nuclear-news

Nuclear nonproliferation is under threat

Nuclear nonproliferation is under threat, and so is American national security WP By Rebecca Davis Gibbons February 14 The newly released 2015 National Security Strategy (NSS), the aspirational security blueprint for the final years of the Obama administration, refers to the risk of nuclear proliferation and nuclear material no fewer than eight times in its 29 pages of text. The key passage on Page 11 reads “no threat poses as grave a danger to our security and well-being as the potential use of nuclear weapons and materials by irresponsible states or terrorists.”  One of the greatest tools the United States has to combat this threat is the nuclear non-proliferation regime. However, shifting global power could threaten the nonproliferation regime architecture in ways that could have serious long-term security consequences.

The Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, or the NPT, is the cornerstone of the nuclear nonproliferation regime, a set of treaties, agreements, and norms aimed at curtailing the spread of nuclear weapons and dangerous nuclear materials. It was this very architecture—the NPT, International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) safeguards, IAEA inspections, IAEA referrals to the U.N. Security Council, and six rounds of sanctions — that brought Iran to the negotiating table, and which remains the most viable way to approach nuclear proliferation peacefully. . ……http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/monkey-cage/wp/2015/02/14/the-2015-national-security-strategy-and-the-future-of-nuclear-nonproliferation/

February 16, 2015 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | weapons and war