Fatal Choice: Nuclear Weapons and the Illusion of Missile Defense

Richard Butler (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 2001), 200 pp., $22 cloth.

Richard Butler, former Australian Ambassador to the United Nations and former chairman of the UN Special Commission to Iraq (UNSCOM), has written a book about the dangers of nuclear weapons proliferation. Butler has a long identification with this issue and worked assiduously (but unsuccessfully) to get Saddam Hussein's government to comply with UN resolutions requiring the dismantling of its weapons of mass destruction (WMD).

The basic argument of Fatal Choice is that, without concerted action, nuclear weapons will proliferate further in the coming decades. The international community must ...