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Right now, there are more than 12,000 nuclear weapons on Earth. The detonation of just one can kill thousands and flatten a city, poison survivors for generations, and alter the politics of every decision that follows permanently. They're the ultimate divider of power in our world. So why is it that a handful of countries get to have nuclear weapons while the rest of the countries are told no? Why can Israel have a bomb but Iran can't? Why was North Korea, one of the most repressive regimes on Earth, able to build nuclear weapons, while Japan and Germany, two of the most advanced democracies, didn't? And what does it tell us? That Ukraine gave up the nuclear arsenal on its soil for security guarantees, only to get invaded? I'm Bianca Noblo, and this is the history of who gets nuclear weapons, who, who doesn't, and who decides. Let's start with the bomb itself. What are we actually dealing with here? Because a nuclear bomb is not just a very large conventional weapon. It's different because it releases energy from the nucleus of an atom. The simplest kind is a fission bomb. It forces fissile material, which is just nuclear fuel, that can sustain a chain reaction. It forces it into this runaway cascade of reactions that splitting many trillions of atoms in a fraction of a second, releasing an enormous amount of energy from a tiny, tiny amount of matter. And there are two main routes for the bomb fuel. One is uranium. Mine uranium, then you enrich it until the share of the fissile isotope, uranium235, is high enough for a bomb, which is typically around 90%. And you might have heard that in the news. For example, America doesn't want Iran to reach 90% enrichment. That's why the other fuel route is plutonium. So uranium fuel is used in a reactor, and some of it is converted into plutonium 239. Then that plutonium is separated from the used reactor fuel. Now, most fission bombs need the same basic ingredients, the bomb fuel, a trigger, and a way to force the fuel very suddenly into a state where fission sets off more fission and engineering so precise that this reaction races ahead before the weapon blows itself apart. And if that timing is off, the bomb can fizzle. It will explode, but inefficiently. And the reason I mention all that is because it underscores how making one of these is a huge scientific industrial machine. You need reactors, enrichment plants, chemists, engineers, metallurgists, explosives experts, precision manufacturing scientists, secrecy, and a state that is willing to pour in serious money. The Manhattan project employed around 130,000 people and cost $2 billion back then. And most of that money went on the fuel, the most expensive part. Then there's the hydrogen bomb or a thermonuclear weapon, which is a fission bomb that triggers a vastly larger fusion explosion. So when people say nuclear weapons, they're bundling together these different types that I just mentioned. Uranium, plutonium, thermonuclear. After the US attacked Hiroshima using a uranium bomb and Nagasaki with a plutonium bomb, which was far more complex, America, having introduced the world to nuclear destruction in the most violent way possible, briefly proposed something quite ironic. Putting atomic energy under international control. But the idea collapsed, it went kaput, because Washington was not going to destroy its weapons until it could verify that everyone else had as well. And the USSR was not going to accept intrusive inspections under a system that would freeze American superiority in place while exposing Soviet facilities to foreign scrutiny that they didn't trust at this time of heightened suspicion. So of course they weren't going to go along with that. And the nuclear age, instead of moving in the direction of arms control, moved in the opposite direction into an arms race. Then came the Cuban missile crisis of October 1962. And anyone watching this, I probably don't need to explain any of this to you, but obviously it's the moment that the United States and the Soviet Union came closest to direct nuclear conflict. And this crisis terrified both superpowers into recognizing that if they could barely manage each other other, a world with 15 or 20 or 30 nuclear states would be almost impossible to control. President Kennedy said Exactly that in 1963. He warned a future that could have 15, 20, 25 nations possessing these weapons. And that was the mindset out of which the non proliferation of nuclear weapons was born. Not utopian disarmament, but a fear of a crowded nuclear world. The push didn't just come from superpowers, though. In 1958, Frank Aitken, Ireland's Minister for External affairs, was first to put stopping the spread of nuclear weapons on the UN agenda. Then what followed was one of the strangest of the Cold War's collaborations. The United States and the Soviet Union pointing thousands of warheads at each other, finding rare common cause in making sure no one else joined the club that they were already in. And this odd coupling produced the Nuclear Non proliferation treaty, the NPT, which opened for signature in 1968 and entered into force in 19. And it's very important, otherwise I wouldn't bore you with bureaucracy and paperwork. But it rested on three key one, non nuclear states would not Acquire nuclear weapons. No nukes for newbies. Two states with nuclear weapons would pursue disarmament in good faith. See how that's worked out. And three, all states party to the treaty get access to peaceful nuclear technology under international inspection and monitoring. So under these new rules, if your country had tested a bomb before the 1st of January 1967, you've got to keep your weapons. Everyone else was told, stop right there. And this third pillar, civilian nuclear access, wasn't a random sweetener. It was the energy promise of the age that everyone was really excited about. The Chairman of the U.S. atomic Energy Commission said that nuclear energy could provide the world with energy that was too cheap to meter. Obvious overstatement. But there was a bigger problem. The same technology that could light a city could also destroy one. And we've got our first big problem with this plan. Dual use, because it's all well and good saying that just use the nuclear technology to heat homes, not obliterate cities. But the line between civilian technology and weapons capability was never clean. In some cases, it was barely a line at all. And this was the elephant in the room that everyone could see and that no one wanted to say out loud. And I'll give you a good example, because Britain's first nuclear power station at Calder hall, which opened in 1956, was trumpeted as this civilian achievement, but it was later confirmed that it was also producing weapons grade plutonium. So giving countries civilian nuclear programs was giving them a significant portion of what they'd need to build a bomb if they ever chose to. The enriched uranium, the reactors, the tech expertise, all of these are transferable skills. And that tension was baked into the NPT from day one, and it's never been resolved. There's also another glaring flaw in planning to disarm the world via this treaty. Feel free to guess what it is in the comments because I will get to it later. So who got to keep their nuclear weapons? Five states, the United States, the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, France and China. The United States, the only country to ever have used a nuclear weapon in armed conflict, was the first in the world to ever build one. And it happened during the Second World War in collaboration with British and Canadian scientists, and of course, refugee physicists who had fled fascist Europe. The US wanted a weapon that could decide the war, originally fearing that Nazi Germany would get there first and then ultimately using the weapon against Imperial Japan. But once the war ended, the bomb very quickly became more than a battlefield weapon. It became the foundation of American global primacy, which became unmistakably clear at the end of World War II that in the New World Order, the US sat at the top. And it also meant that the US's allies didn't need their own bombs because they were sheltering under Americas. This is called extended deterrence and it's an extremely powerful tool of alliance management because you're giving a country their survival, their ultimate protection and making them reliant on the US. In 2026, the USA has over 5,000 nuclear weapons. Only one country has more, and that's Russia. Once Washington had nuclear weapons, Moscow in the Cold War could not afford not to. That's one of the iron laws of nuclear politics that you'll notice that when two states see each other as existential enemies, a monopoly is just not going to last. The Russian bomb project was also proof that the Soviet system could match the west scientifically and industrially, which was important for a country that had lost over 20 million people in the Second World War and emerge from it with a shattered economy. They were telegraphing they could still compete at the highest level of technological power. And Soviet spying probably allowed the USSR to develop an atomic bomb six months to two years faster than they would have been able to had there been no espionage. And their first device was modelled on the American plutonium bomb dropped on Nagasaki, reverse engineered from intelligence gathered from inside the Manhattan Project itself. Modern Russia then inherited the Soviet arsenal. And nuclear weapons remained central to Russian strategy because they compensate for conventional weakness and preserve Russia's claim to top tier great power status in a world where at times that seat at the table would have been much harder to justify. And speaking of wanting to preserve seats at the table, Britain built the bomb because it didn't want to slip quietly out of great power status. This was obviously bound up with imperial decline. Britain emerging from the war formally victorious but materially exhausted, its empire dissolving economy hollowed out. Britain was determined not to become a second tier state in this new order. And nuclear weapons helped it to preserve influence and a seat at the table. But there was also this specific trigger that forced Britain's hand and that involved a lost document. So Churchill and Roosevelt had signed a wartime agreement promising continued nuclear cooperation. When Roosevelt died, this document was lost in his papers. And by the time it was found, Congress had already passed the McMahon act of 1946, which cut off all nuclear sharing with its allies, including the country whose scientists had helped the US build the bomb in the first place, Britain. The US did restore cooperation later on, but Britain, feeling betrayed and shut out, went it alone and tested its first atomic bomb in the Montebello Islands off the coast of Western Australia. The UK also did not want its ultimate security completely dependent on the United States. Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevan put it really bluntly in the Cabinet room and he said, we've got to have this thing over here, whatever it costs, we've got to get the bloody Union Jack on top of it. However, best laid plans, because the Union Jack might be on top of the British made warheads, but American technology and maintenance is underneath, as Britain's Trident missiles are leased from the United States. But London still treats it as a final insurance policy. The one capability that says Britain cannot be coerced in an existential crisis and whose firing authority rests with the Prime Minister. France did not just want protection, it wanted independence. The force de frappe, the name that Charles de Gaulle gave the French nuclear deterrent, was built because of a really uncomfortable question. Would Washington really risk the destruction of New York to defend Paris? French strategists concluded that the answer was probably not. French thinking on this had also been sharpened by a sense of humiliation, defeat in 1940, dependence on allies and liberation, and the shock of Suez in 1956, which was where France and Britain launched a military operation in Egypt and the US simply told them to stop. So Paris discovered just how constrained it was when the USA refused to back an operation. So the French bomb was in part a weaponised refusal to be overruled again. Plus, France never wanted to have to entrust its existence entirely to the USA or to NATO command structures that de Gaulle didn't trust because after all, he pulled France out of NATO's Integrated Military Command in 1960, 66, and that decision stood for over 40 years. So France's bomb program was about strategic autonomy, a sense of national grandeur, and also a refusal to let ultimate power sit entirely in foreign hands. China's nuclear project also carries the memory of what Beijing calls the century of humiliation, roughly 1839-1949, when stronger powers repeatedly coerced, invaded and carved up China. So for Beijing, nuclear weapons were protection against ever again being bullied by states that already had the bomb. After the Communist victory in 1949, the new leadership in China saw the United States as its main foreign threat. And the Korean War ramped up that fear a lot. China faced direct confrontation with a nuclear armed superpower and took the possibility of American nuclear use very seriously after all they had done in Japan. And at first China leaned on Soviet help, but then that relationship collapsed in the Sino Soviet split. This bitter break between the two biggest communist powers in the late 1950s and 60s. So once Beijing could no longer assume that Moscow would protect it, nuclear capability became even more important. In a world of nuclear superpowers, China's arsenal began as a minimal deterrent. Today, it's expanding as Beijing seeks a more survivable second strike force, which is the ability to strike back. And also nuclear arsenals that are more fit for how China sees itself now. The world's future leading superpower. These five recognized nuclear powers were allowed to keep their arsenals while promising to negotiate toward disarmament. But you'd be right to wonder, hold on. But they still have their nuclear weapons? Yes, they do. And the gap between what the treaty promised and what the powerful states actually did would only grow. Meanwhile, everyone else had to practice restraint. But here there is an obvious flaw. If you never signed the npt, you weren't bound by it. The treaty created a club with members, outsiders, and very different consequences depending on if you signed up to it or not. Today, nine states are generally accepted to have nuclear weapons. We've covered five and history uncensored. Viewers, I believe that you've got good arithmetic skills, so you know that we're missing four. India never signed the MPT because it saw it for exactly what it was. A treaty that legitimized the five states which already had the bomb and told everyone else to stay out permanently. India was a rising power at the time of the treaty and they refused to accept that arrangement. Plus, there were also these two other factors that supercharged India's decision. The first was China's nuclear test in 1964 and the memory of the 1962 Sino Indian War, which was this brief, traumatic border conflict in the Himalayas that India lost badly to China. So together that convinced India that moral arguments were no substitute for hard power, because India didn't want to live indefinitely in the shadow of a nuclear armed China. So the bomb was about status, but as ever, also security. Pakistan followed because in its eyes, it had to. India was bigger, richer, now nuclear. Their rivalry was extreme. The two countries being born in the violent partition of British India in 1947, fighting repeated wars and remaining locked in a bitter conflict over Kashmir. Pakistan's mom was a strategic equalizer and the program was built around uranium enrichment and around one man, A. Q Khan was his name, and he stole centrifuge designs while working in Europe, which was confirmed in these declassified documents that I found from the Dutch government. And he brought them home and he built the Kahoota enrichment program. He later became this central figure in one of history's most most dangerous nuclear black market networks, selling designs and tech to Libya, Iran and North Korea. Which shows us that nuclear history is not just about states building the bombs. It's also about the smugglers, brokers, and secret supply chains that come with them. Now, Israel has never officially declared a nuclear arsenal. It's also never denied one. It's widely believed to possess somewhere in the range of 80 to 200 warheads and to have had them since the late 1960s. The core facility at Dimona was built with crucial French assistance in the 1950s, at this moment, where France and Israel were briefly close strategic partners in the aftermath of Suez. This was not widely publicized at the time, and Israel worked hard to keep it quiet. The US was aware, but chose not to press the issue, a deliberate act of tolerance that shaped everything that followed. As for why Israel would want a nuclear arsenal, well, it's a small state born in war, shaped by the memory of the Holocaust, and surrounded, in its view, by hostile neighbors. What is distinctive in Israel's case was not the impulse to build the bomb. It's quite clear by now why countries want them. But the decision not to confirm or deny it. Enough opacity to avoid diplomatic costs, enough credibility to freak everyone out and shape calculations. Kind of like Schrodinger's bomb. North Korea signed the NPT in 1985, withdrew in 2003, and tested its first nuclear device in 2006. And the driver was nakedly political. Pyongyang looked at the world and drew a simple, obvious conclusion. Regimes without nuclear weapons can be isolated, sanctioned, coerced, overthrown. Regimes with them are much harder to touch. Saddam Hussein didn't have the bomb. Gaddafi gave his program up. Both were gone. Kim Jong Il and Kim Jong Un drew their lesson. The world did try to stop them. So in 1994, the Clinton administration struck a deal with the sexy name of the Agreed Framework, in which North Korea froze its plutonium program in exchange for energy aid and a path toward normalized relations. And it worked for eight years. But North Korea was secretly running a parallel uranium enrichment program the entire time. The Clinton administration, for its part, had essentially bet that the regime would collapse before the deal would need to hold. But it didn't. When the Bush administration discovered the secret program in 2002, rather than renegotiate key figures, used it as justification just to walk away entirely. China, the only country with real economic leverage over Pyongyang, prioritised maintaining stability on its border more than it did non proliferation. And once North Korea crossed that threshold, the world shifted from trying to stop it to trying to contain it. So if we step back, there are really five drivers of why states want nuclear survival status, deterrence, especially if they have a stronger neighbourhood, freedom from dependence on allies and a fear of abandonment. Most states with the bomb have more than one of these reasons in play, and all of them ultimately share one that their survival is a problem that they ultimately can't trust anyone else to really deliver or solve for them. Why can Israel have nukes but Iran can't? I've been asked this a couple of times and the legal answer is simple. Israel never signed the NPT, Iran did in 1968. So Iran is formally bound by treaty not to acquire nuclear weapons and to keep its program under international inspection for civilian use. Israel stayed out of the treaty entirely, so faces no such obligation. States inside the legal framework are judged by it. States that never joined can somewhat live in ambiguity, but really that's only half the story, or maybe less than half, because the other part is power and strategic calculation. Because Israel's undeclared arsenal has been tolerated for decades, because the United States and others judged the regional balance more stable, with Israel as a quiet, ambiguous nuclear power rather than open proliferation spreading across the Middle East. And Iran is treated differently for three reasons. So it's inside the treaty. So a weapons program would be breaking rules it formally accepted. It's also viewed by Washington and its regional rivals as hostile. And an Iranian bomb is feared not just in and of itself, but as a cascade trigger, probably the moment that Saudi Arabia and Turkey would conclude that they need their own. The North Korean case makes the underlying logic here brutally clear. Before a state gets the bomb, the international community, as we've seen, tries to stop it. After it gets the bomb, the world generally settles into a southern kind of acceptance and deterrence. That's why North Korea is sanctioned and condemned, but not more. Not moral or ideological, but just pragmatic. There it is. So why doesn't Germany or Japan have a nuclear program? Historically, both of those countries have been leading military powers, and they are technologically advanced enough that if they ever made the political decision to develop nuclear weapons, they'd likely move much, much faster than most states. But their history is of course a big part of the reason why they don't. Both Japan and Germany are countries whose military identities were deliberately constrained after catastrophic aggression in World War II. And in Japan's case, anti nuclear feeling is also shaped by the firsthand experience, experience of the horror of being the only country ever attacked with atomic bombs. Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Total Deaths from the two bomb blasts, the burns and radiation reached 200,000 or more by the end of 1945. The survivors, the Hibakusha, carried radiation sickness, disfigurement and stigma for the rest of their lives. And their children and grandchildren grew up and are growing up in the shadow of it. There's also a strategic reason that for a long time it could be argued that Japan and Germany didn't need their own arsenals in the way that India or Pakistan might have believed that they did, because both technically sit inside a US led system of extended deterrence, which is the fancy way of saying American nuclear protection. But there's also a wrinkle here because some states do not have or own nuclear weapons, but are still tied directly into another's nuclear plants. Under NATO nuclear sharing agreements. Belgium, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands and Turkey host US nuclear weapons on their soil, while the United States retains control and custody. So they are officially non nuclear, but they're still part of the nuclear system. Which countries had them and gave them up? Very few states have ever moved in the opposite direction. And the ones that did reveal a lot of lessons about nuclear politics. South Africa is the clearest case. It built operational nuclear weapons in the 1970s and 80s, six devices in total. Then ordered their dismantlement in 1990 as apartheid was collapsing, and they joined the NPT in 1991. This wasn't just altruism, it was cold political calculation. Because as the Cold War ended and the regime prepared for transition, the bomb had flipped from being an asset to a liability. It brought sanctions and isolation. So South Africa decided that the weapon was more dangerous to keep than to lose. And it remains the only state in history to have built nuclear weapons independently and then voluntarily destroyed them. Now, Ukraine, Belarus and Kazakhstan were a different story. When the Soviet Union collapsed, they found themselves sitting on Soviet nuclear weapons. But the warheads, the command codes, the operational infrastructure behind it, all of it remained bound to Moscow. They'd inherited the hardware, but not the keys. Under the 1994 Budapest Memorandum, Ukraine agreed to transfer these nuclear weapons, thousands of them, to Russia and to give up any nuclear claim. In return, Ukraine received security assurances from Russia, the United States and Britain guaranteeing its sovereignty and territorial integrity. Not a treaty, not a binding military commitment, assurances. Then in 2014, Russia annexed Crimea. In 2022, it launched a full scale invasion of Ukraine. Now, to be precise, because obviously this is all very thorny. And manipulated. Ukraine never possessed a fully independent, ready to use nuclear force. But that distinction is almost entirely swallowed up by what happened next. Because the lesson that governments around the world drew from this was simple and devastating. Security assurances are obviously not the same as security. Possession a promise from great powers is not the same as owning that means of deterrence yourself. Ukraine gave up its nuclear option and then was invaded by one of the countries that guaranteed its safety. In a world that already feels uncertain, that sequence of events has made the case for nuclear disarmament. Giving up weapons in exchange for promises significantly harder to make. So if you're a government today, watching what happened to Ukraine, the decision to relinquish a nuclear program looks a lot less like a noble choice and more like a cautionary tale. And that's why Ukraine haunts every disarmament conversation now, and why it will for a long time to come. In an ideal world, full disarmament would make everyone much safer. For one thing, nuclear weapons wouldn't fall into the wrong hands. And who would the capacity for mass destruction, psychological terror and global publicity appeal to Most terrorists, obviously. And when the Soviet Union collapsed, it left the world's largest nuclear arsenal scattered across multiple new unstable countries with underpaid scientists and poorly secured facilities. That period in the 1990s is when security experts lost a lot of sleep and some serious attempts happened. Al Qaeda expressed interest in acquiring nuclear weapons almost from its inception. It tried to buy nuclear material from the former Soviet world, sought scientific help, and in 1998, bin Laden declared acquiring weapons of mass destruction like this a religious duty. But thankfully, there was a massive gap between intent and capability. The material they pursued was not judged to be weapons grade. And most experts concluded that the most realistic route for them was never, of course, a true nuclear bomb, but a dirty bomb, a conventional explosive used to spread radioactive material, contaminating public areas and creating panic. Um, Shinriko, the Japanese cult behind the 1995 Tokyo subway attack, also went much further than many people realise. It pursued nuclear related ambitions, including efforts tied to uranium mining and attempts to acquire scientific and technical help, especially through Russia. A lot of mystery still swirls around arms nuclear plans, but it is clear that the cult was serious about unconventional weapons. ISIS triggered similar fears after it overran Mosul. Analysts worried about radioactive sources in the city, including cobalt material that could in principle, have been used in a dirty bomb. Now, that doesn't mean that ISIS had a radiological weapon in hand, but it really underscored the danger that you had this group with intent Operating near poorly secured radioactive material. You don't need a true nuclear bomb to spread chaos and terror. Between 2010 and 2015, Moldovan authorities, working with the FBI, disrupted four attempts by criminal networks with suspected Russian links to sell radioactive material to supposed Middle Eastern extremist buyers. Now, I caveat this because officials couldn't always verify who the end users really were, but the pattern is alarming enough. There was material, there was intent, and there were people willing to connect the two. If the history of nuclear weapons feels porous and hypocritical, that's because it is. It's one of the clearest examples of realpolitik. The NPT is both one of the most successful and one of the most resented treaties in modern history. I say successful because it did help to prevent Kennedy's nightmare of 20 or 30 nuclear states. Resented, though, because it asked most of the world to accept permanent restraint, while the states with the most weapons not only kept them when they said they disarm, but in the decades after signing, dramatically expanded their stockpiles. The US And Soviet Union built tens of thousands more warheads after 1968. Ukraine proved that possession is the only guarantee you can rely on, especially if your aggressor is inside the nuclear club. And North Korea demonstrated that once you cross that threshold, the world adjusts, providing an incentive. And the fact that 12,000 weapons weapons exist today, enough to destroy human civilization several times over through blast, nuclear winter and radiation, proves that the system never came close to delivering on its central promise. Which makes me think about Robert Oppenheimer watching that first test in the New Mexico desert. And he famously said that the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad Gita, flashed through his mind, now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds. And he's not wrong. But this is the darkest irony of the nuclear age. The power to annihilate is precisely what deterrence strategists argue has been keeping the peace between major powers for 80 years. The doctrine being Mutually Assured Destruction. And the acronym MAD is apt. The logic runs like this. If any nuclear exchange guarantees the destruction of both sides, then launching first is not a path to victory, it's a path to shared extinction. Because the prospect of death at this scale may have proved so far to be one thing more powerful than aggressive impulses. Or, in other words, now we've built the destroyer of worlds, we're relying on our fear of it to save us. On that happy note, I'll see you next week.