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Briefings & Information
Nuclear weapons:
who's got them, who might have them,
who could have them?
There are five officially declared nuclear weapon states in the world:
the United States, Russia, Britain,
France and China. These states are signatories
to the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.
Three more states, Israel, India and
Pakistan, have developed nuclear weapons outside the
Treaty framework. In the case of Israel, this was first revealed by Mordechai
Vanunu, a technician in a nuclear installation who exposed the nuclear
weapons programme to a British newspaper in 1986.
South Africa admitted that it had nuclear weapons but
then scrapped them in 1991. Three states, the Ukraine,
Belarus and Kazakhstan, formerly parts
of the Soviet Union, had nuclear weapons at one stage but have now either
scrapped them or sent them back to Russia.
North Korea (DPRK) claims to have a nuclear weapons capability.
Iran has a nuclear power programme – a number of
states allege this hides a nuclear weapons programme.
Belgium, Germany, Holland,
Italy and Turkey as well as Britain,
as part of their membership of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation
(NATO), have an estimated 480 US nuclear weapons based on their soil.
Since many nuclear weapons are installed either on surface warships or
in particular on submarines, they can in practice always be found almost
anywhere in international waters.
Although there are 39 countries in the world, apart from the five declared
nuclear weapons states, that have nuclear power or research reactors and
thus the capability to produce nuclear weapons, nearly all of them have
chosen not to possess nuclear weapons and have officially signed treaties
with this intention. Many countries have also signed to be part of large
areas of the world covering Southeast Asia, Central Asia, the South Pacific,
Latin America and Africa that are specifically nuclear weapons free zones.
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