THE world’s first nuclear bomb was dropped on Hiroshima on Aug 6, 1945, killing over 100,000 residents. The second bomb followed three days later, and killed nearly 80,000 in Nagasaki. The scale of destruction was so vast, so indiscriminate that no country — not even the US, which had dropped the two bombs — ever used nuclear weapons after the two events. Oppenheimer, the American scientist who oversaw the creation of the two bombs, came to regret his awful legacy. He, as indeed the whole world, realised that a nuclear war would mean global annihilation. Hence, the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) was signed in 1968 as a binding commitment by all state parties to disarm (nuclear weapons) in due course, not share nuclear technologies in the military domain, and encourage peaceful uses of nuclear energy.
The NPT offered a grand bargain. Five countries, which by then had already developed nuclear weapons — the US, UK, France, the (former) Soviet Union and China — were recognised as nuclear weapon states. All other countries that joined the NPT agreed not to develop nuclear weapons on the assurance that the NWS would pursue disarmament (Article 6) and help in sharing nuclear technologies for civilian purposes (Article 4).