Promoting Proliferation  

George Monbiot comments on the wreckage of the nuclear non-proliferation treaty. Congratulations Mr Bolton - next job - wrecking the UN.

Here then is how it works. If you acquire the bomb and threaten to use it, you will qualify for American exceptionalism by proxy. Could there be a greater incentive for proliferation?

The implications have not been lost on other states. “India is looking after its own national interests,” a spokesman for the Iranian government complained on Wednesday. “We cannot criticise them for this. But what the Americans are doing is a double standard. On the one hand, they are depriving an NPT member from having peaceful technology, but at the same time they are cooperating with India, which is not a member of the NPT.” North Korea (and this is the only good news around at the moment) is currently in its second week of talks with the US. While the Bush administration is doing the right thing by engaging with Pyongyang, the lesson is pretty clear. You could sketch it out as a Venn diagram. If you have oil, but aren’t developing a bomb (Iraq), you get invaded. If you have oil but are developing a bomb (Iran) you get threatened with invasion, but it probably won’t happen. If you don’t have oil, but do have the bomb, the US representative will fly to your country and open negotiations.

The world of George Bush’s imagination comes into being by government decree. As a result of his tail-chasing paranoia, assisted by Tony Blair’s cowardice and Manmohan Singh’s opportunism, the global restraint on the development of nuclear weapons has, in effect, been destroyed in the course of a few months. The world could now be more vulnerable to the consequences of proliferation than it has been for 35 years. Thanks to Bush and Blair, we might not go out with a whimper after all.