"[T]he more numerous and terrible the retaliatory weapons possessed by
both sides, the surer the peace . . . and that it is actually more dangerous to
limit nuclear weapons than to let them proliferate."
General Pierre Gallois, 1960
"We don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud."
Condoleezza Rice, October 2002
Upwards of 128,000 nuclear
weapons have been produced in the past sixty years, about 98 percent of
which were produced by the United States and the Soviet Union. The nine current members of nuclear club—Russia, the United States, Great
Britain, France, India, Pakistan, China, Israel, and North Korea—
still possess about 27,000 operational nuclear weapons between them. And there are at least another fifteen countries sometimes referred to as "virtual nuclear weapons states" that have the materials and know-how to develop nuclear weapons if the political decision was made to do so. The science behind nuclear weapons, once a tightly guided secret, is now much more widely known; In 1978,
a 22-year-old Harvard University student devised highly credible nuclear
designs, and new technologies like the Internet now make the dissemination
of information and knowledge infinitely easier. That is why most non-proliferation efforts these days focus on controlling the materials--but even then, at least fifteen countries beyond the nuclear nine have enough highly enriched uranium for a nuclear weapons program and accounting for materials dispersed globally remains an acute challenge.
Nevertheless, nuclear proliferation has not been as dire as forecasts made in the early 1960s of there being 20-30 nuclear weapons states. Since that time there have been major international treaties (eg. Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty 1968) specifically aimed at curbing the spread of nuclear weapons, but some key countries like Israel, India, and Pakistan are not signatories to that treaty. Some states have also given up advanced nuclear weapons programs (eg. South Africa, Brazil, Argentina, Libya), and many others have chosen--thus far--not to develop nuclear weapons. Nevertheless, nuclear weapons remain very attractive to some other states for a range of different reasons. |