Friday, October 14, 2005

Mushroom Cloudy Thinking

Joe Conason has a great column today on the significance of the awarding of the Nobel Prize to Mohammed ElBaradei and the IAEA. I wont go into all the details (click the link below for the full article) but want to post a couple of excerpts that struck me.

"The deeper meaning of the Nobel committee's decision extends, however, well beyond that celebrated debate -- with clear implications for the misconceived and dangerous nuclear policies of the Bush administration. Failing to control the proliferation of nuclear weapons will someday lead to consequences even more dire than the worst hurricane or earthquake. Yet the geniuses now in charge of the world's most powerful government have consistently botched and undermined that effort.

...

To any government with reason to worry about the intentions of more powerful states, the lesson of this episode is obvious: Build nuclear weapons and the rest of the world will leave you alone. Fail to build nuclear weapons, and you will live at the mercy of those who have them. The corollary was equally plain: Any powerful government -- such as China or Russia, for example -- can use the suspicion of nuclear proliferation to invade a troublesome neighbor or rival.

...

If the Bush administration were truly concerned about the spectral "mushroom cloud" that it conjured up to frighten us while planning to attack Iraq, its approach to nuclear issues would have been different from the very beginning."

http://www.workingforchange.com/article.cfm?ItemID=19747

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