But nuclear technology has become so widespread to the extent that it’s only political will that stops a state from possessing or producing nuclear weapons.

So far 40 countries can make a nuclear bomb if they wanted to, Mohamed ElBaradei, head of the UN's nuclear regulatory body the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), was once quoted as saying. This is because the technology legally used to enrich uranium to make fuel for nuclear power can easily be developed to make material for nuclear weapons.

The U.S. has repeatedly hinted at using military action to prevent proliferation, mainly against Iran.

JOHN BOLTON wrote in The Financial Times a few months ago that the U.S. is "determined to use every resource at our disposal - using diplomacy regularly, economic pressure when it makes a difference, active law enforcement when appropriate and military force when we must."

But what was never mentioned is that the U.S. could use nuclear arms.

New U.S. policies that involve the use of nuclear weapons were formulated in the administration document "Nuclear Posture Review" of 2001 and became more defined in a Pentagon draft document "Doctrine for Joint Nuclear Operations," Jorge Hirsch, a professor of physics at the University of California San Diego, wrote in an article published on a San Diego Union-Tribune website.

These policies, the drafters of which occupy the upper echelons of the BUSH administration, allow the use of nuclear weapons against adversary underground installations, against adversaries using or intending to use weapons of mass destruction against U.S. forces and for rapid and favorable war termination on U.S. terms.

Hirsch suggests that those policies could be implemented in the near future against the Persian Gulf.

Americans are quite well advanced in their planning for the use of those weapons, which raises the fears that other countries will, out of fear, try to build their own. A new concept of warfare is being developed.

Iran's NUCLEAR PROGRAM and efforts for building sophisticated facilities at Natanz and several other cities that would eventually produce enriched uranium have become the center of the world’s concerns, specially the U.S. and its Middle East ally Israel, both fearing emergence of a third nuclear power that would endanger their hegemony and interests in the region.

In case the U.S. or Israel use conventional bombs against Iran's NUCLEAR FACILITIES, the Iranians are expected to retaliate with missiles against the occupying forces in Iraq and against Israel, as well as the occupation military bases in southern Iraq, that the 150,000 U.S. troops in Iraq would not be able to withstand, the article further suggests, adding that the Iranian missiles “could potentially contain chemical warheads, and it certainly would be impossible to rule out such possibility.”

The U.S.’s use of low-yield nuclear bombs with better bunker-busting ability than conventional bombs targeting Iran's nuclear, chemical and missile installations, which would be consistent with the new U.S. nuclear weapons doctrine, will be then justified using the claims of needing to protect the lives of 150,000 U.S. soldiers in Iraq and of Israeli citizens.

And since the United States uses a nuclear weapon against a non-nuclear adversary, the 182 countries that are signatories of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation treaty will immediately consider doing the same, as they will feel at risk.

They will start developing their own nuclear deterrent, and the result will be a new world with many more nuclear countries, and an imminent threat of regional conflict exploding into all-out nuclear war, which would lead to the destruction of civilization.

The nuclear weapons "taboo" protected humanity over the past 60 years, after the U.S. used them in Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945, ending the WORLD WAR II. And using nuclear arms against non-nuclear countries, which has become part of the military doctrine and planning of the United States, there will come a time when using such devastating weapons becomes unavoidable, simply because no alternatives will have been planned for.

Anti nuclear organizations fear that where America treads, others will eventually follow.

The Los Alamos Group has previously questioned the American commitment to article 6 of the NUCLEAR NON-PROLIFERATION TREATY, that says that "Each of the Parties to the Treaty undertakes to pursue negotiations in good faith on effective measures relating to cessation of the nuclear arms race at an early date and to nuclear disarmament".