The new nuclear age.doc

Nuclear weapons The new nuclear age A quarter of a century after the end of the cold war, the world faces a growing threat of nuclear conflict WITHIN the next few weeks, after years of stalling and evasion, Iran may at last agree to curb its nuclear programme. In exchange for relief from sanctions it will accept, in principle, that it should allow intrusive inspections and limit how much uranium will cascade through its centrifuges. After 2025 Iran will gradually be allowed to expand its efforts. It insists these are peaceful, but the world is convinced they are designed to produce a nuclear weapon. In a barnstorming speech to America’s Congress on March 3rd, Binyamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, fulminated against the prospect of such a deal (see?article). Because it is temporary and leaves much of the Iranian programme intact, he said, it merely “paves Iran’s path to the bomb”. Determined and malevolent, a nuclear Iran would put the world under the shadow of nuclear war. Mr Netanyahu is wrong about the deal. It is the best on offer and much better than no deal at all, which would lead to stalemate, cheating and, eventually, the dash to the very bomb he fears. But he is right to worry about nuclear war—and not just because of Iran. Twenty-five years after the Soviet collapse, the world is entering a new nuclear age. Nuclear strategy has become a cockpit of rogue regimes and regional foes jostling with the five original nuclear-weapons powers (America, Britain, France, China and Russia), whose own dealings are infected by suspicion and rivalry. Thanks in part to Mr Netanyahu’s efforts, Iran commands worldwide attention. Unfortunately, the rest of the nuclear-weapons agenda is bedevilled by complacency and neglect. The fallout from Prague After the end of the cold war the world clutched at the idea that nuclear annihilation was off the table. When Barack Obama, speaking in Prague in 2009, backed the aim to rid the world of nuclear weapons, he was treated not a