LONDON -- What has become of the globally agreed regime designed to prevent the proliferation of nuclear weapons -- the Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT)? The answer these days is that while it has served the world well for many years it is now in tatters.

The original treaty was clear and concise. It aimed to confine the ownership of nuclear weapons to those five countries that already had them, or claimed to have them, namely the United States, Russia, China, France and Britain. These were designated the "existing nuclear powers." Both they and all other signatories to the treaty became subject to a strict system of compliance, verification, monitoring and regulation, whatever their nuclear activities, whether civil or military or in the gray area of "dual use" in between. And an often forgotten bit of the treaty was that the existing five would steadily wind down their arsenals.

That was the theory. Today's reality is dangerously different. Outside the original five, Israel has long possessed nuclear weapons in flat defiance of the NPT. So has India, although it has now been "rewarded" for its disregard by American bilateral action with access to various new nuclear technologies.