[Tee tiong huat]

North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un walks with another distator Russian President Vladimir Putin shortly after arrival in Pyongyang, North Korea. The U.S. Director of National Intelligence, recently warned “Russia’s need for support in context of Ukraine has forced it to grant some long-sought concessions to China, North Korea, and Iran with the potential to undermine, among other things, long-held non-proliferation norms.”How much does this matter? Some theorists have long been skeptical about efforts to limit the spread of nuclear weapons, even arguing proliferation can be a stabilizing force. If the horrors associated with nuclear weapons are one reason why have  no wars between great powers since 1945.
https://kyivindependent.com/opinion-we-c...iferation/

Kennedy signed a treaty banning atmospheric nuclear testing, setting the stage for the 1968 Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), which now has 191 members. The treaty’s five recognized nuclear-weapons states – the United States, the Soviet Union, Britain, France, and China – pledged not to spread nuclear weapons, and its 186 other members pledged not to develop them. Israel, India, and Pakistan refused to sign the NPT and did develop nuclear weapons; North Korea signed the treaty but then withdrew to develop its nuclear program.
That brings the total of nuclear-armed states to nine, which is far from perfect, but much better than Kennedy predicted. Defenders of this imperfect regime argue that the rate of spread is as important as the number of states possessing the bomb, because greater predictability improves the prospect of maintaining stability. Already, Saudi Arabia has threatened to develop nuclear weapons if Iran does. If there are regional cascades of new nuclear-armed states, the probability of accidents and miscalculations would increase substantially.
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Haines explicitly mentioned Iran and North Korea. Both had been under United Nations sanctions in which China, Russia, and the West cooperated. Until recently, Russia had a long history of supporting non-proliferation. Not only did it sign the NPT, but it also adopted the 1978 Nuclear Suppliers Group Guidelines, under which vendors of civil nuclear equipment agreed to exercise prudence in their export policies. Now that Russian President Vladimir Putin is becoming dependent on North Korean military supplies to sustain his war in Ukraine, however, he has ended Russia’s cooperation on non-proliferation.
While Iran has long had a nuclear-weapons program based on enriched uranium, it has gone through fits and starts in response to external pressures. The regime has been careful to keep its production of highly enriched uranium below the threshold needed to produce a nuclear arsenal. But with Russia relying on Iranian drones, China relying on Iranian oil, and former U.S. President and Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump having foolishly scrapped the Iran nuclear deal in 2018, international cooperation on non-proliferation has broken down here, too.
[/size]Moreover, some believe (probably mistakenly) that Russia would not have invaded Ukraine if the Ukrainians had kept the nuclear weapons that they inherited when the Soviet Union collapsed. If this assumption gains traction, the prospects for non-proliferation will worse


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