Talk:List of weapons of mass destruction by country

Weapon development or weapon existence?

A large amount of articles under this category, such as Algeria, South Korea, Argentina, Romania, and Spain (among others) do not directly detail the existence, formerly or otherwise, of any specific weapon of mass destruction. Rather, they go over programs, plans, and capability to produce said weapons, successful or not. As well, countries like Ukraine and Kazakhstan did not themselves actually develop WMDs but served as stationing grounds while as constituent countries of the USSR Personally, I feel that it would be in the best interest to either have a broader scope for the page following the Wikibox template, or, if a stricter approach is favored, split the list by either categories or separate pages for successful programs or states that do/did own WMDs. DvcDeBlvngis (talk) 22:31, 8 July 2023 (UTC)

@DvcDeBlvngis First, thanks for creating the table, it's pretty neat! I don't have an opinion on organizing this subject, I just created it because I felt that a list article was missing considering there were so many articles about countries with WMD programs. Please do what you think is best here :). PhotographyEdits (talk) 15:46, 9 July 2023 (UTC)

NPOV issues

The problem with a table like this is that it creates inherent NPOV issues. Key examples of this are Israel and Iran. Israel is listed as "Potential" despite it being very well-documented that they have an existing nuclear program; they just don't declare it. Iran is listed as "Developing" despite the state of Iran denying that they have an active weapons program. A table like this cannot adequately express this kind of nuance ("Israel does not acknowledge having nuclear weapons, but it is clear they do; Iran claims that it had a nuclear weapons program in the past, but no longer does, but lots of people dispute this").

There are deeper issues as well as what counts as a "nuclear weapons program". The German and Japanese programs of WWII, for example, were not programs that were designed to ever produce nuclear weapons: they were research programs that never would have produced nuclear weapons in the forms in which they had before they were shut down (they would have had to have been scaled up by orders of magnitude). This is a very different situation than, say, South Africa, which developed nuclear weapons and then dismantled them, and yet they get the same designation (which tends to exaggerate their closeness to having nuclear weapons). And Ukraine inherited Soviet nuclear weapons with the USSR dissolved, and then agreed to get rid of them — does that count as them having a "nuclear weapons program"?

I am unsure what the utility of a table like this is, because it seems like there is an infinite potential for misunderstanding and very little opportunity for correct understanding. Converting this to something more verbose, which would allow for more nuance than these categories have, would be better. If a table was necessary I would suggest reevaluating the categories — e.g., to allow for a "disputed" category, and to differentiate between research programs and production programs, and to put "Sharing" into a different category than indigenous programs (because there is overlap: the Germans had a research program in WWII, but then later were involved in a sharing program). NuclearSecrets (talk) 20:56, 25 November 2023 (UTC)

For the exact categorical basing, I mostly went off the pages linked for each respective country in the table, which may have resulted in NPOV issues through extrapolation. However, I do think that the table itself is a worthwhile addition to the list, for the sake of visual simplicity and ease of organization. The suggestions for reevaluation that you've brought forth seem like worthwhile addendums to me though, my only concern would be that some of them are primarily nuclear-specific while the list covers chemical and biological weapons as well. If there is a way to simply integrate the information through methods such as footnotes to denote sharing, I think that would be the best route forward, although at the end of the day the page primarily does exist to list the pages linked within, and ambiguity should be cleared up on the pages themselves. DvcDeBlvngis (talk) 05:46, 25 December 2023 (UTC)