The world is imperiled by a new era of proliferation of weapons of mass destruction (WMD). That is the conclusion of the Report of the U.S. Commission on the Prevention of Weapons of Mass Destruction Proliferation and Terrorism, released this month. Its assessment of the dangers of a world awash in such weapons points to one conclusion: All nations must make prevention of the spread of WMD a priority.
Unfortunately, such warnings are not new; that the WMD Commission must repeat it speaks to the complacency that dominates national security thinking around the world.
The WMD Commission was established in 2007 to develop a bipartisan — and, hopefully, politically acceptable — analysis of the threat posed by WMD proliferation and make recommendations about how to combat it. It was intended to follow up on the work of the 9/11 Commission, which warned in its 2004 report that "the greatest danger of another catastrophic attack in the United States will materialize if the world's most dangerous terrorists acquire the world's most dangerous weapons."