The spread of nuclear weapons should not be a matter of indifference to us. I beieve we missed a chance when the Soviet Union collapsed to propose univesal nuclear disarmament. At a minimum, even we couldn't find universal agreement, we would have scored a propaganda victory.
The problem is not nuclear weapons as such, it is the danger of their use, and in particular their use against us. The scenario to worry about is the clandestine supply of one or more of these devices to anti-American terrorists, either via Third World slipshodiness and corruption, or deliberately.
Pakistan's nuclear weapons are, at the moment, the ones to worry about. I don't have any proposals here, since I do not know enough about the internal politics of Pakistan.
In any case, Iraq was not invaded because of any immediate threat of nuclear weapons being developed by it. No serious person believed this story, which was just a pretext. The real motivation for invading Iraq was the "drain the swamp" theory. I happen to agree with this theory, although at the time i thought that the cold-blooded invasion of Iraq was a mistake. (However, I knew little about Iraq at the time, particularly its sectarian divide, and thought that there would be massive nationalist resistance.) That's all moot, since we are there.
The question is: what sort of world will we be living in ten, twenty, thirty years from now, if we do not see the advance of democratic freedoms in the Muslim world? It may be that there is little we can do to help this advance -- in which case we had better dig out Herman Kahn's book of the same name and start thinking the unthinkable.
