India and Pakistan have nuclear weapons. Russia still has thousands of them. North Korea probably has at least one or two. Iran is rushing to join the nuclear club, and recent discoveries in Arab countries like Libya and Egypt make it clear that the Arab Middle East wants in too.

But at Foreign Policy, Robert S. McNamara expresses the view of the inverted-reality-based community, saying it’s the United States that can’t be trusted, and the only way we can be safe is to begin disarming immediately: Apocalypse Soon. (Hat tip: hrw.)

Good faith participation in international negotiation on nuclear disarmament—including participation in the CTBT—is a legal and political obligation of all parties to the NPT that entered into force in 1970 and was extended indefinitely in 1995. The Bush administration’s nuclear program, alongside its refusal to ratify the CTBT, will be viewed, with reason, by many nations as equivalent to a U.S. break from the treaty. It says to the nonnuclear weapons nations, “We, with the strongest conventional military force in the world, require nuclear weapons in perpetuity, but you, facing potentially well-armed opponents, are never to be allowed even one nuclear weapon.”

If the United States continues its current nuclear stance, over time, substantial proliferation of nuclear weapons will almost surely follow. Some, or all, of such nations as Egypt, Japan, Saudi Arabia, Syria, and Taiwan will very likely initiate nuclear weapons programs, increasing both the risk of use of the weapons and the diversion of weapons and fissile materials into the hands of rogue states or terrorists. Diplomats and intelligence agencies believe Osama bin Laden has made several attempts to acquire nuclear weapons or fissile materials. It has been widely reported that Sultan Bashiruddin Mahmood, former director of Pakistan’s nuclear reactor complex, met with bin Laden several times. Were al Qaeda to acquire fissile materials, especially enriched uranium, its ability to produce nuclear weapons would be great. The knowledge of how to construct a simple gun-type nuclear device, like the one we dropped on Hiroshima, is now widespread. Experts have little doubt that terrorists could construct such a primitive device if they acquired the requisite enriched uranium material. Indeed, just last summer, at a meeting of the National Academy of Sciences, former Secretary of Defense William J. Perry said, “I have never been more fearful of a nuclear detonation than now.… There is a greater than 50 percent probability of a nuclear strike on U.S. targets within a decade.” I share his fears.

Is McNamara actually suggesting that if the US were only to ratify the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, we’d have nothing to fear from a nuclear Al Qaeda? That Osama bin Laden is a big fan of the Non-Proliferation Treaty? That Egypt and Syria would give up their nuclear aspirations if we played nice?

Nuclear weapons are indeed hellish, as McNamara points out. But in his horror at the possibility of their use, McNamara is embracing an alternative that, to anyone not seduced by the nuclear disarmament intellectual double-speak, is indistinguishable from suicide.