Who are the proliferators?

In the past few months there have been lots of discussions over adherence to the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty (NPT). (For more than you wanted to know click here) The U.S. has threatened Iran with dire consequences if it doesn’t live up to its obligations under the NPT. Hans Blix, the former chief UN inspector in Iraq, said at a recent lecture in Boise that who the violators are is not as clear as the U.S. government and media would have us believe. The NPT was negotiated in 1968 and signed and ratified by 188 nation states. Three states (Israel, India and Pakistan) neither signed nor ratified the treaty and proceeded to develop, test and deploy nuclear weapons (NW) outside the framework of the treaty. One (North Korea) ratified the treaty, broke it and then withdrew. The treaty has three basic pillars:
1. Non-proliferation - The 5 nuclear weapons states (NWS), Russia, China, France, U.K. and U.S, agreed not to transfer NW technology and not to use NW unless attacked with NW. Non- nuclear weapons states (NNWS) agreed not to receive, manufacture or acquire NW.
2. Disarmament – The NWS states agree to reduce and liquidate their NW stockpiles.
3. Peaceful uses – All states are allowed to develop nuclear technology for peaceful uses.
The treaty has been generally successful. In forty years no NNWS is known to have developed NW under the IAEA inspection regime. Several states (Israel, Pakistan and India) have never let them in and have developed NW. One (North Korea) kicked them out and then developed NW. The NWS, however, have done almost nothing to live up to their disarmament treaty obligations. All proposals at the Disarmament Conferences have been rejected by the NWS under one pretext or another. The NNWS have fumed over this failure and some have used it as justification for their own nuclear development programs. The UK recently said that it needed nuclear missiles to defend itself from Al Quada. As Hans Blix said: “Attacking Al Quada with NW is like trying to kill a mouse with a cannon”. (To see Iran’s reaction to this, click here.)The US/Israel have said that they need NW to defend themselves from Iran, a state whose leader has said that he wanted to “wipe Israel off the face of the map”. A better translation of his statement from the Farsi is “this regime occupying Jerusalem must vanish from the page of time”. This translation has a somewhat different tone; unfortunately it doesn’t meet the political agenda of the US and Israel. (For more on this, click here.) If, in forty years, the 5 NWS had made some effort to live up to their treaty obligations to reduce and liquidate their NW stockpiles, they might have more leverage with countries like Iran and North Korea who feel the need to defend themselves from the overwhelming power of their adversaries. Hans Blix argued that NW have outlived their usefulness and the time is right for disarmament. In this age of globalization, it is not as though China would want to blow up its best customer or that the U.S. would want to blow up China. Nobody in the U.S. would have anything to wear or any TV’s to watch.