The book focuses on the question in terms of issues and implications for US policy not slippery global perspectives. In many other respects, however, it is a conceptual mistake to think of the problem primarily as undifferentiated and worldwide. Profound effects on the global ecosystem are less likely from the first post-Nagasaki use of nuclear weapons and become more probable only when the parties using them have large numbers to unleash. For a long time, the main danger will be the use of limited numbers of low-yield weapons by weak states against each other. If the weapons are a threat in those terms, they will be a specific rather than a generalized threat a threat because they might blow up in some country in particular.
Some countries are more likely to suffer than others.
The effects of proliferation, in short, will not be uniform. That, in turn, underlines the point that strategies for combatting proliferation will have to be varied and attuned to particular cases. Although more realistic and hardheaded in its approach than much antiproliferation literature of earlier times, this volume does not indulge in the unorthodox and blithe optimism about the consequences of proliferation that became fashionable in the past decade among some theorists, such as Kenneth Waltz and John Mearsheimer. The book is forthrightly in the mainstream of opposition to proliferation and the search for practical, policy-relevant approaches to dealing with it. That combination of strategic realism and policy orientation is the right one and rare enough that it highlights the usefulness of this collection.