Here's the deal - five nations get to keep their nuclear arsenals while the rest cannot even think of developing them. One rule for the nuclear 'haves', another for the 'have-nots'.

Try explaining that to your five-year-old kid.

And consider this. While the United States tells North Korea: 'You're a terrible people, you're developing nuclear weapons', the world's sole superpower has thousands of them and is the only country in history to have used such weapons.

Yes, your kid is right - it's like an alcoholic persuading others to vow abstinence.

Indeed, of all the international treaties, the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) - the world's most widely adhered to arms pact - must stand as the one which is the most unjust.

It neither accords equal rights to nor imposes equal obligations on all nations. One law for a few elite, another for the common rest.

We meet again

This month, the world meets again at the United Nations, for the seventh time, to review this deeply flawed treaty.

Considered a landmark agreement, the 1970 treaty seeks to completely disarm nuclear states, prevent the spread of nuclear weapons and foster the peaceful use of nuclear energy. Under the pact, the world is required to meet every five years to review its progress.

The treaty was given a life span of 25 years - it was to expire in 1995. The drafters had figured that by the end of last century, nuclear weapons would have been history. How wrong they were.

When the world met 10 years ago as the treaty was due to expire, it did the only 'realistic' thing to do - extend the pact indefinitely. However, they included some conditions, among them that nuclear powers must meet their end of the bargain, that is to take significant steps to disarm.

Since then the situation has got worse, not better. There hasn't been any new initiative on disarmament. And three years after the treaty was given another lease of life, India and Pakistan gatecrashed into the nuclear club with 11 underground tests.

Their 'coming out' party has blown a hole in the world's nuclear poker face. For years, the world knew that both nations, as well as some others, had nuclear capability. But so long as they didn't openly say so, we pretended not to know.

And now that this nuclear ambiguity is gone, the world has had a hard time living with it. Soon, we will have to recognise that Israel and North Korea - which, like India and Pakistan, are not NPT signatories - also possess nuclear weapons.

Not farfetched

The nuclear five - US, Russia, China, France and Britain - want India and Pakistan to sign the NPT, but on the condition that they join the pact as non-nuclear states. This would require the duo to give up the perks that the nuclear club members have reserved for themselves.

Not surprisingly, the nuclear debutantes have rejected such nonsense. They want in and as full members of the exclusive club.

But therein lies the problem. If the NPT is amended to allow India and Pakistan to be accepted as nuclear powers, they will in effect have 'bombed' their way into the club, something which could encourage other states to do the same.

But if the treaty is not amended, the two countries will be excluded from international inspections and control of nuclear exports aimed at preventing further proliferation.

Today, the US and Russia have most of the world's estimated 30,000 nuclear weapons - enough to blow the world apart many times over.

Each is believed to have 7,000 to 8,000 operational warheads. Washington has an additional 3,000 to 5,000 stockpiled whereas Moscow has an estimated 8,000.

China is said to have some 403 nuclear arms, France 346 and Britain 185. India and Pakistan are estimated to have 40 operational warheads each and Israel 200.

If the world is serious about halting nuclear proliferation, there can be only one solution - the nuclear club must be closed down permanently.

A world without nuclear weapons is not as farfetched as it sounds. After all, former US president Ronald Reagan - not exactly a bleeding-heart liberal - came breathtakingly close to an agreement with Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev to wipe out all nuclear weapons by 1996.

Policy 'immoral, illegal'

Even warmonger-turned-peacenik Robert McNamara - the Vietnam-era US defence secretary and star of the Oscar-winning documentary Fog of War - said last week that Washington's nuclear weapons policy was 'immoral, illegal, militarily unnecessary and dreadfully dangerous'.

Despite this, the US is bent on improving its existing nuclear weapons, as well as designing and building new ones.

Malaysia's sole survivor of the Hiroshima atomic bomb, Abdul Razak Abdul Hamid, had this to say in an interview 10 years ago: 'The world has gone mad'. But who will listen to an old man, even one who had personally witnessed the horror of the bomb 60 years ago.

True, the world should also worry about nuclear weapons falling into the hands of terrorists, but we cannot even begin to deal with this problem if the non-terrorist world is still bristling with with such weapons.

Clearly, the solution is there for all to see. It is only by showing that the game will end soon that the world can stop new players from entering the nuclear arena.

As a first step, the nuclear powers must show that they mean business by ratifying a nuclear test-ban treaty, shutting down its test sites for good and starting negotiations for reduction with the aim of eventually abolishing all nuclear weapons.

But don't hold your breath. Those who have their finger poised on the nuclear button are turning a deaf ear to such calls.

So watch this space when the NPT is up for review again - in 2010.