in Saturday, July 25, 2009
This is a real threat, do you know which countries have nuclear power plants ? The list might be surprising, Argentina, Armenia, Belgium, Brazil, Bulgaria, Canada, China, Czech Republic, Finland, France, Germany, Hungary, India, Iran, Japan, North Korea, South Korea, Lithuania, Mexico, Netherlands, Pakistan, Romania, Russia, Slovakia, Slovenia, South Africa, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Taiwan, Ukraine, United Kingdom, and the United States. There are more than 441 operable reactors in these countries according to the Uranium Information Centre. Some of those countries use their nuclear capabilities to make nuclear weapons and some of them haven't done it yet, but one thing for sure they all have Uranium and plutonium stockpiles. According to the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation there are up to 2,000,000 kg of Highly Enriched Uranium (HEU) in global stockpiles, while it just takes 15-24 kg to make a nuclear weapon and there are 500,000 kg of plutonium in global stockpiles while it just takes 5 kg to make a nuclear weapon, looking at these facts there are at least 28 countries with at least one bomb's worth, and the sad thing is this one bomb could be enough to trigger a nuclear war someday.
The Countries that are known to have stockpiles of nuclear weapons are Russia, the United States, France, China, Great Britain, Pakistan, India, North Korea and Israel. Among these countries only Israel that neither confirm nor deny that they have nuclear weapons, but we all know that USA as their closest ally is the number one country in nuclear race, so even though they don't have nuclear reactors they can still have nuclear weapons in order to secure the US interests in the Middle East of course. There are approximately 31,000 nuclear warheads in the stockpiles of these countries, but more than 95% of these weapons are in the arsenals of the US and Russia. According to Nuclear Age Peace Foundation about 13,000 from those 31,000 nuclear warheads are deployed, and 4,600 of them are ready to launched within minutes notice. The combined explosive power of these weapons are approximately 5,000 megatons which is 200,000 times more powerful than the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima.
It all started during the cold war when two superpower countries The Soviet Union and The USA Threaten each other with their new weapon technologies, and it's pretty reasonable to think that the country possessing nuclear warheads would have attacked or invaded the one that did not, and so the nuclear race began. Both countries keep increasing their Uranium and nuclear warheads stockpiles, renewing their technology to find the most efficient ways to create their nuclear weapons while spreading their ideologies and influences around the world.
The situation is not getting better after the cold war, when the United States unilaterally withdrew from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty in 2002 in order to pursue missile defences and space weaponization, this has caused both Russia and China to improve their offensive nuclear capabilities.
A small hope occurs recently as The Strategic Offensive Reductions Treaty (SORT) between the US and Russia requires the two countries to reduce their deployed strategic warheads to between 1,700 and 2,200 by December 31, 2012. But still on the following day the treaty terminates, each side can redeploy as many nuclear warheads as it chooses. What’s being the concern of many observers is many of the nuclear warheads taken off deployed status are not being dismantled, but rather placed in storage, where they might be stolen by criminal or terrorist groups, even this is just a theory but still it could happen and you can imagine the danger if it falls into the wrong hand.
As I said before it could only takes one missile with nuclear warhead to start a nuclear war and looking at the facts on the number of the - ready to launch warheads and the stockpiles, if the war really happen, human race might have to fight against extinction.
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