Did I present Iran as being uniquely at fault in regard to the treaty?

I drew attention to the fact that according to the IAEA, Iran currently is not honouring it's commitments in relation to the Nuclear NPT.

The BBC article that MGOH links mentions the following countries:

- North Korea, who pulled out of the nuclear NPT to announce it was going to manufacture nuclear weapons. It did this only after it's secret weapons programme became known to the outside world.

- India, Pakistan and Israel, all nuclear NTP Treaty non-signatories so they cannot possibly be held to account for NPT non-compliance.

- USA, the 'new' weapon that the US is 'supposed' to be developing that applies to the subject matter of this thread is the B61-B11, the so called nuclear bunker buster. There is nothing new about it, it takes an existing tactical nuclear warhead and matches it to an existing earth penetrating bomb casing. Trials to determine the ability of the warhead to withstand this type of delivery have not been all that successful, the weapon has not been tested and Congress has refused funding for any further development programme, so it would appear to be a bit of a dead duck.

Seymour M. Hersh's article (www.newyorker.com/fact/content/articles/060417fa_fact) covers it quite well. The one thread that does run through that article is that everybody referred to and interviewed by the author of that article is totally convinced that Iran does have a nuclear weapons programme running, only the time scale to completion varies (From 5 to 10 years).

The BBC article is an overview of the 2005 UN review of the Nuclear NPT. The article misses reporting on what the Nuclear NPT's biggest fault is. The Nuclear NPT as it stands allows countries to enrich uranium to provide fuel. In terms of hardware and technology that gets you about 90% of the way there to acquiring weapons grade material. This is what North Korea took advantage of years ago and is the what Iran is taking advantage of now. That part of the treaty has to be tightened up.

Peace provided some very interesting and highly relevant links with regard to existing stocks of weapons held by the US. I commented on the disarmament trend post SALT and START Treaties, that all halted the minute India and Pakistan acquired nuclear weapons. It stopped both in the USA and in Russia - note only America is castigated for not disarming. Of the other original nuclear powers China hasn't disarmed or decommissioned a single weapon, neither has France, under the SALT and START Treaties the weapons held by the UK and by France were considered too few in number to consider until such time as the super powers were about to reach parity.