What right do we have to tell other countries to stop nuclear weapon

[2Design]

I don't understand how usa pressures others to give up their means of protecting themselves while we build more and more WMD against the world

http://www.iht.com/articles/2005/02/15/news/korea.html

What right do we have to tell other countries to stop nuclear weapon building when we do so much of it?

This perplexes me
We had iraq destroy all their means of protecting themselves and then bombed them anyway and continue to do so

We are the biggest builder of WMD and yet no one is over here bombing us into submission

[arcane1]

1. no right whatsoever

especially since we are the ONLY country to ever USE a nuclear weapon

make that TWO nuclear weapons

[Freedom_from_Chains]

2. Our right comes from the fact that

we have more WMD's than anyone else, not to mention the best equipped military in the world. And if you don't go along with the program, we will put a hurt on you.

[reallygone]

3. U.S. Bully

The U.S. is being a bully in this. True.

It is important to note, however, that Iran and N. Korea have both signed a treaty agreeing to not conduct research leading to the development of nuclear weapons. The same treaty compels the U.S. to not increase its stockpile of nuclear weapons. That's the current basis for compelling compliance.

We have refrained from using nuclear weapons (except in one/two instance) for over 50 years, which does lend some credence to the fact that we will not use them indescriminantly. We could have nuked Vietnam, but we didn't. We could have nuked China, but we didn't. We could have nuked Iran when they seized our dimplomats, but we didn't. The world has (up until now) trusted us to be responsible.

North Korea has no such history of restraint. Neither does Iran.

On the other side, we tell other countries lots of things and apply pressure to make them comply. We don't let countries practice slavery. We insert ourselves when we see genocide (like in Bosnia and Darfur). We put trade sanctions in place when countries have poor histories of human rights violations.

Other nations do it to us. Europe recently had trade sanctions against U.S. for steel production subsidies. Australia charged us with agriculture products dumping in the world court. Europe sanctioned us for denying commercial airflights into US without them providing traveler private information. Many countries in Africa and Asia, and South America tax imported U.S. products. Belgium and Germany reserve the right to indict and convict U.S. military and government officials for human rights violations and seek to extradits such officials from other member states of the EU.

Countires demand things of other countries. The UN tries to mediate many of these differences. Countires use there available strengths to compel compliance (the M.E. oil embargo of 1973 to compel US to not support Israel, for instance). The US is no different from other countries except we have more military and economic strength and so can be more "compelling". Conversly, as with Iraq, when we "get out of line", other countries take actions against us or do things that make it hard on us to achieve our objectives. We do not have the strength to stand up to all other countries, (or even most other countries).