Apart from the five permanent members of the UN security council
(the US, Russia, China, France, and Britain), which are all
nuclear powers, around 25 other countries have sought to obtain
nuclear weapons, say international analysts. Israel, India,
Pakistan, and South Africa are known to have succeeded, though
South Africa voluntarily relinquished its bomb in the 1990s, a
unique event. North Korea is feared to be building a bomb,
Saddam Hussein's Iraq tried and failed, and Iran is said to be
creating the capacity. Japan has the fissile material and the
know-how to develop one quickly. Other countries occasionally
rumored to have nuclear ambitions include Brazil, Argentina,
Libya, and Algeria. It has never officially declared itself a
nuclear power but is by some distance the mightiest nuclear
power outside the Big Five, with the first prime minister, David
Ben-Gurion, inaugurating the project in the mid-1950s in great
secrecy. It had a rudimentary device by the late 60s. Mordechai
Vanunu, a nuclear technician