SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
from the he-might-be-a-little-nuts-too dept.
North Korea's defiant pursuit of nuclear weapons capabilities, dramatised by last weekend's powerful underground test and a recent long-range ballistic missile launch over Japan, has been almost universally condemned as posing a grave, unilateral threat to international peace and security.
The growing North Korean menace also reflects the chronic failure of multilateral counter-proliferation efforts and, in particular, the long standing refusal of acknowledged nuclear-armed states such as the US and Britain to honour a legal commitment to reduce and eventually eliminate their arsenals.
In other words, the past and present leaders of the US, Russia, China, France and the UK, whose governments signed but have not fulfilled the terms of the 1970 nuclear non-proliferation treaty (NPT), have to some degree brought the North Korea crisis on themselves. Kim Jong-un's recklessness and bad faith is a product of their own.
The NPT, signed by 191 countries, is probably the most successful arms control treaty ever. When conceived in 1968, at the height of the cold war, the mass proliferation of nuclear weapons was considered a real possibility. Since its inception and prior to North Korea, only India, Pakistan and Israel are known to have joined the nuclear "club" in almost half a century.
To work fully, the NPT relies on keeping a crucial bargain: non-nuclear-armed states agree never to acquire the weapons, while nuclear-armed states agree to share the benefits of peaceful nuclear technology and pursue nuclear disarmament with the ultimate aim of eliminating them. This, in effect, was the guarantee offered to vulnerable, insecure outlier states such as North Korea. The guarantee was a dud, however, and the bargain has never been truly honoured.
[Ed Note: Since this story was submitted there has been at least one additional ballistic missile test by North Korea.]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday September 16 2017, @01:15PM (1 child)
In 1945, the US and Russia didn't have the power to end the industrial age with nuclear weapons either. And yet, they do now in 2017, which somehow is no longer 1945. The world doesn't stay constant. Someone who has 10-20 prototype nukes in 2015 might have 0 today or 100 nukes. In the scenario given, where North Korea had nukes and no one else did, is that they would have both the capability to make more and plenty of incentive to do so. So 10-20 nukes in 2015 would be more today and more in the future. What are the upper limits to such a policy?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 16 2017, @04:30PM
> In the scenario given, where North Korea had nukes and no one else did, is that they would have both the capability to make more and plenty of incentive to do so.
In the world we're living in, they have both the capability and sufficient incentive. In the scenario, they wouldn't be threatened with nuclear attack, so they might have less incentive. The US removed its nuclear weapons from South Korea in 1991, but there have been proposals to bring them back.
> So 10-20 nukes in 2015 would be more today and more in the future
No need to remind me: I wrote "they may have more now."
> What are the upper limits to such a policy?
The WSJ blog quotes estimates of 20 to 100 warheads by 2020. The nuclear powers that signed the NPT each had more [economist.com] (in 2013) than that. Pakistan, India and Israel each had 80 to 120. The US and Russia, of course, have thousands.