The fall of the Soviet Union immediately created several pressing challenges. At the top of that list was the fact that nuclear weapons and material were now scattered throughout a territory that had dissolved into 14 separate sovereign nations.

Senators Richard Lugar and Sam Nunn (as well as the Clinton administration) played a prominent role in the denuclearization that followed. Thousands of nuclear warheads aimed at the U.S. had to be moved out of new countries, deactivated and dismantled. Weapons also had to be found and collected quickly, since the security apparatus once guarding them no longer existed and thus sale or looting of such material was a legitimate worry. Yet thanks to the actions of the U.S. and others, the plan worked.

You may have heard that Israel is engaged in similar work in Syria since the fall of the Assad regime late Saturday—but you almost certainly haven’t heard it described in similar terms.

Syria has no nuclear weapons (thanks to Israel’s earlier nonproliferation efforts), but the Assad regime had plenty of chemical weapons and conventional weapons on land and sea. The threat they posed was not an abstract one: After the fall of Muammar Gadhafi in Libya, no one secured the loose weapons that then fueled a coup in Mali. In Syria’s case, the weaponry is more capable of mass destruction and the successor government is led by designated terrorists.

Israel knows it is the likeliest target of those weapons, should they fall into the wrong hands. So the IDF has spent the better part of three days doing the world—and itself—a massive favor: cleaning up.

Operation Bashan Arrow began Saturday with Israeli strikes designed to take out Syrian air defenses and make the rest of the cleanup easier. The IDF says 320 targets have been taken out, including chemical-weapons sites as well as “Syrian air defense systems, missile depots, manufacturing facilities, drones, helicopters, fighter jets, tanks, radars, navy vessels and more,” according to the Times of Israel.

Those navy vessels weren’t merely modes of transportation; they carried missiles and the means to launch them.

The situation regarding the chemical weapons is more complicated, thanks to one of the Obama administration’s bizarre mistakes in the region. A decade ago, after Assad was found to have used chemical weapons against his own civilians, which President Obama had designated as America’s “red line,” a scheme cooked up by the administration and the Russians enabled Obama to forgo punitive strikes and pretend the crisis was being handled. Assad declared 1,300 chemical weapons to international inspection regimes, but that was far from its total reserves. Ever since then, inspectors had been stymied by Assad and unable to tally Syria’s full stock of illegal weapons.

“To date, this work has continued, and the Syrian declaration of its chemical weapons program still cannot be considered as accurate and complete,” the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) said in a statement yesterday.

“It costs millions and millions of dollars without making any progress,” one source told Reuters. “So it really is a great opportunity now to get rid of (chemical weapons) for good. This is the moment.”

Unlike the Israeli Air Force, OPCW inspectors require comprehensive security planning to search Syria. That means the new regime, which technically doesn’t exist yet (Syria only has a transitional government at the moment), would have to arrange it. That seems a long way off.

Meantime, therefore, the presence of those weapons poses a “proliferation risk,” according to the U.S. That risk is believed to include undeclared full-scale production sites.

The regime’s 2013 chemical attack on Ghouta killed over a thousand. Assad’s forces were found to have used sarin gas, which is heavier than air and thus sinks. Families hiding with children in their basements might have survived a conventional bombing, but were sitting ducks for the sarin gas.

Israel’s current actions are reminiscent of its successful secret mission in 2007 to destroy Syria’s nascent nuclear reactor, likely constructed with North Korean help. The threat that Syria poses to the region was and remains acute. The threat it poses to the rest of the world is, once again thanks to Israel, far more limited.