The Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons

Since the end of the Second World War the international community has built, very slowly and with many difficulties, the so-called nuclear non-proliferation regime. The main purpose of this regime is to impede the proliferation of nuclear weapons having as its final goal the complete elimination of all weapons of this type but without defining a period during which this goal must be achieved. Up to now the strategy adopted by all nuclear-weapon States in the field of non-proliferation of nuclear weapons has been associated with their main policy objectives in the field of nuclear disarmament, which is to impede that any new country have access to a nuclear weapon and to preserve an acceptable level of dissuasion. However, it is important to highlight that despite all efforts made by some of the nuclear-weapon States to impose this strategy,their enforcement has not been able to impede completely the horizontal proliferation of nuclear weapons. Eight or nine countries have declared that they possess nuclear weapons in their military arsenals or the international community knows that they have this type of weapons; four others destroyed their nuclear weapons in the 1990s.