Opinion: Locking down the NPT

Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists : President Barack Obama recently spoke of the importance of the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT), as has every president since Lyndon B. Johnson who signed the treaty in 1968. Yet all presidents to a lesser or greater degree have weakened the treaty, through lax enforcement, by carving out exceptions for certain countries, or by just ignoring it.We have come to the point now that North Korea, which signed the treaty in 1985, is now mocking it. And in all the discussions over a possible Iranian bomb, no one seems to think the treaty’s 90-day withdrawal clause would be much of a hurdle if Tehran decided to leave the NPT.If President Obama really wants to strengthen the treaty, a good—and necessary—place to start is to make it much more difficult for any of the 189 member states to leave the NPT, say Henry Sokolski and Victor Gilinsky .It is at odds with the NPT’s purpose to allow a country to import or develop technology under the treaty’s cover and then walk out to make bombs. At a minimum, before legally exiting the treaty, a country should have to clear its NPT obligations by returning whatever it got from others based on the understanding that it was a good-faith treaty member.