- Tomorrow at 8.15am, a minute's silence will reverberate
around the world. The people of Japan will commemorate the victims of the
first atomic bomb, which was dropped by an American B-29 on Hiroshima on
6 August 1945.
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- Half a world away, in Tehran, the new hard man of Iranian
politics, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, will take the oath of office before
the country's parliament. His presidency heralds a new era of uncertainty
in Iran's fraught relations with the West over its nuclear ambitions.
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- In Beijing, urgent talks on curbing North Korea's nuclear
weapons programme are close to collapse. And in Pakistan, efforts are still
being made to roll up the world's biggest nuclear proliferation scandal.
Sixty years after Hiroshima, whose single bomb killed 237,062 people, a
new nuclear arms race has begun.
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- A crisis is deepening with Iran over its suspected nuclear
weapons activities. Tehran is threatening to resume uranium conversion
next week, prompting an emergency meeting of the International Atomic Energy
Agency which could result in Iran being referred to the UN Security Council
for possible sanctions.
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- At the six-party talks in Beijing, North Korea is refusing
to abandon a nuclear weapons programme that could lead to another mushroom
cloud over Asia.
-
- International investigators are struggling to wrap up
the lucrative black market that spread a web of proliferation across at
least two continents thanks to the greed of one man: the father of Pakistan's
nuclear bomb.
-
- The scientist A Q Khan, who sold nuclear secrets to Iran,
Libya, and possibly others, is now under house arrest.
-
- Al-Qa'ida has still not been vanquished in its hideouts,
while there are still fears that the terrorists could be working on the
production of a " dirty" bomb that would spread radiation and
panic in major cities.
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- In the light of the war on Iraq, which did not have nuclear
weapons, second-tier nations have judged that North Korea was spared invasion
because of its nuclear deterrent, and drawn their own strategic conclusions.
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- International attempts to renew a global pact banning
the proliferation of nuclear weapons have foundered. In short, the system
of safeguards aimed at preventing a repeat of the horrors of Hiroshima
is in disarray.
-
- The review of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT)
by 189 states collapsed two months ago amid recriminations and accusations
that the nuclear five had no intention of living up to their treaty commitments
to pursue nuclear disarmament.
-
- All signs are that the treaty intended to protect the
world from nuclear peril is dead. Pyongyang has pulled out, boasting that
it now has nuclear weapons, and other members such as Iran, Egypt and South
Korea have been caught cheating.
-
- But the regime had already been seriously undermined
by states that remained outside the NPT and became nuclear powers: Israel,
India and Pakistan. The NPT review at the UN in the spring provided a timely
opportunity to tighten nuclear safeguards. Instead, the month-long conference
turned into a bitter slanging match in which the US administration ignored
its own record and turned up the heat on Iran and North Korea.
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- At the heart of the four-decades-old NPT is a "grand
bargain". The five nuclear powers - US, Britain, France, Russia and
China - agreed to work towards nuclear disarmament. In return, the non-nuclear
states gave up any ambition to develop nuclear weapons; they agreed to
open up all their facilities to inspection; and in return they were guaranteed
the benefits of peaceful nuclear technology.
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- The big five have always been open to the charge of hypocrisy.
Behind the rhetoric of disarmament, they have tried everything in their
power to prevent second-tier powers from obtaining nuclear arms, while
clinging on to their own nuclear arsenals despite strategic cuts. Both
the US and Britain are upgrading: the Bush administration is developing
nuclear "bunker busters" that can strike deep underground, while
Britain has ordered a new generation of Trident missiles.
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- With the NPT seriously weakened, the challenge now is
to keep the genie in the bottle, as regional rivalries in the Middle East
and Asia risk going nuclear.
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- For the Bush administration, openly hostile to a UN solution,
the answer has been talk or bomb: negotiate with states that already have
a weapon (such as North Korea), or to take preemptive strikes against those
that do not (such as Iraq). US officials say acting outside the treaty
has produced results: it brought Libya back into the fold in 2003, when
Colonel Muammar Gaddafi decided to scrap his weapons of mass destruction.
-
- Yet this approach contains the risk of opening the path
to nuclear blackmail, which is how North Korea has coaxed the West into
compensating the hermit state in return for concessions on its nuclear
programme.
-
- As with Iran, negotiations have stalled on the North
Korean insistence that it has the right to a civilian programme, if it
renounces nuclear weapons.
-
- Iran, an NPT member which insists on its treaty right
to pursue nuclear power, has been infuriated by US co-operation with India,
a non-member of the NPT, which blasted its way into the nuclear "club"
in tit-for-tat tests with Pakistan in 1998.
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- In a world no longer guided by a universally accepted
regime, countries are weighing the nuclear option. Arab states consider
nuclear-armed Israel, and are drawing their own conclusions. Iran is hemmed
in by hostile neighbours such as Israel and Pakistan. A nuclear test by
North Korea could prompt Taiwan and Japan to follow down that road.
-
- Preoccupied with Iraq, the US has decided to follow a
diplomatic route in dealing with Iran. But if the Security Council fails
to reach agreement on punishment for Tehran's infringement, the military
option would loom again.
-
- Israel has made no secret of its intention to halt militarily
the Iranian nuclear weapons programme, as it did when it struck Iraq's
Osiraq reactor in 1981, delaying but not ending Saddam Hussein's nuclear
quest. But if Israel did strike, the Iranians could hit back anywhere in
the region. Its nuclear programme would go underground, and the hand of
the hardliners in Tehran would be reinforced. As one expert put it, an
Israeli attack would be " a free pass for the mullahs".
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- The question now is whether nuclear deterrence works.
The threat of American nuclear attack, albeit veiled, did not deter Saddam
Hussein from invading Kuwait. On the other hand, North Korea's boasting
of a nuclear arsenal saved it from invasion. And nuclear weapons have not
- yet - been used on the battlefield.
-
- Today, the "official" nuclear powers could
annihilate the world many times over. And 40 other countries have the know-how
to join their club. Sixty years after Hiroshima, who can say with confidence:
"Never again"? Never again?
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- 60 years since the first use of a nuclear weapon in war.
160,000 people died when the bomb was dropped at 8.15am on Hiroshima, with
another 77,062 dying later.
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- $27bn is spent each year by the US on nuclear weapons
and related programmes
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- 11, 000 active, deliverable nuclear weapons in the world.
The US has 6,390, Russia 3,242 and Britain 200
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- 15,654 sq miles, total land area used by US nuclear weapons
bases and facilities
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- 4 other states known or thought to have nuclear weapons:
India, Israel, Pakistan, North Korea
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- 5 acknowledged nuclear states: China, France, Russia,
United Kingdom, United States
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- 1 number of islands vaporised by nuclear testing: Elugelab,
Micronesia, 1952
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- 16 in length of 'Davy Crockett', the smallest nuclear
weapon ever produced
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- 40 states with technical ability to make nuclear weapons,
including Egypt and South Korea
-
- 30,000 Kazakh conscripts served at Semipalatinsk, the
Soviet test site. There were 456 tests conducted between 1945 and 1991
at the site
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- 100 maximum number of those Kazakh conscripts still alive
today
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- 200 estimated number of nuclear weapons possessed by
Israel
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- 0 estimated number of nuclear weapons possessed by all
the Arab states
-
- 100,000 people were members of the Campaign for Nuclear
Disarmament in 1984
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- 150 estimated number of nuclear weapons possessed by
India
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- 75 estimated number of nuclear weapons possessed by Pakistan
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- 40,000 people are currently members of CND
-
- 900 years is the time it will take for radioactive elements
in Pripyat, near Chernobyl, to decay to safe levels following the disaster
19 years ago
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- © 2005 Independent News & Media (UK) Ltd.
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- http://news.independent.co.uk/world/politics/article303776.ece
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