WMD and Nuclear Proliferation Questions and Answers

Answer: C

Operation Shakti was conducted in 1998.

Operation Shakti was the series of five nuclear tests at Pokhran on 11 and 13 May 1998, including a thermonuclear device, after which India declared itself a nuclear weapon state.

1974 was the year of the first test, Smiling Buddha. 1971 and 1999 are the years of the Bangladesh war and the Kargil conflict, not of nuclear tests.

Answer: D

N.M.D. stands for National Missile Defence.

National Missile Defence was the United States programme, pursued especially under President Clinton and then George W. Bush, to defend the entire national territory against a limited ballistic missile attack. Pursuing it led the USA to withdraw from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty in 2002.

The other expansions are not established terms. NMD was distinguished from theatre missile defence (TMD), which protects deployed forces and allies.

Answer: D

SALT-I and II are examples of arms control.

The Strategic Arms Limitation Talks between the USA and the USSR produced SALT-I (1972: the ABM Treaty and an interim agreement freezing missile launchers) and SALT-II (1979, never ratified by the US Senate). They set ceilings on strategic arsenals rather than abolishing them.

That is arms control, which regulates and limits weapons, not disarmament, which reduces or eliminates them. They had nothing to do with arms trade, and they aimed to restrain proliferation of strategic weapons, not to promote it.

Answer: D

The first nation to give up all its nuclear weapons was South Africa.

South Africa secretly built six nuclear devices in the 1970s and 1980s, dismantled them in 1989-91, joined the NPT as a non-nuclear-weapon state in 1991, and announced the programme and its dismantling in 1993. It was the first country to build nuclear weapons and then voluntarily eliminate them.

Sweden and Switzerland had weapons research programmes that they abandoned before producing weapons, and Australia never built nuclear weapons, so none of them gave up an existing arsenal. Ukraine, Belarus and Kazakhstan later gave up weapons they had inherited from the Soviet Union.

Answer: C

The treaty without such an organisation is the Biological Weapons Convention (BWC).

The BWC of 1972 bans the development, production and stockpiling of biological and toxin weapons, but it has no verification body and no inspection regime; attempts in the 1990s to negotiate a verification protocol failed in 2001. It has only a small Implementation Support Unit in Geneva, set up in 2006.

The others have one. Under the NPT, the IAEA applies safeguards to verify that non-nuclear-weapon states do not divert nuclear material. The Chemical Weapons Convention is verified by the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons in The Hague. The CTBT has the CTBTO in Vienna with its International Monitoring System.

Answer: D

IAEA safeguards are not applied to high explosives.

Safeguards are measures by which the IAEA verifies that nuclear material is not diverted to weapons. They apply to source and special fissionable material: natural and enriched uranium, and plutonium, with the tightest controls on highly enriched uranium and separated plutonium because they can be used directly in a bomb.

High explosives are used in the implosion system of a nuclear weapon, but they are not nuclear material, so they fall outside safeguards. The other three options are all nuclear materials that safeguards cover.

Answer: A

Resolution 1540 criminalizes proliferation.

Adopted unanimously in April 2004 under Chapter VII of the UN Charter, Resolution 1540 obliges every state to adopt and enforce laws that prohibit non-state actors from making, acquiring, transferring or using nuclear, chemical or biological weapons and their means of delivery, and to set up controls over related materials. In effect it makes proliferation to terrorists and other non-state actors a crime in every member state's law.

It does not set out to build a nuclear-weapons free world, it has no verification machinery for such a world, and it says nothing about strengthening nuclear deterrence; its target is proliferation to non-state actors.

Answer: A

Vertical proliferation is the phenomenon of countries increasing and modernising their nuclear weapons and delivery platforms.

Proliferation is divided into two kinds. Vertical proliferation is growth within existing nuclear powers: more warheads, better warheads and new delivery systems, as in the US-Soviet arms race. Horizontal proliferation is the spread of nuclear weapons to states that did not have them before.

The second option therefore describes horizontal, not vertical, proliferation. Countries reducing their arsenals is disarmament or arms reduction, the opposite of proliferation, and 'None of the above' fails because the first option fits.

Answer: D

The IMS belongs to the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT).

The CTBT of 1996 bans all nuclear explosions. To verify compliance, the CTBT Organization in Vienna is building an International Monitoring System of 337 facilities around the world, using seismic, hydroacoustic, infrasound and radionuclide technologies to detect any nuclear explosion.

The Biological Weapons Convention has no verification body at all. The NPT is verified through IAEA safeguards inspections of nuclear material, and the Chemical Weapons Convention through inspections by the OPCW, so none of them uses an IMS.

Answer: C

The IMS does not include satellite monitoring facilities.

The CTBT's International Monitoring System uses four technologies on the ground and in the oceans: seismic stations for underground tests, hydroacoustic stations for underwater tests, infrasound stations for atmospheric tests, and radionuclide stations and laboratories that detect radioactive particles and noble gases released by any test.

Satellite surveillance is not part of the treaty's monitoring network; states may use their own national technical means, but those are separate from the IMS. The other three options are all IMS components.