Tarran over at The Liberty Papers nicely deconstructs McCain's latest National Defense policy drivel. In any event, it's fairly evident from reading that proposal that the McCain team is taking their policy cues straight from the Heritage Foundation playbook that views missile defense and substantial modernization of the US nuclear arsenal as essential strategy to counter the nuclear proliferation "threat" posed by China and Russia. Essentially it is a continuation of the Bush policy, but McCain threatens to put that policy on steroids.

Conn Hallinan, echoing the sentiments of George Shultz, William Perry, Henry Kissinger and Sam Nunn, proposes that nuclear abolition offers a saner strategy, at the very least in terms of economics, than the costly strategy implied by a n-player nuclear proliferation game. As Hallinan points out, smaller countries have defected from the NPT because the larger powers defected from their disarmament obligations.

A long-term cooperation game depends upon the ability of the players to detect uncooperative behavior and to retaliate promptly. And while the US could play the lead role in a new NPT treaty resulting in substantial decrease in nuclear disarmaments among the major powers, total abolition is likely an elusive goal. The increasing marginal value of a dwindling nuclear arsenal A and the costs of enforcement of monitoring compliance as A --> 0 make total abolition unlikely. For example, eliminating 20,000 weapons from a stockpile of 40,000 is one thing, but the marginal value associated with, say, the last remaining 5 in the stockpile is quite another. And while monitoring resumption of a full-scale military nuclear weapons program is certainly possible, it would be quite difficult to monitor whether or not the US, China, or the Russians are sneaking in production of a new weapon here or there.

So a new NPT treaty, while laudable, isn't going to solve the "nuclear proliferation" problem, especially if the major powers beef up their conventional forces as means of compensation.

This all underscores an essential fact that it's quite difficult to "uninvent" something that already exists. It's likely that the Nation-State model won't survive a n-player nuclear proliferation game. As Tarron pointed out, McCain's proposal, which is essentially the Heritage Foundation proposal, is not economically feasible and consumes way too much wealth in achieving a goal of "stability."

So, how do you therefore efficiently solve this n-player nuclear proliferation game? If n is a subset of N, where N=set of all nations, you efficiently reduce n by reducing the cardinality of N. That is to say, you move toward World Government. "Country First," indeed....