Rizwan Asghar

The global non-proliferation regime faces complex and wide-ranging proliferation threats on many fronts, including the most urgent danger posed by high-consequence nuclear terrorism. Many argue that even a single incident of nuclear terrorism could forever change the world as we know it. Hundreds of metric tonnes of highly enriched uranium (HEU) and plutonium are used […]

“No country without an atom bomb could properly consider itself independent” — Charles de Gaulle.While originally France considered possession of nuclear weapons as a means to achieve ‘great power status’ and pursue an independent foreign policy, the maintenance of nuclear capability has now become an essential element of its security policies. In 2006, French President […]

The role of nuclear weapons in US security policy has always divided policymakers and strategic analysts. In the post-Cold War era, a general consensus prevailed that the US no longer needed to retain large stockpiles of nuclear weapons originally intended to deter the Soviet Union. In fact, many believed that maintaining the existing quantitative level […]

Concerns about the spread of nuclear weapons started surfacing following the onset of the nuclear era. At the end of World War II, the US was the only country to possess nuclear weapons. The US realised that it could not maintain its monopoly forever and called for efforts to implement the control of nuclear technology to […]

 With an arsenal of more than 300 weapons and strong delivery capabilities, Israel has already replaced the UK as the fifth largest nuclear power in the world. Israel’s secret nuclear programme now rivals China and France in terms of its size. Since the early 1960s, governments in Tel Aviv have ever maintained an official policy […]

The dissolution of the Soviet Union in December 1991 was a significant event in more ways than one. The Soviet Union, which had opposed the US for more than 40 years, disintegrated virtually overnight. The fears of a global nuclear holocaust hanging like a cloud throughout the Cold War were at last eliminated. However, this […]

No other nuclear explosion did more to highlight the grim realities of a long era of nuclear testing than Castle Bravo. This month marks the sixtieth anniversary of one of the most devastating nuclear test explosions — codenamed Castle Bravo — conducted by the United States in the Marshall Islands situated between Hawaii and Australia. […]

In April 2009, President Obama in his Prague speech called nuclear terrorism “the most immediate and extreme threat to global security”. Even though the possibility of a terrorist organisation carrying out a nuclear attack is slight, the consequences of such an attack would obviously be of gigantic proportions. Against this backdrop, President Obama mounted an […]

Why do states build nuclear weapons? Since the early years of the Cold War, nuclear experts have been grappling with this question to which there is not a single right answer. World leaders have repeatedly expressed their opposition to the use of nuclear weapons. Despite this, states continue to devote enormous human and financial resources […]

Given that India’s nuclear weapons programme was originally motivated more by the prestige factor than as a necessary means to meet real security threats, a gradual shift in India’s nuclear posture over the past few years has been viewed as worrisome by the community of strategic thinkers. The statements of Indian policymakers and military generals […]