Mohamed ElBaradei was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize this year (for merit or to telegraph disapproval of the war?). During his acceptance speech he made the following statements:

The world should work to make nuclear weapons as universally condemned as slavery or genocide.

The hard part is how do we create an environment in which nuclear weapons — like slavery or genocide — are regarded as a taboo and a historical anomaly?

While I’m sure this sounds all great and idealistic total nuclear disarmament would be utterly disastrous. While ElBaradei and other activists for complete nuclear disarmament seem to view deterrence as some kind of evil it is what keeps North Korea from subjugating all of South Korea. Any complete nuclear disarmament would guarantee any rogue nation constructing a nuke would be the sole nuclear power and able to use the threat of a nuclear strike to get whatever it wanted. Even if we make nuclear weapons as “universally condemned as slavery or genocide,” we should expect nuclear rogue states to flair up at least every decade.

I’m all for a reduction in nuclear weapons, and hopefully someday their will be an appropriate world body who can be trusted to be the only nuclear power. However it is just foolishly idealistic to believe that mere moral condemnation is sufficient to stop megalomaniac dictators or ethnic groups who fear genocidal attacks from their more numerous neighbors. Especially when building a nuke would make them the only nuclear power because everyone else has disarmed.

The situation with countries and nukes mirrors that with people and gun use. It may be desirable to reduce or even ban gun ownership by normal individuals (ignoring for the moment the sporting uses) but it would be utterly foolish not to keep some guns around for the police. If criminals knew that the police could not respond with a similar level of force criminals would go out of their way to get guns and use them to commit crimes and fend off the police. Even the most anti-firearm countries recognize this fact and keep guns around for the police and the situation is no less obvious with nuclear arms.

Previously I had been completely behind ElBaradei even when the US tried to oust him from his position as head of the IAEA. However, this revelation makes me worry his judgement is so clouded by peacenik style sentiments he will actually put more people at risk. If he really is foolish enough to believe mere international condemnation will prevent states from acquiring nukes when they would become the sole nuclear power why should I trust his judgments about Iran? Will his faith in the strength of international moral condemnation cause him to downplay or resist any results which might lead to military options for disarmament? Just because the war in Iraq wasn’t needed to prevent nuclear proliferation doesn’t mean going to war is never necessary. Already Bush has severely damaged the effectiveness of the nuclear anti-proliferation by making it political suicide to go to war over WMDs and we don’t want to weaken the anti-proliferation position any further.

Of course ElBaradei could just be cleverly lying to help head off nuclear proliferation. Perhaps by suggesting the ultimate aim of anti-proliferation is to disarm the acknowledged nuclear powers eventually he can make it more palatable to the rest of the world. If this is what he is really doing it is a clever strategy but somehow I get the sense that he isn’t lying.