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Topic: Chavez Says That He Too, Is Going Nuclear
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Rufus Polson
rabble-rouser
Babbler # 3308
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posted 07 October 2005 04:38 PM
Seems like he's playing some politics that rather need playing around the non-proliferation treaty.Thing about it is, that treaty, which the US signed, is not merely an agreement not to develop nuclear weapons. It contains a bunch of other stuff too--the quid pro quo, the reasons why on earth non-nuclear states would ever have wanted to sign. These are reasons which the US has preferred to ignore. Specifically, it sets out that peaceful development of nuclear power is allowed and if anything to be encouraged and enabled by signers with nuclear technologies. And, it specifies that signers with nuclear weapons commit to not using or threatening use against non-nuclear states. No nuclear blackmail. So, both the US' military policy documents, which seem to fairly straightforwardly set forth policies of first use against non-nuclear states which annoy them in any of a number of ways (including but not limited to those states using "weapons of mass destruction"), and the US' military development programs involving new nuclear weapons designed fairly specifically for use outside the context of nuclear wars (bunker busters, new generation tacnukes), and, most directly relevant to this case, the US' insistence on trying to block the attempts of signatories to develop nuclear power, all violate the treaty. Their insistence on taking away all incentives to non-nuclear states in the NPT, combined with the increasingly widespread perception that having actual nuclear weapons is the best way to stop US aggression, are a major stumbling block in the attempt to stop nuclear weapons from proliferating, and make a mockery of their claimed policy of being anti-proliferation. Chavez's public discussion of plans to pursue nuclear power seems like a gambit to get the NPT's support for the right to do so back on the table, and perhaps create an environment sufficiently full of nations doing precisely what Iran (or whoever the next target-of-the-day is) is doing that it becomes difficult for the US to get international co-operation with projects to turn countries into pariahs merely on that basis. As to the actual nuclear power itself, I'm not a big fan.
From: Caithnard College | Registered: Nov 2002
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