Sometimes a gun isn’t just a gun, Richard Fernandez says:
About 740,000 assault rifles and pistols are stored in Swiss homes or in private possession. Nobody knows the exactly how many firearms are in circulation, but there may be up to 1.3 million firearms in Switzerland. Despite this you are more likely to murdered by knife than by gun. “Police statistics for the year 2006 records 34 killings or attempted killings involving firearms, compared to 69 cases involving bladed weapons and 16 cases of unarmed assault. Cases of assault resulting in bodily harm numbered 89 (firearms) and 526 (bladed weapons)”
And sometimes a nuke isn’t just a nuke:
The country with the largest known deposits of uranium, which tested 7 nuclear devices on its soil in the 50s and whose head of government isn’t even going to attend President Obama’s nonproliferation summit won’t keep statesmen up at night. It’s Australia.
The danger posed by weapons depends on their “human modifiers”:
Guns in the hands of the Swiss are not the same as guns in the hands of a Sudanese militia. Enriched uranium in Australia is no worry; but uranium in the hands of Kim Jong Il is.
His real point is that we’ve moved from the First Nuclear Age, with two nuclear superpowers policing their own allies and satellites, to a Second Nuclear Age, of many nuclear powers — and perhaps to a Third Nuclear Age, in which even non-state actors may wield nuclear weapons:
The key to understanding the difficulty of the nonproliferation problem is to realize that the core of the difficulty is a human one. Above all it is a question of who has nuclear weapons; it is one of legitimacy and rationality rather than technology. Bracken noted that the Second Nuclear Age required a “massive change to intelligence programs” precisely because the problem consisted of monitoring the who. The billions of dollars that the Obama administration is prepared to spend on buying fancy locks and safeguards for Pakistan and other Second Age countries may be more useful in terms of developing intelligence contacts within their nuclear establishments than for buying the safeguards themselves. It’s not what’s in the vaults that is the problem, it is who can get to use them.