AHC: Nuclear Proliferation-wank

The challenge is to get as many nations as possible nuclear weapons. Maybe Portugal pulls out of Angola and Mozambique later, and so the governments that take their place are meaner, causing South Africa to feel more paranoid about invasion by those countries, along with Zimbabwe and a revolt of the blacks, prompting them to continue their nuclear program? Maybe Sweden decides that, though they're a neutral power, they need the means to defend themselvesand continue their program? Maybe a weak president in the 1990s, plus the dissolution of NATO means that Kim Jong Il decides that he can afford to pursue a program of his own earlier than OTL, leading to South Korea and Japan deciding that the US's nuclear umbrella isn't enough, so they both pursue programs? Discuss.
 
http://users.rcn.com/mwhite28/nukes.htm

Here are some countries that at least tried to get them OTL. Your best bets are weaker superpowers combined with great insecurity. Probably an earlier Soviet breakup will work in many ways, shattering the bipolar world and with smaller countries either freed to act up or needing new defensive commitments. More aggressive local powers should do the trick, since many countries are capable of producing nuclear weapons relatively rapidly as is.

It's already easy to see South Africa keeping them and Japan, South Korea, and maybe Taiwan getting them as well, although I wonder about North Korea getting them earlier, which is key. (It took forever to get them OTL and the first rest reputedly was underwhelming in results.)
 
Japan probably won't go for a program for obvious reasons, they certainly haven't lately when it's pretty clear that North Korea at the very least has something in terms of a program.

South Korea could do it, but again I'm not seeing yet why the USA is violating its traditional policy of stopping nuclear proliferation, South Korea cannot do it without some form of tacit US approval.

Egypt could have pursued a program if they had wanted, though it might make the Egyptian-American detente more than a little uneasy.

Saudi Arabia could and would do one today with US approval.

South Africa had a program OTL that they discontinued after Apartheid, and perpetuating that is almost impossible.

Sweden or Norway could have done it... an armed neutrality of sorts, probably the least likely to attract any significant anger from the United States.

Suharto's Indonesia could probably have gotten some groundwork down for it, with a weak tech sector and all of Indonesia's economic tumult it would have been hard and slow though. As a US ally he gets some brownie points if he wants to try.
 
The trick is getting the USA out of the way and as need be, the USSR. The USA would be leery of even Canada and Australia getting nuclear weapons. In a sense we're seeing a sort of proliferation as is with the USSR out of the way, and back in the cold war/early post-cold war world only the five declared powers of the NPT, Israel, and India had nuclear weapons. South Africa as well but they discontinued them. And it's worth noting the states that did have them, save for Israel and SA, were huge in size. (Ok, France and Britain not so much after their empires fell.)

SA and Israel provides the easiest models for other states to get them, but it's hard to see what could be done that wasn't tried as is OTL. Actually, even France and Britain could provide models given they wanted to keep what they could of their international standing after the war.

That said if one wants a wank, just have the non-superpower states of the world decide en masse to do their own thing. There is the East Asia scenario above, most of Europe could get them, have Belarus/Ukraine/Kazakhstan decide to keep theirs after the Soviet fall, have Latin America decide not to set up the nuclear-free zone. It's not hard to see Egypt/Iran/a couple other places in the Middle East with them. It would be nasty and hopefully MAD would still work, but yeah.
 
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Perhaps have the Korean War go a bit worse for the US and have the US resort to atomic bombing to retrieve the situation, and somehow the whole mess doesn't end up in WW3. The nuclear taboo is broken in 1951 and the A-bomb becomes part of the standard toolkit of any significant military power.

Alternatively, have Taft elected in 1952. With Europe much less certain of steadfast American support against the Soviets, there's likely to be far more independent programs, e.g. in Italy and Sweden. And once these things get going, there will tend to be a buildup of momentum - the more states have these things, the easier it will be for new states to obtain them.
 
Britain and France turn anti-US for a while after their Suez victory, British Joint project partners get British dual-key nukes which the actually inherit when Britain pulls back west of Suez in the early 80s.
 
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