NAGASAKI -- The end of the Cold War didn't end the threat of nuclear annihilation. An increasing number of experts worry that the dangers posed by those weapons of mass destruction are increasing as the nuclear nonproliferation regime is increasingly stretched and frayed. The 2005 Review Conference of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) provides an opportunity to rethink strategies to counter nuclear proliferation and to rejuvenate efforts to eliminate nuclear weapons worldwide.

That task is both daunting and pressing. Last week I attended the Second United Nations Conference on Disarmament in Sapporo, Hokkaido, and the mood there was grim. Tens of thousands of nuclear warheads and hundreds of tons of weapon-grade material (both highly enriched uranium and plutonium) are tempting targets for terrorists, yet officials in the United States and Russia don't seem to take that threat seriously. The technical know-how and the technology needed to make a bomb are now widespread.

In Sapporo, one speaker after another detailed the failures of the NPT. It's a long list: