« Friday Pot Blogging
Main
Branding the Other Guy »
October 15, 2006
Nuclear Proliferation and Policy
Simply put, there is a relationship between nuclear proliferation and major power policy.
Joseph Cirincione, Senior Vice President for National Security and International Policy at the Center for American Progress, has an opinion piece in the Los Angeles Times that deserves everyone's attention. Here is a sample but please read the whole thing.
At the heart of the problem is the strategy George W. Bush chose, which rejects international treaties as the solution to proliferation. He and his advisors saw these agreements as limiting U.S. flexibility and viewed the United Nations and other global gatherings as arenas where the world's Lilliputians could tie down the American Gulliver.Bush scuttled the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, walked away from the nuclear test ban treaty secured by President Clinton, opposed efforts to enforce the treaty banning biological weapons, mocked the U.N. inspectors before the Iraq war and sent low-level officials to critical negotiations, including last year's NPT conference. The world now believes that the chief architect of the global nonproliferation system has abandoned its creation.
Instead, the administration preferred to rely on U.S. military might and technology, such as anti-missile systems, to protect the United States. Rather than negotiate treaties to eliminate weapons, it forged a strategy to eliminate the regimes that might use them against us. The Bush team felt they knew who the bad guys were, and they aimed to get them — one by one.
But the strategy has backfired. Both Iran and North Korea accelerated their programs, making more progress in the last five years than they had made in the previous 10. Now North Korea's test threatens to trigger an Asian nuclear-reaction chain that could prompt South Korea, Taiwan and even Japan to reconsider their nuclear options.
Control of the spread of the nuclear weapons is almost completely in the hands of those that currently have such weapons. As long as the major powers (and today there is really only one such power) signal each other and the rest of the world that having nuclear weapons is of strategic importance then others will want them too. They will feel a need to have them both as a symbol of national prestige and out of fear of attack by those who do have them. One thing that I think The U.S. should do is begin reducing the absolute size of the U.S. nuclear arsenal. It should be done very publicly. The U.S should make it clear that we have no need for the level of over kill we now enjoy. When we reach numerical parody with whomever is next, presumably Russia, we should open one on one negotiations with them to move each countries total stockpile down to whomever is next and so on. I wouldn't spend too much time worrying about which weapons to keep and which to get rid of. Priority should be given to ease and speed of dismantling and destructing them. While this is going on, we should actively work with the UN to promote the success of the NPA and a new Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty rather than try to scuttle what is (or was) in place. In addition, we should put direct pressure on our allies Israel and Pakistan to join the NPA. We should work with and through others to encourage India and North Korea to do the same.
The world is far less safe due to bad policy. But bad policy can be fixed.
Posted by Duane Smith at October 15, 2006 10:37 AM | Read more on Current Events |
Trackback Pings
TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.telecomtally.com/mt/mt-tb.cgi/1903
Comments
Sorry, comments are closed for this post.
Send me an email if it is important.