The United States' willingness to attack adversaries while rattling allies is threatening to push the world into a new nuclear age, according to Bloomberg.
From the North Atlantic to the West Pacific, governments are debating more publicly than before whether they, too, must get the bomb. Germany and Poland, who have long been satisfied to sit under the US nuclear umbrella, have in the wake of Trump's musings about taking Greenland, welcomed French overtures about extending the country's own strategic deterrent across the continent.
China and Russia, both longstanding members of the exclusive club of nuclear-armed nations, have raised alarm about the risk of weapons proliferation in Japan and South Korea, even as they upgrade their own arsenals. The US, the only country to use a nuclear weapon against a civilian population, is assessing a return to atomic bomb tests to comply with an executive order by Trump after a hiatus of more than three decades, says Bloomberg.
"The possible acquisition of such weapons of mass destruction is openly discussed, even in countries that have pledged never to possess them," Rafael Mariano Grossi, director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, said in an interview. "But more nuclear weapons in more countries will not make the world more secure - on the contrary.
"It is more important than ever to uphold the non-proliferation norms that have served the world so well for the past half century," Grossi said.
While only nine nations are currently considered nuclear-armed states, more than 20 others have energy programs, industrial bases and engineering expertise that could allow them to begin climbing the ladder to the bomb. It takes just 25 kilograms (55 pounds) of highly enriched uranium or 8 kilograms of plutonium to make a weapon capable of destroying a small city.