The Rest of the Nuclear Club

Luxembourg is next to go
And (who knows?) maybe Monaco.
Tom Lehrer, "Who's Next"

The US, Russia, the UK, France, and China all have nuclear weapons and get to deal with all the attendant politics thereof. Since their development, nuclear weapons have been used in warfare by one nation only two times: the United States against Japan in the 1945 bombings of Hiroshima on August 6, and Nagasaki on August 9. The sheer destructive effectiveness of these weapons shocked the entire world, including the US, and since then the only nuclear detonations have been tests or demonstrations.

In theory, only the Permanent Five (P5) members of the United Nations Security Council—i.e. the US, Russia, United Kingdom, France, and China—are even allowed to have nuclear weapons, per the terms of the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). That said, international law being what it is—i.e., highly voluntary—several states currently have, previously had, or may have or be developing nuclear weapons. For the most part, the non-P5 states that have/had nuclear weapons either did not sign the Treaty in the first place (India, Pakistan, Israel, South Africa) or withdrew from it (North Korea).Important note  The states that are suspected of developing weapons are generally parties to the NPT, and the shadiness about them is caused by their attempts to circumvent the controls they agreed to under the terms of the NPT.


Israel - The Samson Option



Translation: Israel has nukes. Unofficially.

Israel being a nuclear power is frequently referred to as "the worst kept secret in nuclear politics". While the Israeli government refuses to officially admit that they have nuclear weapons, multiple leaks have confirmed to anyone interested that hell yes, they do. These leaks come from... the Israeli government (the arsenal's primary purpose is after all to intimidate the other side not to attack—secret doomsday devices aren't too good at that). That includes the Prime Minister (Ehud Olmert having once let slip in a speech that Israel has the Bomb before hastily retracting his statement).note  Basically, Israel wants you to know they've got the bomb. They just don't want to deal with the politics of being a nuclear power. While Israel refuses to comment on its nuclear capability (using the vague statement that they will not the first to "introduce" nuclear weapons, which seems to mean they won't admit to having nukes unless and until one of their regional rivals develops them), 80-400 warheads is the estimate, deployable via Jericho ballistic missiles, submarine based cruise missiles, and a wide range of fighter aircraft, giving Israel a full nuclear triad. Their nuclear program was first exposed by the The Timesnote  by way of Mordechai Vanunu, a whistleblower who worked on it. He was abducted in Rome by Mossad and faced nearly two decades of solitary confinement in Israel.

    • Refusing to acknowledge its nuclear arsenal (and more importantly, the United States also refusing to officially acknowledge it) has another major benefit to Israel: since 1976, US law has prohibited any foreign aid payments from being made to nations that proliferate nuclear weapons technology beyond the confines of the Non-Proliferation Treaty, even if (as in the case of Israel) the nation is not a signatory of the NPT. Israel is the largest single recipient of such payments.

India - The Smiling Buddha

-Jawaharlal Nehru

Detonated its first nuke in 1974 in what was termed a "peaceful nuclear explosion" entitled "Smiling Buddha" (one wonders if the actual Buddha would smile, but it's funny anyway; the name comes from the fact that the test happened to fall on a holiday marking the Buddha's birthday). Interesting because it's the first nuclear explosion to be ordered by a woman; Indira Gandhi was Prime Minister at the time. The main weapons are the Agni medium-range ballistic missiles, with an ICBM in development. The Su-30MKI "Flanker" is being adapted for nuclear use and its first missile sub has just been launched.

Pakistan - Mutually Assured Destruction: The Remix

-Zulfikar Ali-Bhutto

Pakistan tested its first nukes in 1998, developing them in response to India's test, although it is believed to have had them for many years previously. The country has an unknown number of nuclear weapons, but current estimates put it ahead of India in both weapons and delivery systems. Unlike India it has successfully developed a triad of systems which can be launched from land (medium- and intermediate-range missiles), aircraft, and submarines, making this a much more sophisticated arsenal then the Indians; although this is at the cost of accepting Indian superiority in conventional weapons (the earlier doctrine called for approximate parity). Are currently making a nuclear submarine..


Furthermore, while the Pakistani nuclear project started in response to India's test, the deployment, was as a result of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. The Soviets had been threatening Pakistan with nuclear attack since the whole Gary Powers incident note  and after the Pakistanis started helping anti-Soviet militias in Afghanistan this kinda got increased. Pakistan was no longer under a nuclear umbrella note . As a result not only were many western leaders prepared to turn a blind eye to Pakistani nuclear ambitions but there were many in the West who were sympathetic to such a aims.


North Korea - The Hooves of Chollima

-Korea Central News Agency

North Korean Songun ("military first") policy calls for the development of nuclear weapons as a possible defense against the West. The country recently conducted two nuclear tests. The first one, conducted in 2006, was a fizzle, but a WC-135. confirmed that the test was nuclear. The second test was conducted in 2009 and was much more succesful, and confirmed North Korea's status as a full fleged nuclear power, albeit one with the world's smallest arsenal, somewhere in the single digits. They yield was somewhere between 1 to 20 kilotons, probably in the single digits, from 2 to 6 kilotons, which is comparable to India and Pakistan's first nuclear tests.





South Africa - The Next Mfecane

Why do they need them anyway?
-Nelson Mandela

During The Apartheid Era South Africa developed a small number of nuclear weapons, probably no more than 10. The very isolation that drove them to develop the weapons also limited their means of delivery, the aging English Electric Canberra. It also limited their design options—all South African nukes were of the inefficient and dangerous but simple and dirt-cheap (for a nuke) gun-type, rather than the implosion-type all other nuclear powers use for most of their weapons. In 1979 an American satellite detected what may have been South African (or joint Israeli-South African) nuclear test, now known as the Vela Incident. Rumours of collaboration with Israel's nuclear program abound (which is unsurprising given that Israel and South Africa were both "pariahs of the West"—anticommunist but also somewhat distasteful to the US and Europe—known to cooperate on conventional weapons development), but have never been proven. All weapons were dismantled shortly before the end of apartheid and South Africa helped establish the African nuclear-weapon-free zone.

Ukraine, Belarus and Kazakhstan - Regifting

25,000 nuclear warheads. One is missing.

Between them inherited thousands of Soviet nuclear weapons after the fall of the USSR. They were all sent to Russia, and Kazakhstan has since became part of the Central Asian Nuclear-Weapons-Free-Zone. Several Neorealist international-relations scholars—most notably John Mearsheimer—have advocated rearming Ukraine as a deterrent to war in Europe. However, given that their analyses were made in the late '80s and early '90s and assumed that the reunited Germany would be tempted to flex its muscles militarily, this theory is not given much credence these days. As it turns out, the Germans hate war viscerallynote , and prefer to flex their muscles economically; as the strongest economy and de facto political leader of the European Union, Germany has no need to act aggressively. The actual threat has come not from the West, but from the East, with an aggressive Russia invading Ukraine in violation of the agreements made at the time of disarmament.

The decision by the former Soviet Socialist Republics to disarm marks the first time since the invention of nuclear weapons that a nation has declined the technology. In the wake of 2014 Russian annexation of Crimea and backing of separatist rebels in Eastern Ukraine, one wonders if they now regret that decision.

Developing Hell/Development Hell

Iran - The Fist of God

-Ali Khamene'i






Syria - A Great Big Hole in the Desert

-Bashar Al-Assad, after Operation Orchard.

Suspected to be developing nuclear weapons by many. Israel destroyed a suspected nuclear reactor (or at least a site where Syria seems to have been gathering materials to build a reactor) in an airstrike in 2007. Any further attempts have probably been utterly derailed by the ongoing civil war.

Taiwan - Trying Again?

-Lee Teng-Hui during the 1996 Taiwan Strait Crisis

Refuses to confirm or deny rumors, but it has six operational power-generating nuclear reactors that could potentially be converted to producing weapons-grade plutoniumnote , with two more in construction; additionally, back when the United States still had official diplomatic relations with Taiwan a lot of advanced physicists were sent there for an unspecified reason and there was that one time during George W. Bush's presidency that a ship full of warheads and other stuff got "accidentally" shipped to Taiwan...




Had programs, but no longer







Germany - Atomwaffen nicht einsatzbereit!

During World War II, the Third Reich commissioned a heavy water production scheme for potential nuclear weapons use. That is, until the Norwegian resistance movement successfully sabotaged it in 1943. Even without the sabotage, the Third Reich would still have been a long way off producing any warheads. According to Luft46, which has deleted the article in the meantime, they might or they might not have had a quasi-gun-type nuclear device (stacked plates of uranium separated by hydrogen-rich kerosene, to be compacted together in a critical mass upon impact instead of being fired at each other) in construction stage by the early months of 1945. Even then, the Nazi nuclear program was limited by a number of key factors; the lack of space to test a weapon, Hitler's lack of interest (which meant little funding), the loss of many prime scientists to other programs or Nazi repression, a perilous military situation (which necessitated frequent relocations of the project) and, finally, a lack of delivery systems. Indeed, the Nazis only aircraft close to nuclear capability was the Heinkel He-177 Greif long-range bomber, a notoriously unreliable tub of a plane that would have been just as likely to crash into Germany as drop a bomb on Moscow or London.

Their program was also hobbled from the start by the regime's own racist policies of rejecting Einstein's work as "Jewish science", and many other academics who could have advanced the Nazi program fled Germany, either because of fears of persecution due to their own Jewish roots or because they sympathised with their Jewish colleagues or simply on general principle. This gives their failure to build anything remotely resembling a working bomb a sense of Poetic Justice to it. They were undone by their own bigotry. When German nuclear physicists were debriefed after the war it quickly became clear that the Nazi program had been a shambles and Hitler was never close to obtaining the Bomb. Nonetheless, the prospect of Nazis with Nukes remains a popular subject of speculative fiction.

Japan - The Power of a Thousand Rising Suns

Similar to Germany, Imperial Japan during World War II attempted to develop a nuclear weapon. Also similar to Germany, the program was pretty much doomed from the start, and didn't get very far. Today, Japan does theoretically have the resources to produce nuclear weapons (see below) in a matter of months (or even less, according to some estimates) given its resources and status as an economic juggernaut and the very advanced rockets they use for launching unmanned spacecraft could be re-purposed into ICBMs in a matter of hours, but they've never pursued the idea for two reasons. One, they're under the protection of the most powerful military in the world already. Two, as the only country ever to have nuclear weapons used against them, the idea of a nuclear weapons program is widely viewed as taboo. There is occasionally some speculation that if North Korea's nuclear and missile programs reach the point of a truly viable weapon, Japan would be forced to field its own nuclear deterrent, but even then they'd likely consider their alliance with the United States to be sufficient.

The Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster in 2011, while it didn't result in any actual deaths, has also left a sour taste in the mouth of many Japanese with regards to nuclear technology in general and there is currently a lot of political pressure to decommission all nuclear power plants in Japan. Should that happen then sourcing suitable material for a Japanese nuclear weapon would become incredibly difficult as weapons-grade uranium and plutonium is normally bred in uranium reactors. However, the environmental damage caused by burning hundreds of thousands of tons of coal to make up the power generation shortfall, not to mention the sheer cost of importing the coal in the first place (Japan is very resource-poor when it comes to minerals such as coal) could force a re-think. Nonetheless, the appetite for a home-grown Japanese nuclear weapon is not great.

Italy -The Glory that was Rome

In the mid to late 30's, the fascists provided funding for nuclear research by a team of physicists headed by Enrico Fermi, but he(along with many others) left for the United States when Nussolini passed anti-Semitic laws to bring fascism ideologically closer to Nazism. a team at the University of Milan picked up where they left off, but funding was cut when Italy joined the war.





Romania - Even Our Enemies Shall Kneel.


Sweden - Extra Neutral Neutrons

Despite the country not having been at war since 1814, Sweden started a covert nuclear weapons program after WWII that was only abandoned in 1972 (in favor of development of the Saab 37 Viggennote ). The reasoning behind Sweden's program was maintenance of its neutrality: since Sweden declined to join NATO, it could not expect to fall under the American military and nuclear umbrella. A Swedish Bomb would have probably been an effective deterrent to the Soviet Union trying to involve Stockholm in the Cold War.

Yugoslavia - Balkanuclearization

Yugoslavia started a nuclear weapons program in The Fifties, but abandoned it after the thawing of Soviet-Yugoslav relations in The Sixties, and became a firm proponent of non-proliferation. However, after India detonated its first bomb (see above), the program was revived. The program was again abandoned in 1987 due to the country's financial troubles, impending breakup, and the Chernobyl disaster.

Other stuff

Nuclear sharing

Several non-nuclear members of NATO participate in nuclear weapons sharing with the US: in the event of World War III, some or all of the American bombs stationed in their territory would be turned over to the their governments to dispose of as they deemed necessary. Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands, Italy, and Turkey participate in the program, while Canada and Greece used to participate but have since withdrawn from the program (Canada in 1984, Greece in 2001).

Nuclear breakout capacity

This is a technical term referring to the ability to quickly build a nuclear weapon: it generally means that the country in question has all of the know-how needed to build a weapon and most if not all of the infrastructure, but have not for whatever reason actually built a weapon.


  • Good management. As we've learned over time, these projects cannot be subject to political timetables or coercion. Scientists and engineers need to be given the freedom to make mistakes in the lab, if you want avoid mistakes while actually building the things. Best case, the device won't work; worst case, you kill a lot of people by accident.


  • Of the nuclear club, the P-5 already had them and that was that. Bear in mind, however, that the Soviet Union and China did suffer somewhat from the politicization of their programs, and the effect of that on management may have negatively affected the design (we obviously can't know, seeing as the plans are all top-secret—and obviously any flaws aren't that bad, since the bombs work).
    • It is important to note that the Soviets were definitely affected in the related area of the space program:note  Soviet designers, afraid of failure and the political fallout that might cause (NASA engineers had protection from politics, and the worst that could happen was a funding cut; Soviet engineers were subject to the whims of the Party leadership, and many of them had served time in The Gulag and had no interest in going back), tended to use large numbers of small engines rather than a small number of large ones (which is what NASA did/does)—if one engine of twenty fails, it's not as likely to cause catastrophic failure as one of four (or so they thought, anyway). In general, this still led to good results, but when it came time to build the super-heavy-lift N1 rocket for the Soviet Moonshot, the behemoth (with 30 engines on the first stage) was far too heavy and complex to compete with its American rival, Saturn V (which had a mere five large engines on the first stage).
  • Israel lucked out that they got information from Jewish scientists who had worked on the Manhattan Project (many of whom remember had escaped Hitler's Germany and then Europe — this is the source of the Herr Doktor stereotype.) They also had assistance from France, who was their main military supplier and a close ally in the 1950s and 1960s.note  Finally, Israeli industrial infrastructure and management techniques were well-developed pre-independence. Being a democracy and the strategic situation helped, as well; the propaganda value of having a bomb was lessened by the fact that Israel's leaders were/are elected politicians, not megalomaniac autocrats, and their situation required that the bombs be an open secret rather than something to boast about.

So how does that leave the aspiring/failed powers?


For those who have the basis, depending on how you define it, breakout capability could refer to anything from "could build a bomb in six months" to "could build a bomb in six months once they built the infrastructure, which would take at most a year or two more." Japan, Germany, Italy, Finland, Sweden, Canada, South Korea, and the Netherlands all have the infrastructure in place (although Germany is seriously considering dismantling it, and Japan would of course have to be in really dire straits before it even thought about building a bomb), while Brazil, Argentina, Taiwan, and Australia would need a few years to build up the infrastructure and collect enough U-235 or plutonium and they probably lack the know how, something which they could (probably) rectify. Saudi Arabia barely has the infrastructure or know-how at all, but with its money, it could possibly buy its way into the breakout-capacity club, and the House of Saud is well aware that science is not something to meddle in lest they anger their Islamists even more. With that being said, there are fears that an Iranian bomb could provide the impetus for a Saudi nuclear program. There are also reports that Saudi Arabia had extensively bankrolled the Pakistani nuclear program, in an arrangement that would have the Pakistanis deliver warheads if the Saudis felt their security needs required their own nuclear arsenal.

Breakout capacity has come to the fore in recent years on account of the aforementioned Iran thing. The most important one is probably the positions of the US and Israel on the right moment to attack Iran: while the US has frequently reiterated that it would be willing to make a military strike if Iran developed a nuclear weapon (i.e. built the damn thing), Israel has just as frequently reiterated that it is unwilling to let Iran get into a situation where it had the ability to develop a nuclear weapon (i.e. developed breakout capacity). This is what Benjamin Netanyahu's cartoon-bomb poster speech at the United Nations General Assembly in October 2012 was about, although he explained it rather poorly.

During the 2012-13 crisis on the Korean peninsula, some South Korean politicians suggested that the state could start a nuclear program, though thankfully cooler heads prevailed. South Korea is under the nuclear umbrella of the USA in any case, and its only potential enemy, North Korea, is so close to it that an actual nuclear detonation on the peninsula would have disastrous effects on the South. Not to mention, as the Republic of Korea claims sovereignty over the entire Korean peninsula, despite obviously not having de facto control over the whole peninsula, it would be a bit like Britain nuking Northern Ireland, India or Pakistan nuking Kashmir, China nuking Xinjiang or Tibet, or Russia nuking Chechnya.

It has been suggested by some (including Victor Davis Hanson and the aforementioned John Mearsheimer) that if those breakout club members allied with the United States thought, for whatever reason, that the US wouldn't come to their defense (particularly Germany in regards to Russia, South Korea in regards to North Korea, and Japan in regards to China/North Korea/Russia) they would rapidly nuclearize by necessity.