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"Wars are stupid and can therefore only be caused by people who are more stupid than those who recognize the stupidity of war."

As my professor read those words during a recent religion and political order class at the University of Chicago, a wistfulness came over me. I wished wars were merely nonsensical. Then they would be easy to stop: All we'd have to do is educate warmongers out of their ignorance.

The theologian who penned the statement, Reinhold Niebuhr, didn't believe it either. He meant it as a characterization of the Christian pacifism he had espoused before he saw what the fascists were up to in the 1930s. Eventually, he articulated a view of world politics called Christian realism, which influenced his student Dietrich Bonhoeffer, contributed to the development of just-war theory, and today shows up in Barack Obama's public statements.

As I thought about Niebuhr, my mind went to a recent book by William Langewiesche, whose pithy, world-enlarging reporting made The Atlantic Monthly a must-subscribe in my home. In The Atomic Bazaar: The Rise of the Nuclear Poor, Langewiesche attempts to disarm fears of nuclear doom. He does it by pointing out that international hostilities—especially ones that involve the development of nuclear weapons—are far from stupid.

A nuclear-free world is not realistic, Langewiesche argues; poorer countries will inevitably join the group of countries we like to think are more responsible in stockpiling nukes. North Korea and Iran are just the beginning.

Politicians may paint some developing nations as evil, but their production of nuclear weapons signals to Langewiesche that they're making rational choices. Nuclear weapons are the wisest investment cash-strapped countries can make. The biggest bang for their buck. And, oddly, there's hope in that.

Langewiesche writes that even regimes with the kookiest leaders are "subject to conventional logic of deterrence and will hesitate to use their weapons because of the certainty of a crushing response—since they, too, have cities and infrastructures that they will lose." Thus, any nuclear attack by nation-states is highly unlikely, and their arsenals are well-secured.

It gets trickier, of course, with transnational terrorists who act independently of any state, because they don't have territory that could be hit in retaliation. But very few people in the world have the money, know-how, and connections needed to make nuclear weapons. Langewiesche explains that their success would depend on a series of highly risky operations, including: infiltrating a well-protected site with at least 100 pounds of weapons-grade uranium, stealing the uranium, transporting the fuel across borders to an assembly point, and producing the weapon. All improbable in a world far removed from the one Jack Bauer takes on in the TV series 24.

Langewiesche believes that precluding such a scenario could be fairly easy, but the means would most likely have to be "non-governmental," requiring flexibility, curiosity, and imag-ination. We'd need people who could hitchhike—not attract attention by driving government-provided SUVS—and become acquainted with the people who cross borders regularly. The solution to nuclear theft is informal relationships. The rub, of course, is that sources who know the most are often shady types, narcotics traders and such. Government officials told Langewiesche off the record that this kind of approach gets tripped up on the formal chain of command—and by senators who'd want to grab headlines by exclaiming that "we cannot work with criminals!"

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August 2007, Vol. 51, No. 8