"The Cold War's end promised relief from nuclear nightmares. Long-adversarial governments agreed to eliminate warheads and collaborated to stop the spread of atomic weapons. That promise is now slipping away.
Russian President Vladimir Putin in September touted new rules on using nuclear arms, offering Moscow's latest signal of readiness to use atomic weapons in its defense. North Korea's nuclear arsenal is expanding. Iran is close to developing usable nuclear weapons, prompting fears of a Middle East arms race.
One of the two critical U.S.-Russian nuclear-arms-control treaties has collapsed. The other, which caps how many nuclear weapons Russia and the U.S. deploy, expires in early 2026.
Roughly 60 years ago, President John F. Kennedy warned that by 1975 the world could have 15 to 20 nuclear powers. His fears were inflated: There are only nine today.
Still, the global nonproliferation system is in greater peril than at any time since the Cold War, said Rafael Grossi, director-general of the United Nations International Atomic Energy Agency, or IAEA. The threat of a nuclear confrontation, which a decade ago seemed fanciful, is no longer unimaginable.
"The shared consensus among great powers on the importance of nonproliferation -- which was critical to building and sustaining the nonproliferation regime since the 1960s -- has eroded," said Eric Brewer, a former director for counterproliferation at the National Security Council, now at the Nuclear Threat Initiative think tank. "I think at a minimum we're going to end up in a world with more countries that are capable of building nuclear weapons."
After the Berlin Wall fell, the U.S. and Russia cooperated to deactivate more than 3,000 strategic nuclear warheads located in the former Soviet republics of Belarus, Kazakhstan and Ukraine. By 2012, Russia and the U.S. each held fewer than 5,000 warheads. In 1988, they had more than 41,000 and 23,500 respectively, according to the Federation of American Scientists.
South Africa, which had developed a small nuclear arsenal, became the first -- and still only -- country to scrap its nuclear weapons in the early 1990s.
A decade later, Libya agreed to end its nuclear program.
Iran, in the wake of the U.S. invasion of neighboring Iraq, agreed to start negotiations over its nuclear research.
Nonproliferation faced some setbacks. Pakistan tested its first nuclear weapon in 1998, and North Korea did so in 2006.
Efforts to contain nuclear threats have centered on the 1970 Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, or NPT. It codified a decision made by the two superpowers that limiting the spread of nuclear weapons was more important than seeking advantage by each giving its allies the bomb.
The NPT, which today has 191 signatories, commits countries without a bomb to using nuclear energy for peaceful purposes and grants the IAEA oversight powers. It includes a pledge by nuclear-weapons states to work in good faith to reduce their arsenals.
As tensions have grown among the U.S., China and Russia in recent years, the consensus around nonproliferation has frayed.
Officials say Iran could be months away from building a nuclear weapon, and Saudi Arabia has said it would follow suit if that happens. Top officials in South Korea and Turkey have talked about their countries going nuclear.
Events in Ukraine have raised the first real specter of nuclear-weapons use in decades.
Russia has repeatedly pointed to its nuclear weapons as a means of defense, although Western intelligence agencies have detected no real steps to prepare for nuclear use.
Matthew Kroenig, senior director of the Atlantic Council's Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security, argues that despite the strains on the global nonproliferation system, the U.S. has the tools to shore it up.
"We focus on the problem children like Iran and North Korea, but for the most part, 190 countries are following it," he said of the NPT. "I do think a lot of it is in our hands. . . And I think the big one is extended deterrence and can we get our nuclear strategy in order and credibly assure our allies."
The IAEA's Grossi is less sanguine. Today's increasingly tense global environment makes "the attraction of nuclear weapons very strong," he said in September. "It's a difficult moment, indeed."" [1]
1. World News: Global Conflicts Fuel Escalation in Nuclear-War Risks. Norman, Laurence.
Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y.. 17 Oct 2024: A.8.
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