Looking Ahead

National Public Radio this morning did a curtain-raiser on the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty review conference being held this week at the United Nations in New York. NPR spoke with several nonproliferation experts to get their views on Iran and North Korea. Leonard Spector of the James Martin Center for Non-Proliferation Studies had this to say about Iran's challenge to the United States regarding the U.S. commitment to nonproliferation:

Iran will pound away at that, but I think most states are going to say, whoa, the United States has really made some progress. It's committed quite openly to the vision of disarmament, which we had not seen in the previous administration. Maybe now it's time for us, the other countries, to stand behind the United States in an effort to reinforce the non-proliferation parts of the treaty.

Mitchell Reiss, a nuclear issues expert at the College of William and Mary, said that non-nuclear countries could receive security benefits from the NPT, regardless of whether the United States were to make reductions to its atomic arsenal:

It's the non-nuclear weapon states that have the most to gain from making sure that the NPT is robust and that its safeguards are effective and the cheaters, like North Korea and Iran are punished. Our reductions aren't a prize or a reward to the non-nuclear weapon states; it's something that we do out of our self-interest. But the NPT is in their self-interest.