Catching up with the times

From The New York Times:

WASHINGTON, Dec. 18 — President Bush reversed a decades-old ban on nuclear cooperation with India on Monday, signing legislation allowing the United States to sell civilian nuclear fuel and technology to India for the first time since that country tested a nuclear device in 1974.

Mr. Bush, who has taken a hard line against nuclear programs in Iran and North Korea, negotiated the atomic energy pact during a visit to India in March, and Congress approved the measure shortly before adjourning this month. In return for access to American technology, India must now open its nuclear program to international inspection.

“This is an important achievement for the whole world,” Mr. Bush said during a signing ceremony in the East Room of the White House. “After 30 years outside the system, India will now operate its civilian nuclear program under internationally accepted guidelines, and the whole world is going to be safer as a result.”

Critics say the pact will open the door to nuclear proliferation. Representative Edward J. Markey, the Massachusetts Democrat who has been a leading opponent of the bill, said it “may well become the death warrant to the international nuclear nonproliferation regime.”

It should. The "international nuclear nonproliferation regime" is based upon a flawed concept. The "regime" attempts to keep any nation which currently does not possess nuclear weapons from acquiring them.

The flaw is this. Not every nation is irresponsible yet the nonproliferation regime them as though they were. India is a civilized nation which offers no threat to any other civilized nation. The only people who need feel threatened by India's nuclear arsenal are the Islamic fanatics who always seem to hover a hair's breadth away from the taking over the levers of power in Pakistan.

The only people threatened by Israel's nuclear weapons are the Arab/Muslim tyrants who have the stated goal of "pushing the Jews into the sea" and the nukes of NATO nations were only ever aimed at communist targets.

The people who we ought to fear having atomic weapons are the "bad-guy" states like Iran and North Korea. To devote the same efforts to keeping nukes out of the hands of the good guys as we do to keeping them from the bad guys all in the name of avoiding "hypocrisy" is a moronic wast of time.

The fact is that a nuclear armed Japan and South Korea would do wonders for damping Communist China's ambitions to establish hegemony in the Asian sphere and would effectively pull Kim Jong-il's fangs. Just as putting the former Soviet satellites under the NATO nuclear umbrella significantly limits the damage that a newly totalitarian Russia can inflict on the world.

The fact is that weapons in the right hands (doesn't matter if we are talking about a nuclear tipped ICBM in a silo in Nebraska or a .38 handgun tucked into the purse of a nurse who has to go to her car in a dark parking lot at 1:00 AM) are a force for good in the world.

It is past time that the civilized world abandon nonproliferation in favor of targeted proliferation.