The World Nuclear Threat Is Worse Than Ever

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Nathalie Guibert, World Crunch: Iran Deal Or Not, World Nuclear Threat Is Worse Than Ever

The treaty signed with Iran won't eliminate the risk of global proliferation. Russia, China and North Korea in particular are building arsenals and see destabilization as strategy.

PARIS — Despite the historic agreement reached with Iran July 14, the idea of a world with no atomic weapon remains a dream, even 25 years after the end of the Cold War. There are 4,100 nuclear warheads on the planet, and 1,800 of them are American or Russian ones in a state of alert, according to the Federation of American Scientists (FAS) experts.

No indeed, the Iranian deal hasn't come close to eliminating the risks of proliferation. In fact, North Korea announced in the wake of the deal that, for its part, it was "not interested at all by a unilateral freeze or the abandonment of its nuclear program."

The use of the bomb became irrelevant in the past decade as new threats emerged (terrorism and cyber-terrorism, in particular) and as existential border risks to Europe disappeared. During the 1990s, the United States, Russia, France and United Kingdom decided to cut their nuclear arsenals. China was the only country with nuclear weapons that did not follow suit. Asia, in fact, has become a nuclear continent. Those who believed that the Iran nuclear deal would stop proliferation were wrong.

WNU editor: I cannot help but feel that the world has become desensitized to the existential threat that these weapons possess. Growing up .... the fear of these weapons and their possible use was something that we were all exposed to, and in turn I could not help but feel that our political leaders .... while still pursuing a policy of nuclear proliferation .... had to also be sensitive to these public concerns. Today .... the focus is elsewhere, and while our attention is elsewhere the technology and knowledge to make these weapon systems is becoming more widely distributed and available.