What is the Nuclear Club and How Many Countries are Members?

Put simply, the "Nuclear Club" is the informal name for the group of nations known or thought to possess nuclear weapons.

The term was coined in 1957, when the club had just three members. But the grouping was effectively created eight years earlier, when the USSR broke America’s monopoly on nuclear weapons by detonating Izdeliye 501 ("Device 501"), US code name Joe-1 (after Joseph Stalin), on August 29, 1949 at the Semipalatinsk test site in Kazakhstan.

The club gradually acquired new members, with the United Kingdom joining in 1952, France in 1960, and the People’s Republic of China in 1964. These five countries became the five "authorized nuclear weapons states" under the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, or NPT for short. Signed in 1968 and stepping into effect in 1970, the NPT was designed, as the name suggests, to stop the spread of nuclear weapons technology to new countries, to increase the use of the power of the atom for peaceful purposes, and to strive toward global nuclear disarmament.

Unfortunately, the NPT was only partially successful, with several countries continuing their research into nuclear weapons, and the United States and the Soviet Union continuing to build up their nuclear arsenals, to the point where by the late 1980s, they had a combined total of about 61,500 nukes – enough to destroy one another, and the world, many times over. During the 1980s, Soviet physicist and popularizer of science Dr. Sergei Kapitsa and American astrophysicist Dr. Carl Sagan and his colleagues discovered that even if one of the superpowers managed to catch the other off guard and conduct a debilitating nuclear first strike, the radioactive fallout and immense dust storms generated as a result would probably result in the end of humanity. Something had to give.

Even as the USSR and US began talks on reducing nuclear arsenals and ending the Cold War (which culminated in the Soviet Union’s dissolution in 1991), new countries strove to build the devastating weapons.

India began to build up a nuclear arsenal in 1994, two decades after conducting a “peaceful nuclear test” in 1974.

Pakistan became the second official non-NPT nuclear weapons power in May 1998, when it conducted five underground nuclear explosions simultaneously in western Balochistan province.

Finally, in 2006, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (or DPRK for short, unofficially known as North Korea) became the eighth, and to date the last, country to test a nuclear device and thus formally join the Nuclear Club.

Israel is likely a member of the Nuclear Club, but neither Tel Aviv nor the world’s major nuclear powers like to discuss it for some reason. The Israeli government’s official position on the issue is "deliberate ambiguity" – i.e. "maybe we have nukes, maybe we don’t." Israel never conducted a nuclear test, but is thought to have acquired nuclear weapons capability sometime in the mid-to-late 1960s, just in time for the Six-Day War in June 1967. The Soviets caught on to Israel’s activities at the time, and allegedly sought to destroy Tel Aviv’s nuclear research facility at Dimona, but ultimately canceled the plans amid fears of an escalation of tensions with Washington.

The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute estimates that Israel has about 90 nukes, and that they can be delivered via ground-based intercontinental ballistic missiles, aircraft, and submarines. That makes Israel one of just five nations with nuclear triad status (the others are Russia, the US, India, and China).

During the 1960s and 1970s, the South African government came under increasing pressure from local and regional revolutionary movements aimed at overthrowing the apartheid regime, which consigned the country’s majority non-white population to legal and institutionalized racial segregation and discrimination. In 1977, two years after the collapse of the Portuguese empire, which left South Africa’s left and right flanks in Angola and Mozambique with pro-Soviet governments, and amid the growing power of the African National Congress at home, Pretoria made preparations for a nuclear weapons test in an underground facility in the northern Kalahari Desert, allegedly after receiving help from Israel in acquiring nuke tech. Moscow found out about it and, threatening to raise a stink internationally, convinced the US and other Western governments to put pressure on the South Africans not to go through with the test. The test was canceled.

Nevertheless, Pretoria went ahead and built a stockpile of about six viable nukes, giving them up in 1989, as the Cold War came to an end, and as Washington lost its sense of dread that a post-apartheid government may lead to a Moscow-friendly one in Sub-Saharan Africa’s most powerful state. Five years later, apartheid was history.

Since the end of the Cold War, there has basically been one reason why smaller, non-nuclear nations have sought nuclear weapons: deterrence. Whether it’s Pakistan seeking a deterrent against its bigger and conventionally more powerful neighbor India, or North Korea seeking protection against the United States, which has systematically overthrown, couped, invaded, and bombed nations which have refused to bow to the US’ "new world order" declared in 1991, nukes are a major deterrent designed to make an enemy think twice before launching aggression.

Even for bigger powers, like Russia, the threat of encroachment by NATO, and Pentagon tinkering with strategic concepts like the "Prompt Global Strike" – which envisions wiping out the country’s nukes and leadership using thousands of conventional cruise missiles in a surprise first strike, nuclear weapons are seen as the means that guarantee security and regional and global strategic stability.

There are exceptions to this logic. Despite being named a member of the "Axis of Evil" by Washington in 2002, and seeing its neighbor Iraq invaded in 2003, the Islamic Republic of Iran has rejected nuclear weapons. The country’s supreme leaders, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini and his successor, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, have rejected nukes and all other weapons of mass destruction, in "fatwas," or religious edicts, citing such WMDs’ incompatibility with the Islamic faith. To that end, Iran even destroyed its substantial stocks of chemical weapons in the 1990s, and never used them in the bloody Iran-Iraq War of 1980-1988, despite its internationally-recognized right to retaliate to Iraqi chemical attacks in kind.

For many years, Western and Israeli officials have alleged that Iran is on the brink of a nuclear breakout. In 2012, at the United Nations General Assembly in New York, then (and soon to again be current) Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu famously held up an image of a cartoon nuclear bomb, warning that Tehran would have enough fissile material to build a nuke in six months. It’s been more than 120 months since then, and no Iranian nukes have been built.

Why, aside from its leaders’ fatwas, has Iran rejected nukes? One possibility is that Tehran may feel that the other cards in its hand, including its arsenal of conventional ballistic and cruise missiles, its regular army, its ability to choke off the Strait of Hormuz – lifeline to over a quarter of the world’s oil, plus its network of regional allies, are enough of an argument to make enemies go "hmmm" before attacking.