Nuclear Proliferation: South Africa
Background:
South Africa is the only country in Africa to successfully develop nuclear weapons, and then to voluntarily dismantle them. To start Africa’s affiliation with nuclear weapons’, South Africa signed 50-year nuclear collaboration agreement with the U.S. in 1957. A nuclear weapons program was then started in1970 with scientists that were instructed to build various nuclear weapons. By 1990, the president of South Africa, F.W. de Klerk, ended the program with the aim of joining the NPT as a state without a nuclear weapons capability. In 1991 they then joined the NPT and came to a safeguards agreement with the IAEA (International Atomic Energy Agency). This was an organization that promoted peace, which they also performed, safeguard inspections. South Africa thus submitted its declaration on facilities and nuclear material inventories, and the IAEA then had to verify the completeness of our inventory.
At this time, South Africa was in control of 10% of the country’s electricity. Between 1979 and 1989, South Africa built and dismantled a lot of nuclear weapons. This made it very complicated for the IAEA to verify them for the first time. In 1993, President F.W. de Klerk announced that six nuclear weapons and a seventh one that was not finished had been dismantled. In 1995, the IAEA declared that is was satisfied with all the materials and weapons program that South Africa had. Although that weapons program had be stopped and dismantled, it still had to be accounted for. In 1996, South Africa signed the African Nuclear Weapon Free Zone Treaty. It stated that in this zone there would be no nuclear activity happening. In 2002 South Africa signed the Additional Protocol in relat...
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All in all, nuclear weapons are capable of causing mass destruction amongst large nations. With this in mind, the Republic of South Africa believes in the establishment of nuclear free zones in Korea.
If any nations in the area of North Korea have nuclear weapons, the typical conflicts that are already happening could quickly escalate to nuclear conflicts that could cause in amazingly high casualties. And in order to keep this problem under control and safeguard life on earth we need to help keep some extent of peace in the area, and the establishment of the nuclear weapon free zones appears to be an excellent way to do so. Several nations have already pushed for the security of many other nations, even those located outside of the zone, would benefit from it as well.
We can also enforce the NPT so that many nations will see how important keeping nuclear weapons
What Nuclear power has the ability to do is get a lot of power in a little amount of space. “Roughly 1.6 billion people live without access to electricity, and 2.4 billion rely on traditional biomass because they have no access to modern fuel.” (General Dr. Mohamed ElBaradei) With nuclear power put into these countries that are without power we can have it to where electricity will be accessibility to everyone. By having power accessible to everyone we can accomplish so much more and unlock more possibilities in our world today.
Together with the Soviet Union we have made the crucial breakthroughs that have begun the process of limiting nuclear arms. But we must set as our goal not just limiting but reducing and finally destroying these terrible weapons so that they cannot destroy civilization and so that the threat of nuclear war will no longer hang over the world and the people.
...'t need nuclear weapons to achieve the feared results; the U.S. already has the high murder statistics to prove it with handguns alone.
Nuclear weapons are a problem that the world is facing today as countries want to have their
"The Nuclear Non Proliferation Treaty Has a Proud Record of Success « Nuclear-news." Nuclear-news. Web. 06 Apr. 2011. .
Out of all the dangerous powers and authority our government wields, possibly the most threatening powers are nuclear weapons. People tend to be frightened by things they do not understand, which make nuclear weapons a perfect catalyst for fear. These weapons have the most overwhelming and destructive power known to man; although, nuclear weapons are only safe in countries that try to maintain harmony and stability. Nuclear weapons are defined as “explosive devices whose destructive potential derives from the release of energy that accompanies the splitting or combining of atomic nuclei.” This power is both dangerous and unstable in the hands of small erratic countries.
The Treaty of Versailles, signed in 1919, was made upon at the end of the World War I; the purpose of this treaty was to create a peace between the Allied Powers and Germany. However, as it’s witnessed, greed won over peace. The Allied powers chose vengeance against Germany, instead of world peace. They decided to strip Germany of their land, military forces, and make them pay significant reparations for all the destruction that happened because of the war. This angered Germany and fueled Hitler to rise to power. Although the world has taken note of what happened and learned from history, we are witnessing the same mistakes being made that might lead to another world war. The Non-Proliferation Treaty today reflects similar aspects as the treaty of Versailles, and we need to learn from those mistakes to prevent any future conflict. The treaty of Versailles prevented Germany from being able to defend its country and rebuild a strong economy, and in the same way the Non-Proliferation Treaty prevents Iran from building a strong military while limiting Iran’s economic growth, so in order to prevent potential conflicts the Non-Proliferation Treaty has to be revised.
This conflict began developing in 1994 when North Korea announced its intentions to withdraw from the NPT. This led to the US and North Korea signing the Agreed Framework. Under this agreement, North Korea agreed to stop its illicit plutonium production in exchange for increased aid from the United States. While this agreement broke down in 2002, the Six-Party Talks restarted the efforts to stop North Korea from gaining nuclear weapons, involving the aforementioned North Korean, South Korea, Japan, China, Russia, and the United States. This le...
From the creation of nuclear weapons at the start of the Cold War to today, the world has experienced struggles fueled by the want of nuclear power. The bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and Iran’s nuclear weapon program are some of the most important conflicts over nuclear weapons. Thanks to the use of nuclear weapons in 1945 to end World War II, the world has come extremely close to a nuclear war, and more countries have began developing nuclear power. Unmistakably, many conflicts since the start of the Cold War have been caused by nuclear weapons, and there are many more to come.
While the Cuban missile crisis came to be a learning experience to us instead of global destruction the world has far from seen its last nuclear war scare. Since 1960 the number of states that possess nuclear weapons has tripled. **And while the number of active nuclear war heads since this time has gone down significantly, from over 40,000 to 15,350, but many of these decommissioned warheads are just stockpiled away somewhere, not destroyed (Kristensen & Norris, 2016). A. Today the world’s biggest threat of a nuclear war comes from the totalitarian dictatorship of North Korea. North Korea’s leader Kim Jong-un has made numerous threats of nuclear strikes and invasion against neighboring South Korea for the past decade.
Since its origin in 1948, North Korea has been isolated and heavily armed, with hostile relations with South Korea and Western countries. It has developed a capability to produce short- and medium-range missiles, chemical weapons, and possibly biological and nuclear weapons. In December 2002, Pyongyang lifted the freeze on its plutonium-based nuclear weapons program and expelled IAEA inspectors who had been monitoring the freeze under the Agreed Framework of October 1994. As the Bush administration was arguing its case at the United Nations for disarming Iraq, the world has been hit with alarming news of a more menacing threat: North Korea has an advanced nuclear weapons program that, U.S. officials believe, has already produced one or two nuclear bombs. As the most recent standoff with North Korea over nuclear missile-testing approaches the decompression point, the United States needs to own up to a central truth: The region of Northeast Asia will never be fully secure until the communist dictatorship of North Korea passes from the scene. After threatening to test a new, long-range missile, Pyongyang says it is willing to negotiate with "the hostile nations" opposing it. But whether the North will actually forgo its test launch is anyone's guess. North Korea first became embroiled with nuclear politics during the Korean War. Although nuclear weapons were never used in Korea, American political leaders and military commanders threatened to use nuclear weapons to end the Korean War on terms favorable to the United States. In 1958, the United States deployed nuclear weapons to South Korea for the first time, and the weapons remained there until President George Bush ordered their withdrawal in 1991. North Korean government stateme...
Through the years the countries continue to take steps forward toward peace by allowing families to unite from the North and South. Then North Korea will make a decision with their threat of nuclear weapons that will separate the countries from one another and they are pulled away from each other again. The only solution to the political differences and to eliminate the threat of weapons of mass destruction not only to kill and injury the people of North and South Korea, but also of neighboring countries due to chemical and nuclear fallout that will have years of lasting negative health impact to the world. Not only on land, but our valuable resources in the ocean. If we reflect on our history with this type of nuclear destruction such as in Japan or in Russia we see how this impacts the immediate areas, people and for generations. The world needs to agree that the political leadership in North Korea should be moved. The options for removal are limited and pose significant risks for not only the Koreas’, but for the
Governments from other countries should be able to work things out and settle business without fearing that someone will be threatened with a nuclear war. These weapons have a very high percent of total destruction, other countries do not think about when they use these fatal weapons as an excuse, of what they will really do when sending the bombs off. They are only thinking of defending themselves no matter what the consequences are, little do they know that it could come back and bite them in the butt. Nuclear weapons will not only cause destruction to one country but all of them. Banning these dangerous weapons will make sure that these excuses will no longer be a problem to the world, countries and nations will not have to fear if they are putting the entire world in
Moreover, according to the same theory, relations among states are derived primarily by their level of power, which constitutes basically their military and economic capability, and in pursuit of the national security states strive to attain as many resources as possible. The theoretical model explains thus why the nuclear issue has eventually resulted in identifying with a security one, meaning that North Korea main concern is to assure its survivor, its efforts are in the first place finalized at meeting that target and its only means of pursuing it consists of the posing of the nuclear threat. North Korea finds itself stuck in an economic and, to some extent, diplomatic isolation; even though the financial sanctions leading to the just mentioned critical conditions have been caused by the government inflexible, aggressive and anti-democratic behavior, the regime has no other choice than restate and strengthen its strict and, apparently, definitive positions to ensure its survivor, since at the moment any concession or move toward a more liberal approach breaking the countrys isolation could easily cause a collapse of the whole system.... ... middle of paper ...
It is a well-known fact that the dropping of the two atomic bombs near the end of World War II in 1945 ushered in the dawn of the Atomic Age. For the first time in human history, the world was introduced to the awesome power of nuclear weapons. Since that time, there have been several different nuclear threats to the world, and one of those threats can be found along the Pacific Rim, in the country of North Korea. Like the dropping of the atomic bombs, it is also known that the North Korean government has admitted to possessing nuclear weapons, and in doing so, it stands as a silent, potential nuclear danger to the rest of the world.