New arms race undermining nuclear control treaty: experts

[ahlam1399]

PARIS: Fifty years after the US, Russia and other powers reached a landmark deal to halt the spread of atomic weapons, an arms race and shifting US alliances risk triggering a new scramble for the bomb, experts say.Signed on July 1, 1968, six years after the Cuban Missile Crisis took the world to the brink of an atomic war, the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) has been credited with dramatically reducing the threat of a nuclear apocalypse.The treaty attempted to strike a balance between the security concerns of nuclear-armed powers and the atomic ambitions of the have-nots. The five countries that already had nuclear weapons, the US, Russia, China, France and Britain, all permanent UN Security Council members, were allowed keep them, in return for commitments on reducing their arms stockpiles.Non-nuclear-armed states agreed never to develop such weapons, in return for help from the so-called P5 countries in developing peaceful nuclear technology. The treaty became the cornerstone of non-proliferation efforts, with 191 countries signing up. "The NPT has been amazingly successful in keeping the number of nuclear armed states to less than ten," said Mark Fitzpatrick, director of the Non-Proliferation and Nuclear Policy programme at the International Institute for Strategic Studies in Washington.On the disarmament front, the treaty has also exceeded expectations, with the global stockpile of nuclear warheads falling by 85 percent as the US and Russia dismantled the bulk of their huge Cold War arsenals.But the treaty failed to prevent a handful of other countries going on to acquire atomic weapons. Besides North Korea, which pulled out of the treaty in 2003 and built a bomb three years later, India and Pakistan have become nuclear powers after never signing up to the NPT. Israel is also widely believed to have the bomb.Beatrice Fihn, director of the Nobel-winning International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, argues the treaty is fundamentally flawed because it aims merely to reduce, rather than abolish nuclear weapons.http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/World-TheNewsInternational/~4/6qr2552B4eY

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