Atomprogrammene i India, Pakistan, Nord-Korea, Israel, Iran og Syria

This report discusses the nuclear programmes of established and possible nuclear-weapon states outside the group of five acknowledged nuclear-weapon states, the United States, Russia, the United Kingdom, France and China, who have a temporary right through the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons to keep their weapons. The discussions are for the most part of a technical nature, and it is beyond the scope of this report to assess the intentions behind the various nuclear programmes. The report is necessarily in its entirety based on open, unclassified sources and may therefore suffer from possible, unavoidable inaccuracies.  India, Pakistan and North Korea have carried out nuclear tests, and they publicly confirm their status as de facto nuclear-weapon states.  Israel has never confirmed nor denied the existence of a national nuclear-weapons programme, but it is generally assumed that such a programme does exist, and that Israel is able to deploy domestically developed nuclear weapons on short notice. We support this assumption.  In our opinion, Iran is not a nuclear-weapon state as of late 2012. The state keeps moving closer to being able to develop its own nuclear weapons, but there are no indications so far that it has decided to enrich uranium to weapons quality and actually manufacture nuclear weapons.  Syria may have had a secret programme for plutonium production which Israel ended in 2007 when it bombed a building in Dair Alzour claimed to contain a nuclear reactor. The International Atomic Energy Agency has so far not been able to resolve this question, and it is therefore difficult to assess Syria’s capability to develop nuclear weapons. In any case, it will take long to build the necessary infrastructure, particularly under today’s lack of stability in the country.