''Ultimately, like slavery, you have to be willing to argue against it wherever it is -- including getting away from our own reliance on it,'' he said.

Paul Bracken, a Yale political scientist who set out to define the second nuclear age in a prescient book published four years ago, ''Fire in the East,'' began as a scholar of military strategy, but got bored with the subject and added a second career as an expert in global corporate strategy. He still teaches political science at the Yale School of Management, and when I called him at his campus office not long ago, he sounded exasperated at the polarization of the debate over nuclear proliferation. He agrees with the Bush hawks that the old arms-control regime has become increasingly irrelevant, and he regards the war in Iraq as ''the most important arms control action in 50 years.'' Yet he agrees with the traditionalists that the administration hawks fail to understand the dangers of overheated rhetoric and the real value in arms-control diplomacy. Neither side, he says, seems able to climb up from its ideological trench.

''We had a nonproliferation regime that worked into the 90's, and then failed,'' Bracken said. ''How many other government programs can you point to that worked for 25 years? If I can find a new arms control that works for 25 years, and then fails, I will break open the Champagne.''

What might a new arms-control regime look like?

In the first nuclear age, the Americans and the Soviets studied each other intensely, negotiated constantly and over time learned to communicate their intentions clearly. The new players are more mysterious to us, and the administration sometimes seems more inclined to moralize about them than to study them and their motives for seeking to go nuclear. We know little, for example, about how North Korea's leader thinks, and even Iran -- which is both more accessible and more complicated than North Korea -- is regarded in some parts of Washington as a cartoon evil.

A new arms-control regime might begin by assessing the motives that tempt states to go nuclear, and then figuring out how to remove the temptation. It would necessarily be more engaged, less smug and more versatile. Some potential nuclear states might be amenable to swapping their weapons programs for a chance at prosperity. Some might respond to assurances that they will not be attacked, backed up by security guarantees or new alliances the U.S. would foster. Arms controllers are mostly dogmatic in their rejection of missile defenses, but it's worth studying whether missile defense -- which may or may not ever be useful to protect America from a nuclear attack -- could be useful in some regions to persuade potential nuclear states that they can live without these weapons.

Some countries could lose interest in nuclear weapons if we played a more active role in defusing the regional grievances that keep them on edge -- notably the border dispute between India and Pakistan, and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. A few will prove incorrigible, at which point we choose between containment and forcible disarmament.

The administration is clearly right that a new arms control cannot rest entirely on the illusory safety of talks and treaties and U.N. resolutions. The autocrats most likely to be dangerous to us if they get nuclear weapons are the leaders least likely to care about staying in the good graces of the ''international community,'' whatever that is. A new arms-control regime should distinguish among threats and offer a menu of options appropriate to the danger, from inspection to coercion. It would draw on military pressure and economic sanctions, along with the softer diplomacy that the counterproliferators scorn. It would not disdain international agreements but would demand smarter treaties, backed by intrusive inspections and rigorous enforcement.

And it would accept the solemn responsibility -- a particularly American responsibility -- to restore the special stigma of nuclear explosives. The destructive power of these weapons is unique and breathtaking, and almost impossible to confine to military targets. Chemical and biological weapons, horrible as they are, cannot match them as agents of catastrophe. A strategy that focuses exclusively on regimes and not on weapons themselves has several flaws, and the most obvious one is this: when regimes change, weapons remain.