The United States and Nuclear Weapons

The United States developed the first atomic bomb and used it to end World War II in 1945. After the war, the world was marked by a Cold War that lasted until the fall of the Berlin Wall and the disintegration of the former Soviet Union at the end of the 1980s. During that long period of time, a number of other nations joined the nuclear club by developing the capability to produce nuclear weapons, and one of the primary goals of American foreign policy was to limit nuclear proliferation to the greatest degree possible. In the changed world circumstances faced today, the danger of nuclear proliferation has not passed. Instead, there is more and more concern about new technological developments that might make it possible for smaller and less-developed nations to produce nuclear weapons that would be smaller and more powerful than the bombs used on Japan in 1945. While the Cold War may have ended, international tensions have not disappeared as more and more border wars and regional conflicts have developed. We can only speculate about what such clashes would be like if one or more participants possessed nuclear weapons, or what might occur of a terrorist group had nuclear weapons. The U.S. has long believed nuclear proliferation was something to be fought, and clearly there is and should be a concern about the spread of nuclear weapons to the Third World today.

Allan M. Winkler in his book Modern America: The United States from World War II to the Present relates the

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nd it has proved an important instrument for enhancing the social and economic development of its members. The importance for the United States of stopping nuclear proliferation is seen in the recent diplomatic battles between the United States and North Korea, a country suspected of trying to develop nuclear weaponry: Even though the cold war is over, leaders like Kim [Jong Il] are making the world a more, not less, dangerous place. The superpower standoff that exerted precarious control over the use and proliferation of weapons of mass destruction has vanished along with the Soviet empire. North Korea has not only embarked on the road to the bomb, but according to many analysts, it has actually arrived. It reportedly has enough plutonium for at least one nuclear bomb, and it has successfully testfired a new missile, the 650milerange NoDong I, that could reach beyond South Korea to Japan, China or eastern Russia. Kim's government is an eager peddler of missiles to other countries, and Western analysts fear that Pyongyang could assist other wouldbe nuclear powers like Iran. Tensions between North Korea and the U.S. are nothing new, extending back at least to the Korean War in the early 1950s, but the concern no

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