Heading towards a world without nukes
President Obama has set out his vision of how he thinks he can embark on a path which will lead to a nuclear-free world. "The existence of thousands of nuclear weapons is the most dangerous legacy of the Cold War ... Today the Cold War has disappeared but thousands of those weapons have not."
We previewed his non-proliferation ideas a couple of months ago -- I blogged about it here.
We also discussed the arguments with the Russian analyst Roland Timerbaev, who's one of the world's leading experts on nuclear non-proliferation, and one of the founding fathers of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, and with Ken Adelman, former director of the US Arms Control and Disarmament Agency under President Reagan.
And I asked the British foreign secretary David Miliband what this all might mean for the UK Trident nuclear programme. You can hear the interview here.
(broadcast on The World Tonight, 29 January 2009)
~RS~q~RS~~RS~z~RS~09~RS~)
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'Who's Next?' - Tom Lehrer
If this wee gem from 1965 is not familiar, I urge you to check it out.
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A dangerously naive and childlike idea that you should put the genie back in the bottle or that it is even desirable. The dire consequences of the use of nuclear weapons has kept the peace for decades. The USSR would have overrun Western Europe without them. Arabs would have fought more wars to destroy Israel without them. The world did not even display the will to find and destroy secret nuclear weapons programs in Iraq, Lybia, North Korea, and Iran. Iraq agreed to end its WMD programs in 1991 but it wasn't until 1995 when an Iraqi defector, Saddam Hussein's brother in law who ran the program told the world about it that the world even knew it existed. Libya's program was much further along than anyone suspected when it voluntarily gave it up. And the world has proven utterly incapable of seeking out and destroying a terrorist organization like al Qaeda we know is trying to acquire them and would use them if they had them. This is the kind of idiotic lawyerthink and lawyerspeak that believes all it has to do is pass laws and the world will comply with them. The consequences of nuclear disarmament for those who could be attacked either by overwhelming conventional force or by secret nuclear weapons would be a disaster. I think many in governments like the US and Israel will not allow this to happen no matter what it takes to stop it. Their enemies have no intention of complying and will do whatever it takes to get them secretly. We've heard this same blather for decades. How about the EU starting by forcing Iran to give up its secret program by issuing an ultamatum that if it doesn't, it will mean war and the NATO and Russia will invade it to put an end to it? If it can't do that now, how will it do it when it is far weaker after it disarms itself?
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I would prefer the texts to the verbals Life is short vids are long and slow!
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If Obama can see a path towards a safer world then it should be pursued. It would be a useful boost to the finances if we don't have to blow £70 billion on Trident.
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