mustang bobby posted this classic, always topical, tom lehrer song:
it's been a few years before i've heard the song. i realize it's a joke, but it's also a snapshot of what fears about nuclear proliferation looked like in 1965. what i find interesting is how inaccurate those fears turned out to be.
lehrer starts out with the four countries that had the bomb at the time he recorded the song: the US, "russia" (i.e. the USSR), france and china. (for some reason, he skipped the UK, the third country to get the bomb, after the USSR but before france). of the six countries that he projects getting the bomb next, he only gets two right: israel and south africa. plus, south africa gave up it's nuclear weapons program voluntarily before it ever tested it's device (well, maybe before). meanwhile, the other countries that did get nuclear weapons after china are largely unforeseen: india, pakistan and north korea (and that's putting aside countries like kazakhstan, ukraine and belarus that didn't exist when the song was written and who ended up giving up their nukes pretty quickly). the song is supposed to be funny, but if it were written today, you can bet that iran would be projected to get the bomb. the next best guesses would probably be egypt, syria, and brazil.
then again, forty years from now, those guesses could look just as foolish as indonesia does today.
