Nuclear Blindness 
Brian Jones on Iran, the West and the Bomb
It is time for the West to develop a new policy on nuclear proliferation. The highly partisan Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty of 1968, which allowed only the US, Russia, Britain, France and China to retain nuclear weapons, has been gradually eroded, as Israel, India, Pakistan, North Korea and, briefly, apartheid South Africa, have unofficially joined the club. Now Iran, too, may be trying to develop the bomb, and has threatened to withdraw from the treaty, as North Korea did in 2003.
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Brian Jones, a visiting senior research fellow at the University of Southampton, is a former deputy director on the Defence Intelligence Staff, specialising in nuclear, biological and chemical weapons analysis. He gave evidence to the Hutton Inquiry.
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