Apart from the five permanent members of the UN security council (the US, Russia, China, France, and Britain), which are all nuclear powers, around 25 other countries have sought to obtain nuclear weapons, say international analysts.
Israel, India, Pakistan, and South Africa are known to have succeeded, though South Africa voluntarily relinquished its bomb in the 1990s, a unique event.
North Korea is feared to be building a bomb, Saddam Hussein's Iraq tried and failed, and Iran is said to be creating the capacity.
Japan has the fissile material and the know-how to develop one quickly. Other countries occasionally rumored to have nuclear ambitions include Brazil, Argentina, Libya, and Algeria.
Israel
It has never officially declared itself a nuclear power but is by some distance the mightiest nuclear power outside the Big Five, with the first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, inaugurating the project in the mid-1950s in great secrecy. It had a rudimentary device by the late 60s. Mordechai Vanunu, a nuclear technician, famously blew the whistle on the programme in 1986 and was imprisoned.
France is believed to have supplied Israel secretly with a nuclear reactor and equipment for extracting weapons-grade plutonium from spent nuclear fuel in the 1950s.
Israel is estimated to have stockpiles of more than half a tonne of plutonium and an unknown quantity of weapons-grade high-enriched uranium. The plutonium stockpile is more than the combined total held by the other non-Big Five nuclear powers. Experts estimate that Israel has around 200 nuclear devices.
India
For decades India pursued the bomb using a plutonium extraction plant and two heavy water reactors which produce plutonium. The Indian effort was based at the Bhabha atomic research centre outside Bombay. It went public in 1974 when a plutonium-core fission bomb was tested in the Rajasthan desert.
Analysts estimate that the Indian nuclear arsenal has up to 70 devices.
Pakistan
The Indian successes triggered a nuclear arms race on the sub- continent. The father of the Pakistani bomb, Abdul Qader Khan, worked in the Netherlands for what became the Anglo-Dutch-German Urenco company specializing in uranium enrichment.
He is said to have stolen centrifuge designs for uranium enrichment and inaugurated the crash Pakistani programme. The same designs have been used at the Iranian facility at Natanz, feeding speculation that the Iranians obtained equipment and help from Islamabad.
The Pakistanis built the Kahuta enrichment plant using the Urenco designs to produce weapons-grade uranium, and are believed to have obtained weapons designs from China. Pakistan announced it had the bomb in 1998.
Pakistan is the only country known with certainty to have a bomb developed from a programme started after the nuclear non-proliferation treaty came into force in 1970. It is believed to have at least 700kg of weapons-grade uranium and a small quantity of plutonium stockpiled and to have up to 15 nuclear devices.
North Korea
The current crisis over North Korea's nuclear ambitions came to a head last year when Pyongyang cut off relations with the UN watchdog, the Vienna-based International Atomic Energy Agency, and said it would not observe the non-proliferation treaty.
The jury is still out on whether North Korea has the bomb. It said last month it could test a nuclear device when it wanted. Washington believes it may have two.
Multilateral efforts are under way to defuse the crisis, which is having the knock-on effect in Japan of encouraging the only country to have been hit by an atomic bomb to build its own. Japan has a large civil nuclear power sector, ample stockpiles of plutonium, and the technological and scientific resources to obtain a nuclear bomb swiftly.
Iran
A dripfeed of revelations from UN inspectors over recent months is hardening suspicions that Tehran is bent on acquiring nuclear weapons, or creating the wherewithal. It was last week presented with an ultimatum by the UN: reveal all by the end of next month and allow unrestricted inspections.
Recent discoveries and question marks include the tracing of two different types of weapons-grade uranium at an underground uranium enrichment centre being built in central Iran, the disclosure that the programme goes back to 1985 and not 1997 as previously stated, evidence of uranium metal conversion testing -- needed for weapons but not for power stations -- and substantial rebuilding at a suspect Tehran facility, apparently to frustrate UN inspections and environmental sampling for radioactive materials.
With the midday sun blazing, an experimental orange and white F-16 fighter jet launched with a familiar roar that is a hallmark of US airpower, but the aerial combat that followed was unlike any other: This F-16 was controlled by artificial intelligence (AI), not a human pilot, and riding in the front seat was US Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall. AI marks one of the biggest advances in military aviation since the introduction of stealth in the early 1990s, and the US Air Force has aggressively leaned in. Even though the technology is not fully developed, the service is planning
INTERNATIONAL PROBE: Australian and US authorities were helping coordinate the investigation of the case, which follows the 2015 murder of Australian surfers in Mexico Three bodies were found in Mexico’s Baja California state, the FBI said on Friday, days after two Australians and an American went missing during a surfing trip in an area hit by cartel violence. Authorities used a pulley system to hoist what appeared to be lifeless bodies covered in mud from a shaft on a cliff high above the Pacific. “We confirm there were three individuals found deceased in Santo Tomas, Baja California,” a statement from the FBI’s office in San Diego, California, said without providing the identities of the victims. Australian brothers Jake and Callum Robinson and their American friend Jack Carter
Le Tuan Binh keeps his Moroccan soldier father’s tombstone at his village home north of Hanoi, a treasured reminder of a man whose community in Vietnam has been largely forgotten. Mzid Ben Ali, or “Mohammed” as Binh calls him, was one of tens of thousands of North Africans who served in the French army as it battled to maintain its colonial rule of Indochina. He fought for France against the Viet Minh independence movement in the 1950s, before leaving the military — as either a defector or a captive — and making a life for himself in Vietnam. “It’s very emotional for me,”
UNDER INVESTIGATION: Members of the local Muslim community had raised concerns with the police about the boy, who officials said might have been radicalized online A 16-year-old boy armed with a knife was shot dead by police after he stabbed a man in the Australian west coast city of Perth, officials said yesterday. The incident occurred in the parking lot of a hardware store in suburban Willetton on Saturday night. The teen attacked the man and then rushed at police officers before he was shot, Western Australian Premier Roger Cook told reporters. “There are indications he had been radicalized online,” Cook told a news conference, adding that it appeared he acted alone. A man in his 30s was found at the scene with a stab wound to his back.