At first blush, the prevention of the spread of nuclear weapons appears as a rare and important feature of global consensus spanning close to half a century. This is clearly the case not only in multilateral declaratory undertakings such as the 1978 Final Document of the UN Special Session on Disarmament (1), notable for its universal nature committing all member states of the United Nations at the time, which states inter alia that “Non proliferation of nuclear weapons is a matter of universal concern”(§36)…”It is imperative…to prevent the proliferation of nuclear weapons”(§65).
Previously, and more operationally, the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, opened to signature on 1 May 1968, laid out the elements of an international regime which has over the years acquired quasi-universal status, with only India, Israel and Pakistan holding out, while only one state (North Korea) has opted out. The NPT in turn built open an initially modest set of safeguards established by the International Atomic Energy Agency after its creation in 1957 and which have developed extensively into an ever-more intrusive system of inspections materialized in particular by the so-called Additional Protocols formalized in 1997 which have been acceded to by 115 states and which another 25 have signed (2). Out of the 44 countries(3) possessing at least one operational nuclear reactor, 35 have ratified the Protocols and three others (India, Iran, and Israel) have signed them . Even the three countries which never joined the NPT have not signaled their intent to act against the non-proliferation aims of the NPT. Only North Korea breaks what is in effect a universal declaratory pattern to which countries pay collective and individual obeisance in words, if not always in deeds.
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