Let me put it this way, Israel got all the advanced nuclear technology from the West without giving any commitments. India and Pakistan also never signed the NPT and never put forward any commitments on the table, still they went through years of international sanctions and condemnation. Why the West didn't impose similar sanctions on Israel?
According to Wikipedia the time it is believed that Israel gained operational nuclear weapons capability was 1967, the NPT was opened for signatures in 1968 and came into force in 1970. India and Pakistan detonated their first in 1974.
Fact remains, the United States has conveniently picked which nations can and which cannot possess nuclear weapons.
Except for India and Pakistan, all nuclear powers gained their weaponry before the NPT. That no more nuclear powers have appeared so far, either by diplomacy or force, should tell you how seriously it has been taken.
Did I ever express support for Iran's nuclear program? Few Indians would because of the possible adverse repercussions. United States is half a globe away, whereas Iran is barely a few thousand miles from India's western border.
On closer look I see you did not either implicitly or explicitly give support. I obviously misunderstood you and so I apologize for my error.
But yes, there is a growing realization that it is already too late to convince Iran to give up nuclear weapons and instead, focus should be on a strategy to deal with a nuclear Iran. And at the same time, we also wonder what caused Iran to pursue nuclear weapons with such vigor.
The true reason for Iran's push is only known to the leaders, but (imo) the best guess is regional politics, much like Saddam. They don't take the implicit threat of force from the West seriously and desire a greater position in the Middle-East, perhaps in the world with a greater implicit threat than temporarily mining the straits. They don't believe a coalition will be formed, or otherwise feel the coalition will be too adverse to losses to succeed. Where they get such confidence from is not totally without reason, but neither is it a safe assumption as of yet.
Read about the events of Indo-Pakistani war of 1965 when a nuclear armed China repeatedly threatened to intervene in the war in support of Pakistan. Read about the events of Indo-Pakistani war of 1971 when the U.S.' Nixon administration sent a nuclear aircraft carrier to the Bay of Bengal in support of Pakistan. Read the comments of then Pakistani President Gen Pervez Musharraf who threatened to use nuclear weapons if India retaliated for the numerous Pakistani sponsored terror attacks in the country.
And you are claiming India has never had to live with the threat of total destruction?
The US surely never had plans to spend the totality of its nuclear arsenal on India, if for nothing else than because there wouldn't be any left for the Soviet Union, and Pakistan's nuclear arsenal is not enough to assure total destruction, even with China in the mix at the time. That said I agree that it's rather moot point between total destruction and enough destruction to send the remnants back into the stone age.
So I concede the point.
I don't understand how the case of South Africa is relevant here. Which country threatens South Africa? Namibia? Botswana? Nah, it is Lesotho!
South Africa does not have any arch-rivals against whom it would have used nuclear weapons as a deterrence.
If Iran was clear with its nuclear actions who would be contemplating attacking Iran? Up until the Green revolution the stability of Iran's domestic politics was not particularly in question, and the Cold War is long past. While supplying insurgents in Iraq and jockeying for influence would draw America's ire, that has already been shown to have not resulted in invasion. On top of this the US would hardly desire to overthrow Iran's regime and potentially cause instability in oil markets unless the alternative was even more unacceptable.
Israel and Iran can't even reach each other in any militarily sustainable fashion. The only reason Israel contemplates an aerial strike is the fear of Iran's program.
So is it Saudi Arabia or nationalist Kurds?
There are some laws which are written in the law-book. And there are some laws which form an inherent part of the civilized human society. Usage of atomic weapons, under any circumstances, is definitely an abuse of those laws. And till date, only one country has used atomic weapons, and unfortunately, that country continues to be involved in conflicts around the globe.
The easy answer to your question is that there was no 'civilized society' of the modern definition among the warring nations, only societies at war.
Those were the days of societies at war in every sense of the word. There were more deaths from firebombings of Tokyo. There were more deaths from conventional bombings in different countries, none of which have the same popular impact of the atomic bomb. This is because of the Cold War and the prominent role nuclear weapons played.
OK, let us assume that USSR would have developed nukes no matter what. But how many of the Warsaw Pact countries ended up having nuclear weapons? Compare that with NATO countries - three. Are you suggesting that the US didn't play a role in the British and French acquiring nuclear weapons? You think the world is that naive?
Despite the fact that the Soviet Union went on a frenzy to develop nuke warheads, fact remains USSR acted much more responsibly with regard to nuclear proliferation compared to the US.
Russia supplied China with nuclear technology and based its nuclear weapons within the Soviet controlled Belarus, Ukraine, and Kazakhstan The nuclear weapons remained in their control with the breakup of the Soviet Union. Belarus, Ukraine, and Kazakhstan returned the weapons to Russia and joined the NPT, while France and Britain are recognized nuclear powers who gained their capability before the NPT.
Firstly, no part of my previous comment suggest that I'm "cheering the potential growing nuclearization of the world".
Secondly, list down all the countries which either possess or are developing nuclear weapons and then analyse how many of them feel threatened by the United States and how many of them got nuclear weapons through US aid (whether technical or diplomatic). You'll get your answer.
To the first sentence, I will once again apologize for my false attribution.
To the rest, the US indeed supplied the UK with nuclear weapons technology, but France developed its own independently (actually soon after the Suez crisis) When Charles De Gaulle was in charge. He had a known distrust of the US and USSR which was strengthened after the Suez crisis.
Israel was supplied its nuclear technology from the UK around the early 1960's (before 1965). This was before the US had the current relationship with Israel, whose relationship's roots were born in 1967, after the 6 day war.
The rest is rather unrelated to the real question of the US' nuclear proliferation responsibility as they were rather far from the pole the US was on during the Cold War, but the USSR gave technology to China, who gave help to Pakistan, afterwhich the knowledge made its way to North Korea, who is not quite a nuclear power as of yet.
India developed its own.
