LONDON — Speaking in Moscow on July 7, U.S. President Barack Obama was the very soul of reasonableness. The United States and Russia must cooperate to stop the proliferation of nuclear weapons, he said, while keeping the goal of a world without nuclear weapons always in sight: "America is committed to stopping nuclear proliferation, and ultimately seeking a world without nuclear weapons."
Unfortunately, that is the wrong way round. The deal that underpinned the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, signed way back in 1968, was that the five great powers who already had nuclear weapons would gradually get rid of them. In return, the rest of the world's countries would not make them at all. But more than 40 years later, none of those five countries (U.S., Russia, Britain, France and China) has kept its side of the deal.
Under the circumstances, it's remarkable that only four more countries have developed nuclear weapons. Three of them (Israel, India and Pakistan) never signed the treaty at all, and the fourth (North Korea) signed it in 1985, quit it in 2003 and then tested its first bomb in 2006. But the queue of those who are now thinking about doing it stretches down the block and around the corner.