Nuclear arms control is weakening as key treaties collapse and powers like the U.S., Russia, and China expand their arsenals. The risk of nuclear proliferation grows, with countries like North Korea and Iran challenging the NPT, raising fears of a new arms race, report Laurence Norman, Daniel Kiss, Ming Li, and Peter Saidel of The Wall Street Journal. They write:
At the end of the Cold War, global powers reached the consensus that the world would be better off with fewer nuclear weapons.
That era is now over.
Treaties are collapsing, some nuclear powers are strengthening their arsenals, the risk is growing that nuclear weapons will spread more widely and the use of tactical nuclear weapons to gain battlefield advantage is no longer unimaginable. […]
For decades, arms-control agreements, technological challenges and fears of mutually assured destruction kept such a doomsday on the distant horizon.
As years passed, U.S. and Russian stockpiles of nuclear warheads grew, then shrank—while China, in recent years, began its ascent. […]
The global stockpile reached a peak in the mid-1980s, and has since been significantly reduced. In the first Start treaty, signed in 1991, the U.S. and Soviet Union agreed to cap the number of their warheads.
But one of the two critical nuclear-arms-control pacts between Russia and the U.S., the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, has collapsed. The New Start treaty, which placed even tighter limits on the number of deployed warheads on each side and the missiles and bombers that carry them, expires early next year. […]
The latest estimates indicate that China has about 600 intercontinental ballistic missiles in its arsenal, all of which can reach the U.S. mainland, according to a Pentagon assessment of China’s military released in December. Beijing has rejected past proposals that it meet with the U.S. and Russia to negotiate formal limits on nuclear forces. […]
President Kennedy’s warning of the perils of a global arms race was an argument for a continued effort to limit arsenals through treaties. While those treaties, especially the NPT, have bound many nations into staying away from nuclear weapons, those commitments could be tested in a world of serious global tensions and the weakening of traditional alliances.
Read more here.
How Russia’s Nuclear Arsenal, the World’s Largest, Compares With Others | WSJ
