Annan Bombs
New York Sun Staff Editorial
May 3, 2005

And they said irony was dead. Within days of North Korea's test firing of a missile that moved the dictatorship's nuclear program one Stalinist step forward, the U.N. secretary-general, Kofi Annan, calls for a return to the principles of the nuclear nonproliferation treaty. Since obviously the NPT has done such a stellar job of preventing proliferation thus far.
In his address to the five-year Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty Review Conference, going on this week at U.N. headquarters, Mr. Annan reiterated his quaint belief that treaties can contain all the nuclear ills in the world, if only the right treaty can be drafted.
If only that were true. Instead, North Korea's most recent saber rattling reminds us that it isn't. A treaty is only as good as the good faith of the parties who negotiate and sign it. And it isn't worth anything if a party won't negotiate at all, let alone sign. As wonderful as a nonproliferation treaty sounds in theory, it doesn't do anything to protect us from a regime like that of Kim Jung Il, contemptuous as it is of any international norms. This was one of the great lessons of the years of the Soviet Union, with its phased array radars and its machinations with the weapon known as yellow rain.
Those classic cases and recent events highlight the more fundamental flaw in the United Nations' system of treaty mongering, indeed, in the United Nations itself: It doesn't lend itself to judging regimes. The real problem with nuclear proliferation isn't that some guys will have nukes - it's that the bad guys will have nukes. When's the last time anyone outside Turtle Bay fretted that the U.K. has the bomb? In the real world, it matters whether the man brandishing the pistol is the sheriff or the robber.
But not on the East River. Hence, Mr. Annan's assertion that, in order to be credible, any revisions to the treaty must require increased transparency in all nuclear states, along with a commitment from the former Cold War rivals to further cuts in their arsenals. In other words, even if every nation except for America unilaterally disarmed tomorrow, we would still have a nuclear problem.
Who has the weapons makes as much difference as whether someone has weapons in the first place. And ultimately, the United Nations ignores this distinction at its peril. We'd venture to guess that most people intuit that a single nuclear weapon in the hands of North Korea or Iran is more dangerous than Great Britain's entire arsenal, or, for that matter, America's. Mr. Annan isn't helping his credibility any by pretending otherwise.