Despite the power and allure of nuclear weapons, only nine nations in the world today have nuclear arsenals. Why aren't there more?
The main reason: the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). The NPT, which went into force 41 years ago today, has provided strong incentives for nations to give up their nuclear weapons programs -- or not pursue them in the first place. Over 30 other nations have the technological ability to make nuclear weapons, but they chose not to do so.
Since the treaty entered into force on March 5, 1970, more countries have given up nuclear weapons programs than have started them. The number of nuclear weapons in the world has declined from a peak of 65,000 in 1987 to roughly 22,000 today. And every nation in the world has joined the treaty save three: India, Pakistan and Israel.
By all measures, the NPT has been remarkably successful at keeping states from getting the bomb -- especially considering the alternative of life in a nuclear-armed crowd.
Bargaining to Prevent Chaos
In the 1960s, 23 states were conducting weapons-related research, were actively discussing the pursuit of nuclear weapons, or already had the bomb. At the time, this wave of proliferation threatened nuclear chaos as dozens of nations -- large and small, stable and unstable -- moved to arm themselves with atomic bombs.
This is why John F. Kennedy warned in 1960 that if we did not do something, 15, 20 or 25 countries would have nuclear weapons by the end of that decade. As president, Kennedy acted. He started negotiations for a treaty to stop the proliferation wave. He couldn't finish the job, but Lyndon Johnson did and Richard Nixon signed the treaty. Democrats and Republicans worked together, side by side, with a bi-partisan consensus to eliminate these weapons and prevent their spread.
With American leadership, the states of the world agreed to a simple three-part bargain, enshrined in the NPT:
The bargain worked. The overwhelming majority of states kept their end of the deal. Sixteen states with nuclear weapons programs that were under way abandoned their programs (Argentina, Australia, Belarus, Brazil, Canada, Iraq, Kazakhstan, Libya, Romania, South Africa, South Korea, Spain, Switzerland, Taiwan, Ukraine and Yugoslavia).
A few states never signed the treaty, and only a couple of states grossly violated the treaty (North Korea and Iran). But the majority of the world has respected the bargain of the NPT. As a result, only ten states have nuclear weapons or are believed to be seeking them today -- a far cry from the 25 states forecasted decades ago. (States with nuclear weapons are, in order of the size of their arsenals: Russia, USA, France, China, UK, Israel, Pakistan, India, and North Korea, with Iran suspected of seeking nuclear weapons.)
Reduce Arsenals, Prevent New Nuclear States
The U.S. and other nuclear powers must uphold their end of the bargain by reducing their nuclear arsenals. If they do not, other states over time may begin to drop their commitment to not pursue nuclear weapons.
Most analysts understand the essential link. The interim report of the Congressional Commission on the Strategic Posture of the United States correctly notes:
If the U.S. by its actions indicates to other nations that we are moving seriously to decrease the importance and role of nuclear weapons, we increase our chance of getting the kind of cooperation we need to deal effectively with the dangers of proliferation.
As the commission concluded:
What we do in our own nuclear weapon program has a significant effect on (but does not guarantee) our ability to get that cooperation. In particular, this cooperation will be affected by what we do in our weapons laboratories, what we do in our deployed nuclear forces, what kind of nuclear policies we articulate, and what we do regarding arms control treaties (e.g., START and CTBT).
The historical record supports this conclusion. To continue the success of the Non- Proliferation treaty it is essential the nuclear-armed states steadily work to reduce their arsenals. The leadership must come from America and Russia who together have over 95 percent of all nuclear weapons in the world.
After 41 years of remarkable, though imperfect, success under the NPT, it's vital that we see the treaty to its conclusion: the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons.
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In summary, the report says, “Iran has not provided the necessary cooperation to permit the Agency to confirm that all nuclear material in Iran is in peaceful activities. More specifically, Iran is not implementing the requirements contained in the relevant resolutions of the Board of Governors and the Security Council, including implementation of the Additional Protocol ...”
The report goes on to say that, “contrary to the relevant resolutions of the Board of Governors and the Security Council, Iran has not suspended its enrichment related activities ... and has also continued with construction of the IR-40 reactor and with heavy water related activities.”
Finally, the Director General of the IAEA has requested that Iran “take steps toward the full implementation of its Safeguards Agreement and its other obligations, including implementation of the Additional Protocol.”
This IAEA report is well worth reading in its entirety.
http://www.iaea.org/Publications/Documents/Board/2010/gov2010-62.pdf
"While the Agency continues to verify the non-diversion of declared nuclear material in Iran,"
This is exactly why NPT is a failure. We've politicized it. Why don't you check Wikileaks for US on Yukiya Amano. Even this guy who was given this job for the sole purpose of putting the skrews to Iran, in an interview told SPIEGEL that Iran is not making a bomb.
http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,738634,00.html
And of course Iran is not opening her missile factories and Centrifuge manufacturing plants. They don't want them targeted by cruise missiles, and the UNSC requiring Iran to suspend it's enrichment is precisely the problem with NPT, since enrichment is guaranteed to all signatories.
IAEA safe guard agreement, is an agreement that monitors safety of the nuclear activities and also establishes mechanism to monitor movement of fissile material.
Iran is a sovereign never ratified Additional Protocol, although voluntarily observed it for two years, but the nonsense from the west continued, so the Iranian parliament passed a law preventing the government to continue with additional protocol.
Anyways, Iran hasn't violated NPT, other than a minor oversight of the safe guard agreement, years ago, the rest of the stuff is just conjecture and requirement for Iran to prove a negative: namely they aren't producing a nuclear weapon, or lately they aren't thinking of them either, or possibly dreaming about them in color.
If anyone believes the pressure US and its western allies, on behalf of Israel, are putting on Iran has anything to do with nukes, or NPT, I have a bridge in Brooklyn I can sell them.
http://ploughshares.org/moment/video
It is only hoped that they will be forever unaccessible to mad men, and by mad men I mean anyone that would use them as a weapon.
I would also note that while we have had wars since the use of these weapons, they have not escalated to a global conflict. 70 years of MAD has seen the gradual fall of dictators, tyrants, and fools. Would anyone have envisioned a peaceful cooperative Union forming out of the rubble of devastating wars in Europe?
The way it does work is that even non-signatories who do pursue nuclear armaments - the usual suspect, Israel, for example - get such assistance if the US likes them and that signatories who do not pursue nuclear armaments do get no such assistance if the US doesn't like them.
The NPT is a worthless scrap of paper. A motherhood statement on a global level.
The 1968 non-proliferation treaty had nothing to do with Canada's stance on nuclear weapons. Canada was not led or inspired by the US to abandon nuclear weapons.
Canada has had the ability to build nuclear weapons as long as has the US: the Manhattan Project was a joint Canada/UK/US program, started in Quebec City.
In 1963, when Canada fought an election on nuclear arms, throwing out the government that was in favour of nuclear arms and installing one that refused to truck in them, the US government and military forcefully and scandalously intervened, trying to convince Canada to remain a nuclear armed state.
Even after that election, and the decision to give up Canadian nuclear weapons, it was many bitter years before we could get US nuclear weapons out of our territory. Even after the 1968 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, the US continued to pressure Canada to accept US nuclear weapons for strategic alliance purposes. It wasn't until 1984 that the US finally acceded to the distinct wishes of Canada and removed all US nuclear weapons from our nation.
Canada was the first nuclear armed nation to voluntarily give them up, on principle, long before the NPT, and the US did not inspire us, but hindered us every inch of the way.
Is that the best you got? Gosh, we must be pretty clean then.
We sell tritium? Well, we got a lot of it, and we are selective who we sell it to. We'd give it away, if we could, we have so much of it, and it's damn expensive to store. And our customers are of the sort (the US and the UK, you say) that neither do we fell bad selling them tritium, we are absolutely sure they could make their own if they wanted to, but since we have so much, we might as well sell it to them, at a price slightly below what it would cost them to make their own. Call us capitalists, but that doesn't make us dirty.
Although India did break its license and steal Canadian technology to produce a nuclear weapon, Canada was the victim, not India. We were so upset that we still have barely reestablished normal relations with India, now, several generations later (that was a long time ago, you know). Things are still frosty between us. That too, doesn't make us dirty.
The fact that India and Pakistan are belligerent towards each-other, that too, was not caused by Canada, and does not make Canada dirty.
My gosh, according to you, we're pretty clean!
"
http://original.antiwar.com/smith-grant/2011/02/08/pollard-espionage-ring-still-unfolding/
Almost one year ago Victor Gilinsky and Roger J. Mattson penned the stunning article “Revisiting the NUMEC Affair” in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists. It describes how in the 1960s Israeli agents and their U.S. collaborators stole highly enriched uranium from the Pennsylvania NUMEC plant for Israel’s first atomic weapons.
The two former Nuclear Regulatory Commission officials’ exposé reveals how 337 kilograms of material, enough for several weapons, made their way into Israel’s Dimona nuclear weapons facility likely packed in the same sealed containers as lawful radioactive agricultural and scientific equipment shipments. It cites a secret CIA diversion briefing held at the NRC, credible official audits of materials lost to processing waste and absorption versus diversion, accounts of CIA recovery in Israel of HEU traces matching the Portsmouth signature of NUMEC’s government-supplied uranium, and the plant owner’s deep and ongoing ties to Israeli intelligence case officers and suspicious activities"
One is that it ignores that one of the reasons for the lack of nuclear proliferation is that once a critical number of nuclear weapons with global reach were in the hands of a few diverse powers, nuclear weapons lost all effective power as an offensive weapon (because using them would result in the destruction of the country/regime that used them either quickly by military means or slightly slower by ostracisation of them), and pretty much the same as defensive weapons (trying to use them as an actual defensive weapon means either choosing to nuke oneself to take out the invading army, or nuke the civilian population and change the war to a genocidal one while leaving the army that you couldn't defeat conventionally intact) making nuclear weapons programs a very expensive boondoggle for most countries.
The second is that it repeats the propaganda that allows policies that threaten the foundational agreement of the NPT to continue (the US refusal to allow Iran to excercise its right to assistance with its civilian nuclear program).
And the NPT is vital to the safety of the world not because it limits the number of states with military grade weapons programs, but because it chokes off research into non-military grade weapons.
Is that like when Canada (sadly) went from being a 'peacekeeping' nation to a 'let's invade Afghanistan and stay there past 2011 nation'?
THAT'S something I could get behind.
Besides: "(States with nuclear weapons are, in order of the size of their arsenals: Russia, USA, France, China, UK, Israel, Pakistan, India, and North Korea, with Iran suspected of seeking nuclear weapons." - this is a lie.
The United States continues to deploy roughly 480 nuclear bombs in Europe. The deployment was detailed in the report "U.S. Nuclear Weapons in Europe" published by the Natural Resources Defense Council.
Today, the United States is the only nuclear power that continues to deploy nuclear weapons outside its own territory. Therefore, countries considered as "free of nuclear weapons" are indeed armed with nuclear weapons: Belgium hosts 20 weapons, Germany hosts 130, Italy hosts 50, Netherlands hosts 20, Turkey hosts 90, and UK, which is already a nuclear nation, hosts, in addition to their owns, 110 US' nuclear weapons.
So... I strongly support ANY country rights to develop such weapons. If the only country that has ever used them against human beings still have them and continues spreading them throughout the world... why shouldn't they?
Israel HAS never signed the NPT nor allowed any IAEA inspectors into Dimona. NONE! Israel was trading nuclear secrets with South Africa and yet this country gets a free pass.
Interesting the writer mentions Israel has nuclear weapons yet this country continues to break the law.
I am no fan of North Korea, but they never violated NPT. From their point of view they signed NPT, were falsely accused of enriching uranium with no evidence. Withdrew based on provisions of the NPT when there was a threat to their national security. Then well after the deadline tested a nuclear device. Details:
http://www.fas.org/nuke/guide/dprk/nuke/dprk012203.html
Iran: They had one technical violation, using very small amount (milligrams) of fissile material when they were developing their centrifuges, the explanation was good enough for IAEA not for US. No other violations ever presented or has ever been found. South Korea and Egypt in recent years had similar violations but no one ever heard about them.
The major violators of NPT are all nuclear states who have signed the NPT. After 40 years they haven't gotten rid of them. Beyond that US and France are guilty of knowingly and willingly proliferating nuclear weapons to Israel and even today covering up for them.
Realistically, US, Russia, France, UK and China will never get rid of their nukes. In absence of that the hope should be for every single country to have nukes so that there will be no more wars. Particularly, for countries that think by using the latest technologies killing seven year olds collecting firewoods make them safe.
Very true. In fact, the US appears to be doing everything in it's power to destroy the NPT.
How can the sanctions against Iran not be violations of the NPT?
Exactly. Especially seeing as Iran has never violated the NPT.
Iran did NOT violate the NPT, as this article by Cyrus Safdari explains:
http://www.endusmilitarism.org/iran_did_not_violate_the_npt.html
The silence will continue to be. People, especially Israeli apologists, are quick to claim that Iran is producing nukes or has violated the NPT... Right up until you ask them to provide the evidence...at which point they either run away, or run around in circles insisting that everyone knows it.