An Accident Waiting To Happen  

Noam Chomsky has written an analysis of the machinations going on around the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.

What's this got to do with peak oil ? I'll talk about the latest news on Iran later...

This week a United Nations conference of 180 signatory nations will review the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, commonly regarded as the foundation of any serious hope to avoid the catastrophe that is virtually guaranteed by the logic of nuclear weapons.

"The NPT has never seemed weaker or its future less certain," Thomas Graham, former US special representative for arms control and author of Common Sense on Weapons of Mass Destruction (2004), writes in this month’s Current Affairs.

If the treaty should fail in the coming weeks, Graham warns, a "nuclear nightmare world" may become reality.

Like other analysts, Graham recognises that the primary threat to the NPT is US government policy, though the other nuclear states share responsibility.

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Under current policies "a nuclear exchange is ultimately inevitable," Michael McGwire, former Nato planner, warns in the January journal of Britain’s Royal Institute of International Affairs.

"By comparison with global warming, the cost of eliminating nuclear weapons would be small," McGwire writes. "But the catastrophic results of global nuclear war would greatly exceed those of progressive climate change, because the effects would be instantaneous and could not be mitigated. The irony of the situation is that it is in our power to eliminate the threat of global nuclear war, but climate change cannot be evaded."

McGwire’s warnings are echoed on this side of the Atlantic by Sam Nunn, formerly a Democratic senator and chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, who is a leading figure in arms control and efforts to reduce the threat of nuclear war. "The chances of an accidental, mistaken or unauthorised nuclear attack might be increasing," Nunn wrote in The Financial Times in December. As a result of policy choices that leave "America’s survival (dependent on) the accuracy of Russia’s warning systems and its command and control ... we are running an unnecessary risk of an Armageddon of our own making."