In 1995 all countries, with the exception of India, Israel and Pakistan, signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT); some because it was in their interest and others under pressure from the superpowers. Since the mid-1970s, a further problem has been how to make the signatories put the treaty into practice. A not insignificant number of breaches were noted in the 1980s and 1990s, but until recently the United States and the former Soviet Union were able to crack down on them and prevent the non-compliant countries from achieving their aims. More recently, the crises in North Korea and Iran seem to show that the great powers no longer have the means to impose their policies on others, or to get a majority of countries on their side. Meanwhile, the UN is at a standstill on the issue.
Non-Proliferation in Deadlock?
The non-proliferation system set up at the end of the 1960s enables the five nuclear weapons states to claim that their arsenals protect them from threats of whatever nature and origin whilst forbidding other countries from acquiring them.(1) It could also be seen as a way of perpetuating the dominance of the five great powers, which view their weapons as a symbol of power, prestige and above all, superiority. For all that, a good number of countries welcomed it without hesitation since they had long considered that they were better off if their neighbours did not have the weapons unless they themselves procured them. Furthermore, they reckoned that nuclear arsenals posed an unacceptable risk to world security. So it was that in 1958 Ireland, the Scandinavian countries and Mexico, among others, presented a draft treaty to the UN banning the production of nuclear weapons at a time when the United States and USSR were not that way inclined. These countries were of course the first signatories of the NPT, followed by those who thought they would never have the means to procure such weapons and saw no use in them. Among the latter, Iraq, Iran, Syria and Libya later attempted to wriggle out of the limitations that their signatures imposed upon them. These countries’ signatures were in turn followed by those of East European countries which, from 1968, followed the wishes of the Kremlin.
In other countries, nationalists in favour of nuclear weapons initially won the day and tried to keep the military nuclear option open despite pressure from the superpowers. Such was the case of Switzerland and Canada, for example, which pursued nuclear programmes for several years after joining the treaty. The same goes for West Germany, Italy and Spain, which only joined the treaty fully at the end of the 1970s. For some considerable time opinions in favour of nuclear weapons were publicly expressed there by some in important official positions. Change only came in the mid-1970s when a large part of public opinion became fiercely hostile to nuclear power in general, and in particular to its military applications.
In this respect, Japan, the sole country to have been victim of the nuclear bomb, has a rather special position. Since 1945, public opinion has been by a wide margin hostile to nuclear weapons, and the basic law on nuclear energy, adopted on 19 December 1955, specifies that ‘research, development and application of atomic energy shall be limited to peaceful uses’. Nevertheless a small nationalist fringe influential in the political and business fields continued to try to preserve the future. Key figures regularly repeated that Japan should not exclude the possibility of a military nuclear programme. The consequence was that at the end of the 1970s, construction began on a plant for uranium enrichment by centrifuge and another for plutonium separation. The result is that, today, Japan has the means to make a bomb at short notice, should it so wish.
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