There is no shortage of ideas for how to tackle missile proliferation. The real question is one of international will. The United States is unlikely to sit idly by while its own territory or those of its core allies in Europe, Asia or the Middle East are threatened with missile attack by nations such as North Korea, Iraq or Iran. To accept that vulnerability, as the U.S. sees it, would be to forfeit a good part of America's power and prestige in the world. The issue, then, is whether those threats will be mitigated by the brutal and unilateral assertion of superpower might; or whether the international community can devise other means of defusing what is literally an explosive problem.
As Saddam Hussein has shown – in the bombardment of Teheran that closed the Iran-Iraq war, and in the attacks on Israel that almost broke apart the alliance in the Gulf war – a tactical missile (even just a Scud with a modest high-explosive warhead) can have strategic consequences.