14 be handed over to some future international body, or destroyed. “I would certainly cheat,” the prime minister said. “And so would all the others.” I was in no way surprised by this admission. I agree that the problem of nuclear proliferation is real. Dealing with it is an urgent and enormously important duty of the US government. But it is a mistake to define the problem in such a way as to suggest that any spread of nuclear weapons is dangerous or that nuclear weapons in Iranian hands should be regarded as the same as nuclear weapons in the hands of, say, Japan or Australia—or, for that matter, that the weapons themselves are the problem. Yet the proponents of global zero tend to deplore all nuclear weapons equally, no matter who holds them, and to regard any diminution of their number as a positive step because only subtraction leads to zero. But would a reduction in the number of North Korean weapons together with an increase in, say, those held by the French, yielding a net increase in the number of weapons, be a bad thing? The problem is not the weapons but the character of the regimes that possess them. In many ways such a principle simplifies the proliferation problem and makes it less daunting. Focus on the miscreants, on the few countries seeking nuclear weapons whose possession of them would be dangerous or destabilizing or both. Sanction them. Isolate them. Undermine their regimes. Pressure them mercilessly. Do whatever it takes. But don’t offer to aid their “peaceful” nuclear programs in exchange for promises about weaponization that are so easily broken. And don’t let them get away with the insulting notion that until we ourselves disarm we have no right to demand that they halt their clandestine programs—as if the US nuclear arsenal poses the same danger to international peace and security as do the nuclear arsenals of the regimes of Kim Jong-il or the Iranian clerics. The goal of zero nuclear weapons, often referred to by its sponsors as a “moral i