Julian Borger and Ian Sample, The Guardian: All you wanted to know about nuclear war but were too afraid to ask
The use of a nuclear weapon is now more likely than any time since the cold war, but the probability of humanity being wiped out entirely has diminished.
Which countries have nuclear weapons?
There are nine countries that possess nuclear weapons. Five of these (the US, Russia, the UK, France and China) are members of the official owners club, who made their weapons early and had them legitimised in the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) signed in 1968, the key piece of international law governing nuclear weapons possession.
NPT has arguably been quite successful. In the 1960s it was widely anticipated that dozens of countries would get the bomb, as it appeared to be the fast track to clout and status on the world stage. But so far there have only been four rogue nuclear weapons states who ignored the NPT and made their own bombs. In order of acquisition, they are Israel, India, Pakistan and North Korea.
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WNU Editor: A good summary.
1 comment:
An 800 kiloton nuke is not something a terrorist group might conceivably build.The most you can expect from them is a 10 kiloton nuke and that is assuming everything goes perfectly which it will not.Of course even a 10 kt nuke is something that in reality is a lot harder to build than anyone assumes.Its not like in the movies the costs would be tremendous the difficulty very high the odds small at best.I'm more worried that someone will build an biological weapon at some point in the future compared to nukes that is easy especially with progress made in genetic engineering.One day 20-25 years from now a disgruntled but briliant geneticist might decide to do it.Basically the scenario you had in Army of the 12 monkeys.That is actually a plausible long term scenario not the Sum of all fears scenario.
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