40 Countries

In Thursday night's debate, John Kerry said:

Thirty-five to forty countries in the world had a greater capability of making weapons at the moment the president invaded [Iraq] than Saddam Hussein.

Of course every country has the capability of making weapons. He meant nukes. Here's a quote from his NYU speech, dated 20 September:

Thirty-five to forty countries have greater capability to build a nuclear bomb than Iraq did in 2003. Is President Bush saying we should invade them?

Are there really 35-40 countries with a greater capability to make a nuclear bomb than Saddam's Iraq? Sounds dangerous. I couldn't find any such list on Kerry's website, or any source for that factoid.

I went looking for a list of countries on the internet and made up my own estimate of which ones could possibly have the capability to make a nuke. Here's an Excel spreadsheet I found, which is convenient to work with since it includes economic classifications. It's from the World Bank.

First, I picked all the countries classified as High income: OECD as being nuke-capable. Then from those countries listed as either Upper middle income or Lower middle income I selected those that are of a reasonably large size and have something of an industrial base. St. Lucia is listed as Upper middle income, but it's such a tiny country that I doubt that they'd be able to put it together. On the other hand, South Africa is listed as Lower middle income, but they do have the industrial and scientific base to build a nuke. I'm sure there's a more scientific way of putting this list together, but for now I'm just going with my gut. Finally I removed those countries already known to have nukes.

Here's the list I came up with.

1 Argentina
2 Australia
3 Austria
4 Belgium
5 Brazil
6 Canada
7 Chile
8 Czech Republic
9 Denmark
10 Finland
11 Germany
12 Greece
13 Hungary
14 Iceland
15 Iran
16 Ireland
17 Italy
18 Japan
19 Korea (DPRK)
20 Korea (ROK)
21 Libya
22 Malaysia
23 Mexico
24 Netherlands
25 New Zealand
26 Norway
27 Philippines
28 Poland
29 Portugal
30 Romania
31 Saudi Arabia
32 Singapore
33 South Africa
34 Spain
35 Sweden
36 Switzerland
37 Thailand
38 Turkey
39 Ukraine
40 Venezuela

I'm sure Kerry had a slightly different list in mind. For instance, I included Saudi Arabia, which is doubtful, but didn't include, say, the Slovak Republic or Uruguay, which may be more likely to have the capability to make a nuclear weapon.

But for my purposes, this is giving Kerry the benefit of the doubt. The vast majority of those countries are democracies. So the claim that there are 35-40 countries that were more capable of producing a nuke than Saddam and Kerry's rhetorical question "Is President Bush saying we should invade them?" is quite the red herring.

No, John, Bush isn't saying we should invade Canada or Brazil. It's not just the capability; it's the capability in the wrong hands. The countries on my list that aren't democracies, Iran, North Korea, Libya, and Saudi Arabia, are the ones that everyone is concerned about.

Only someone with a deep case of moral equivalence can use the argument that it's the capability to make a nuke that ought to concern us rather than the nature of the government that seeks nukes. As technology spreads, more and more countries will join the nuke-capable list. Nothing can be done to stop that (short of a nuclear catastrophe that is). But we can do something to spread democracy. It won't be by military means alone, but it's the best hope we have.

By the way, you can see my spreadsheet here. If you think there are additional non-democratic nuke-capable countries that I should have included, let me know.

Update: Kerry's 35 or 40 country claim apparently comes from Mohamed ElBaradei of the IAEA.