Back in those comfy days of the First Nuclear Age, the United States and the Soviet Union kept each other at bay with a policy known as Mutual Assured Destruction — you bury us, we’ll bury you. Now that India and Pakistan have launched the Second, this crazy world once again must rely upon MAD while it searches for sanity.

“Two wrongs don’t make a right,” advised President Clinton upon hearing Pakistan had responded to India’s blowing five holes in its desert by blowing five in its own. Such schoolmarmish platitudes are not not sufficient, nor is the president’s immediate remedy of economic sanctions.

Had the CIA not been caught napping, the threat of sanctions might have deterred India from conducting its tests, but as punishment they are pointless and possibly counterproductive.

Both new members of the Nuclear Club surely calculated the economic loss of withheld aid and trade barriers against what they perceived as the gain in security and made their choices. Far too many other nations will be unwilling to sacrifice their financial interests to the somewhat vague principal of keeping the number of nuclear powers from expanding from five to seven.

But the most perilous part of sanctions is this: India has a large, increasingly self-sufficient economy that will be only dented by sanctions; Pakistan is struggling and will suffer far greater damage. Even the casual student of history knows what happens when a heavily armed nation is given reason to feel persecuted. It will identify a scapegoat, it will lash out. The Pakistani leaders who took this dreadful step must not be backed into that corner.

The developed nations have turned enormous profits for year arming the undeveloped with conventional weapons, so it is highly hypocritical for them to be aghast. Rather than inflame passions further, the United States and the other powers must act to cool things down. Rather than punish, the world must work with India and Pakistan, focussing upon the specific issues that have kept them at each other’s throats for 50 years and not upon the blind hatred driving this arms race. These spiteful neighbors must be given time to realize they now possess weapons they cannot use.

And while the button can be pushed at any moment, there are signs such reflection is starting to occur.

India has been nuclear for nearly two weeks and the dancing in the streets has long since stopped. Already, the Indian media is questioning the tests, the opposition political parties are banding together, the majority party is talking treaty. Unless Pakistan is sanctioned back into the Stone Age, it is likely this new grim reality will dawn there as well.

For decades, the Nuclear Five tried to maintain its exclusivity by preaching nonproliferation. It has failed and it will fail even more in the years to come. Nuclear technology is more than 50 years old, Third World countries now have several generations of scientists and engineers that have been educated and trained at the best universities in the world. The genie is out of the bottle. The have-nots are becoming the haves and they’re not about to give anything back. And until the world gets serious about nuclear disarmament, the madness will continue.