Strategic Panorama 2009 - 2010 - IEEE

Vicente Garrido Rebolledo
It was attempted to remedy this vagueness in 1995 at the NPT Review and
Extension Conference, which we will go on to deal with.
Despite the criticism levelled at the NPT for its discriminatory nature,
there is no denying the decisive contribution it has made to the containment
of the uncontrolled proliferation of nuclear weapons for the past forty
years. Apart from the nuclear powers, only India, Pakistan and South Africa
have successfully exploded an atomic bomb. Only three states, none of
which is a Party to the NPT, currently have sufficient nuclear capability to
manufacture nuclear weapons: India, Israel and Pakistan. North Korea is
the only state that has withdrawn from the NPT (after announcing it had
sufficient nuclear capability to build several atomic bombs) and, despite
having conducted two nuclear tests (9 October 2006 and 25 May 2009
respectively), its status as a nuclear power has always been debatable. As
for Iran, despite international suspicions about the dual nature (civilian and
military) of its nuclear programme, coupled with repeated complaints of its
failure to cooperate with the IAEA in providing complete information about
this programme, there is currently no clear evidence of its nuclear military
capability. Should this capability materialise, it would have an extremely
worrying «domino effect» in the region and would question the NPT’s efficiency
at preventing future cases of proliferation.
All in all, with the exception of the above cases, it may be said that the
current situation constitutes a considerable success for the Treaty bearing
in mind that, when it was signed in 1968, forecasts predicted that some
two dozen countries would have access to nuclear weapons by the end
of the 1980s. South Africa is the first example of a state which, having
acquired a nuclear capability of its own after the entry into force of the
NPT, chose voluntarily to decommission its nuclear arsenal and subject
its civilian nuclear programme to the international inspections provided
for in the Treaty. In the 1990s the NPT was reinforced as a result of the
implementation of United Nations Security Council Resolution 687 (1991)
condemning Iraq for repeated non-compliance with the NPT, obliging it to
dismantle its military nuclear programme and place all its nuclear installations
under the control of the IAEA, which was responsible for verifying the
commitments adopted by states under the NPT.
In 1993 the director of the IAEA stated that the programme had been
fully decommissioned and there were no indications of Iraq «having retained
any physical capability for the indigenous production of weapon-usable
nuclear material». It was the first time in the history of the nuclear nonproliferation
regime that the Security Council gave its unanimous support
— 195 —