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Had Kennedy been correct -- and there was little reason back then to doubt his gloomy prophecy -- we would now be living on a planet where Yugoslavia, Libya, Argentina, Indonesia, Malaysia, South Africa, Romania, Syria, Iraq, North Korea, Taiwan and literally dozens of other states could have developed or acquired the Bomb.

Joe Conason Joe Conason's column appears in Salon News every other Tuesday. + Biography + Archives

Aside from the potential destruction threatened by such armaments under the command of the likes of Milosevic and Gadhafi, there would also be an inevitable, continuous increase in the number of thermonuclear devices being tested annually, resulting in the radioactive degradation of the Earth's air, water and soil. Millions of children growing up today would carry the slowly decomposing fallout of those tests inside their bones.

The human population would, in short, be suffering a gradual health breakdown due to radiation poisoning while awaiting the near certainty of a final world-ending disaster.

Instead, thanks to a dedicated international effort to control proliferaton over the past three decades, there are currently only eight countries known to possess nuclear weapons: the United States, Russia, China, France, the United Kingdom, Israel, India and Pakistan. And instead of hundreds or even thousands of plutonium-spewing tests occurring at an increasing rate, there have been fewer and fewer in recent years.

This more promising (though still dangerous) situation has come to pass because of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty or NPT -- perhaps the single most significant diplomatic achievement since people first started killing each other with stones and sticks. The Senate's refusal to ratify the test-ban treaty would be stupid enough in its own right, but what makes it an act of lunacy is that Trent Lott and Jesse Helms have seriously damaged the non-proliferation treaty as well.

Yet having held no hearings and only a few scant hours of debate on the CTBT -- during which the drooling Helms displayed his usual erudition with references to Monica Lewinsky -- it seems quite likely that he and most of his colleagues have no idea what harm they have done to the world's security. They badly needed the instruction they never received about the international security structure that they so casually undermined.

When the NPT was first signed and ratified in Washington, Moscow and London in 1970, even the most wildly optimistic analysts didn't expect that by 1995, every country in the world except India, Pakistan and Israel would have voluntarily joined the accord. And not even the NPT's most enthusiastic proponents thought that the treaty's enforcement by the International Atomic Energy Authority would be as successful as it has been. Regular on-site inspections have found virtually no significant violations except those by North Korea and Iraq, and the treaty's provisions have so far helped to contain the nuclear ambitions of both rogue states.

Lulled by those accomplishments, many in the West have taken for granted both the NPT and the stable nuclear oligopoly that the agreement has maintained. But when the NPT's 25-year review provision came due in 1995, many states -- including our allies in places like Australia, Germany and Japan -- insisted that new initiatives be undertaken to expand the treaty's safeguards.

Ambassador John Ritch, the U.S. representative to the nuclear arms control agencies in Vienna, describes the NPT as "a bargain: that the non-nuclear states will stay that way if the nuclear states take steps to disarm, including a halt to nuclear testing."

In order to keep the NPT in force, the nuclear powers were expected by the other signatories to begin reducing their own strategic stockpiles, as provided by Article VI of the treaty. Just as importantly, they also had to agree to the implementation of a comprehensive worldwide test ban.

Next page | To the nuclear brink -- again