can build them using domestic industries and imported "dual-use" equipment -- high-tech items that have civilian as well as military applications. Last year, says Kenneth Timmerman, a specialist in Middle Eastern security issues, Germany sold a total of $5 billion worth of goods to Iran. Japan sold Tehran nearly $3 billion worth and the U.S. shipped almost $1 billion. Much of the trade involved "dual use" items.
In September 1991 the CIA established a center to keep track of weapons of mass destruction and stop the flow of dangerous technology to the Third World. To watch about 24 countries and more than 75 weapons programs, the center collects information from spies on the ground, satellite photos and electronic intercepts, which is used to apply pressure on importing and exporting nations. In some instances Washington quietly asks a friendly capital to stop certain exports because they are being diverted to a weapons program. In other cases the U.S. and its allies sometimes use covert action to halt the shipments.
President George Bush signed an intelligence finding authorizing covert CIA action to disrupt the supply of dangerous weapons or components. How that authority has been used is secret, but an official in Washington confirms that "it has been used. Things have been prevented from getting from one place to another." Even so, says another official, controls over exports "cannot prevent but can only make it more difficult to produce nuclear weapons."
The Clinton Administration says it is determined to strengthen international controls. But it has yet to settle on a plan of action, much less begin to persuade friends and foes to go along. In the end, to head off nuclear arms races in various regions of the world the U.S. might have to offer security guarantees to worried governments and threaten to intervene, if necessary, to keep the peace. But that would require an overhaul of its alliance system and a major expansion of its overseas commitments.