Whenurhappy: (Whilst I appreciate your tongue in cheek reply there
)
I don't think the Kiwis and Ozzies care for nukes enough to add such weapons to their capabilities.
Do the Irish? Probably not.
You could argue that India is "an English speaking country" in terms of how many of its people have English as a second language, though in their case it is a
fait accompli. See below.
I think that as various nations spend the time and money necessary to develop their own capability and the infrastructure to support it, they will find it both an expensive millstone around their necks, and also find themselves in the strategic situation where they won't be inclined to use said weapons. They'll also tend to be targeted by at least one other nuclear power. That's how the deterrent game tends to work.
The NPT will continue to degrade into less than the scrap of paper that it already is. (PTT made some good points up there on what's behind that).
The new players in the nuclear game will have to experience for themselves the lessons we older nuclear hands learned in the Cold War about the matched blessing and curse of holding these weapons in the magazines.
As I see it today, the most likely nuclear weapons exchange in the next five to ten years is an exchange between India and Pakistan.
If they both empty their clips at each other, the impact on the rest of the planet, as the the environmental damage spreads due to wind currents and potential holes in the Ozone layer, and such, looks to cost the planet about a billion lives, maybe twice that when all is said and done, and spread both agricultural and economic damage across the temperate zones of the Northern Hemisphere, East and West. The wind will blow, you can't stop it.
A few years back Scientific American ran a pretty good article on the estimates of what the aftermath of a nuclear war on the sub continent would look like.
What the scientists used to help their models was the dust output of volcanic eruptions, and the global effects of major volcanic eruptions, such as Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines a couple of decades ago.
Worth a look if you can find it.
South Asian Threat? Local Nuclear War = Global Suffering: Scientific American
http://climate.envsci.rutgers.edu/pd...iAmJan2010.pdf
Caution: the analysis is of course based on some modeling, and as such holds errors if the models are off.
With the above in mind, you can argue that the NPT needs to be beefed up, not lef to die its natural death. It seems to me that the NPT was a product of pos-WW II progressivism, and a bit of wishful thinking.
Given the increasing bilge between the US and Russia, and to a different extent Russia and the rest of the West, and adding China's position that it is the 800 pound gorilla in the room, the odds of getting the NPT reinvigorated strike me as low to zero.