A Brief History of Nuclear Proliferation

Introduction In the last hundred years, life expectancy doubled and many deadly illnesses were eradicated. The world would be a better place to live, had the astonishing scientific discoveries not been devalued with building the atomic bomb an invention that can destroy life on earth in an instant. Fredrick Soddy, who together with Ernest Rutherford discovered in 1901 that radioactivity involved the release of energy, described an atomic future in which humanity could transform a desert continent, thaw the frozen poles, and make the whole Earth one smiling Garden of Eden. While the poles are indeed thawing, the earth hardly looks like paradise. Instead, people fear nuclear Armageddon, and the power of the atom is becoming synonymous with death and destruction. Today, nine states have nuclear weapons and many more can easily acquire those, although only five states are officially recognized as possessing nuclear weapons by the 1968 nuclear Non- Proliferation Treaty (NPT). Those are the United States (1945), Russia (1949), the United Kingdom (1952), France (1960) and China (1964). Three states never joined the NPT but are known to possess nuclear weapons Israel (n/a), India (1974), Pakistan (1998), and North Korea (2006). Two additional states that present immediate proliferation concerns are Iran and Syria. Citizens of those states have paid a heavy price in taxes and/or sanctions and sacrificed opportunities for economic and educational development to build weapons that can destroy their lives. This paper is an overview of the 64years of proliferation history. It is intended to help understand the motives behind the decision to acquire the atomic bomb and grasp the subtle causal relationships between all actors involved in the proliferation chain. Comprehending the politics of proliferation is crucial for devising policy measures to curb the further spread of nuclear weapons. The nuclear-weapon states recognized under the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty The