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Failure of disarmament drives proliferation
Ohmynews (South Korea)
Why Are North Korea and Iran Going Nuclear?
Ranjit Goswami (ranjit)
October 5, 2006

After months of speculation and negotiation, North Korea has officially announced that it intends to go nuclear. As expected there's been a deluge of protests from the U.S. to the E.U. to Japan, China, and Australia, and also from its very own neighbor, South Korea.

The obvious question that comes to mind and therefore needs to be addressed by global policymakers is not when North Korea or another power-ambitious country, Iran, will finally go nuclear. The more pertinent question is why do a few countries want to go nuclear?

Why should it be North Korea and Iran today? Why was it India and Pakistan a few years back? Why was it Israel? And why was it the veto-wielding permanent members (P-5) of the U.N. Security Council even before that?

Another dimension of this issue is that the P-5, supposedly responsible for maintaining global peace, account for 85 percent of weapons exports, according to Al Jazeera, following studies showing that the international arms trade has increased exponentially. The news agency found it disturbing -- global policymakers don't seem to feel so, as their actions and words show.

Science and scientific invention never was anyone's monopoly. But when scientific invention could be used for destructions of human beings and civilization through Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMDs), global policymakers wanted it to be the monopoly of a few.

Why should it be monopoly of the few? We see a lot of concern about the increased poppy cultivation in Afghanistan. Agreeably that needs to be banned, because it's bad for human health and civilization. But according to the same logic, why not ban any military usage of nuclear weapons by all across the entire world, applicable uniformly? And if any nation resists, impose economic sanctions against that country. That should do the trick.

It sounds so simple -- but we know how impossible that is. We know the reasons -- both why it's so simple and probably the best commonsensical solution to the increased nuclear threat that the world faces today; and thereby we also know why it's so impossible.

"The problem of nuclear proliferation is inextricably linked to the continued possession of nuclear weapons by a handful of states. As long as any state has nuclear weapons, there will be others, state or sub-state actors, who will seek to acquire them," stated the Canberra Commission on the Elimination of Nuclear Weapons. There have been many debates and discussions on it. There's been some negotiation and a few agreements like INF (Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces Treaty), START I, and START II. And there's been CTBT (Comprehensive Nuclear-Test Ban Treaty), signed by 176 nations and ratified by 135.

While CTBT aims to prevent further tests and therefore development of nuclear weapons, it does not deal with complete nuclear disarmament. Moreover, several of the existing nuclear states -- the United States, the PRC, India, Pakistan, Israel, and the DPRK -- have yet to ratify it.

Piecemeal solutions never work. They didn't work in the past and we all know that they won't work in the future either. It's a question of time again, not whether but when one day some terrorist gets his hands on a nuclear device somewhere in the world.

Before we dig further, a look back in the history on which nations went nuclear when, how, and why would be instructive.

The U.S. went nuclear on July 16, 1945 through the Manhattan Project, and subsequently dropped two live bombs, nicknamed Little Boy and Fat Man, on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 to hasten the end of World War II. The Manhattan Project was supposed to be driven by the threat that Nazi Germany under Hitler was also in the nuclear race, and the world under nuclear Nazis would be catastrophic. That threat was later found to be exaggerated.

And once it started, it never ends. Could we expect the U.S. nuclear monopoly to last forever?

Of course not. Russia followed, France, Britain, and China joined the club. India, Israel, and Pakistan joined unofficially initially, and then India and Pakistan tried to gain official status.

We saw why the U.S. thought it needed the bomb back in 1945. Did they indeed need it to help mankind on earth? And once they had it, the former USSR needed the bomb badly to have its own say in global affairs. They got it in 1949. Britain and France got theirs in 1952 and 1960 respectively. China succeeded in 1964. India followed in 1974.

Israel, living in a neighborhood where many would love to see it did not exist at all, needed the bomb, and began its nuclear program from 1956, initially with French aid. By the time the Six Day War broke out in 1967, it was estimated that Israel had accumulated enough plutonium for one or more nuclear weapons.

According to The Nuclear Weapon Archive, "Considerable nuclear collaboration between Israel and South Africa seems to have developed around 1967 and continued through the 70s and 80s. During this period SA was Israel's primary supplier of uranium for Dimona [nuclear power plant]. An open question remains regarding what role Israel had (if any) in the 22 September 1979 nuclear explosion in the south Indian Ocean which is widely believed to be a SA-Israel joint test."

South Africa is the first and, to date, only country to build a nuclear arsenal, and then voluntarily dismantle its entire nuclear weapons program, which it did in the early 1990s.

On June 7, 1981 Israel attacked the Tammuz-1 nuclear reactor at Osiraq in an attemp to scuttle Iraq's nascent nuclear program.

President Pervez Musharraf wrote how Pakistan helped North Korea and Iran with nuclear technology. Critics and historians would struggle to categorize his book, In The Line of Fire, as a truthful and correct memoir of world events or the fictionalized memoir of a military dictator.

And with proliferation, there were moments when usage of these nuclear arsenals came close. India and Pakistan cam close to going nuclear during the Kargil War; the U.S. thought of using it even against Vietnam; and the U.S. and USSR came close to a nuclear exchange again during the Yom Kippur War which pitted Israel against Egypt and Syria in 1973.

To some it seemed that having the nuclear bomb was recognition of the homegrown maturity of their scientific research. Few stayed away from the race -- except the nations from the losing side (Axis powers) of the last big scar of human civilization, World War II. Economic leaders like Japan, Germany, and Italy belong to this group. Japan, as the only nuclear victim, so far has vowed never to have the bomb; however the maddening affairs of the present time and the increasing nuclearization of its neighboring region lately has led some to question that principle.

Millions remained malnourished in India and Pakistan; millions live in abject poverty. Still both these two countries took pride in their nuclear capability.

North Korea lags behind South Korea in economic prosperity. According to the CIA World Factbook, South Korea has almost 14 times higher per capita income than that of North Korea (which is around US$1400 only).

The story gets repeated across various stages around the world. There is no cure of this nuclear race. It's high time that we realize an old saying -- prevention is better than cure.

And any form of partial prevention has failed in the past so far and expectedly would fail in the future too. Today it's North Korea, tomorrow it could be Iran and then one day -- we won't know when but we would know why -- some terrorists would possess the same deadly weapon.

And it could be any of us as victims, as a result of the irresponsible adventures that a few nation-states play or from the misadventures of some terrorist organizations.

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