New Members of the Nuclear Club

Although the major nuclear arsenals belong to the two nuclear superpowers, there are other nuclear powers such as China, France, and Great Britain. These declared nuclear powers, called the nuclear club, recently took on India and Pakistan as new members. Besides these countries, several others, including Israel, are often described as countries seeking​—or perhaps already possessing—​nuclear weapons.

Political conflict involving any of the nuclear club members, including the new members, could be a trigger to nuclear hostilities. “The crisis between India and Pakistan . . . marks the closest two states have come to nuclear war since the Cuban Missile Crisis,” explains the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. Seeing the intensified situation during early 2002, the fear of nuclear attack became very real to many people.

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A Second Nuclear Age?

Writing in The New York Times Magazine, columnist Bill Keller (now the executive editor of The New York Times) expressed the opinion that the nations have entered into the second nuclear age. The first one ran until January 1994, when Ukraine agreed to give up weapons inherited from the former Soviet Union. Why does he speak of a second nuclear age?

Keller writes: “The second nuclear age was heralded by a rumble under the Rajasthani desert in 1998, as India’s newly elected Hindu nationalist government detonated five test blasts. Two weeks later Pakistan followed suit.” What made these tests different from those of the former nuclear age? “These were nuclear weapons with a regional agenda.”

So, can the world feel any safer for having two more active members of the nuclear club? Keller continues: “Each new country that gets nuclear weapons multiplies the potential for a war involving a nuclear state.”​—“The Thinkable,” The New York Times Magazine, May 4, 2003, page 50.

The situation is complicated further by the news that North Korea may have “enough plutonium to be within striking distance of building six new nuclear bombs. . . . Each day increases the risk that North Korea will succeed in producing new nuclear weapons, and perhaps even testing one of them to prove its success.”​—The New York Times, July 18, 2003.