U.S., France, U.K. Support Consensus-Based CD? Please . . .
Posted: March 6, 2013 Filed under: Nuclear 1 CommentThis is such B.S. Do you really think that if this initative was something the U.S., U.K. and France were actually interested in pursuing, that they would let the lack of complete consensus in the international community stand in their way? Anybody remember the PSI? The 2003 Iraq war? Coalitions of the wiling are their proven M.O when they want something done but can’t convince everyone/anyone else it’s a good idea. This is just straight stonewalling, and not wanting to progress the disarmament agenda, and so objecting to any process that might actually put pressure on them to produce real disarmament results. For those interested, in my 2011 book I go through an analysis of Article VI of the NPT in detail and conclude that all five NPT nuclear weapon states are in breach of their Article VI obligations. And things like this are a big part of it.
Arms Control Law 
Welcome to the real world where power overwhelms law in every case.
You got nukes? No one can force you NOT to have nukes. It’s that simple.
The one thing preventing nuclear proliferation is the fact that the vast majority of countries have no tactical or strategic use cases for nukes. The only countries which have nukes today are countries that were under threat by nations who either already had nukes or who had threats from nations with vastly larger conventional forces. This is the case for the EU nations (threatened by the Soviet Union), Pakistan (threatened by India), India (threatened by China), North Korea (threatened by the US), China (threatened by the US), Russia (threatened by the US) and the US – the original threat to everyone. No one else needs nukes.
The only time Iran considered developing nukes was when they were afraid Saddam had a program. Otherwise Iran doesn’t even care about Israel and the US arsenals since they know they can never match them and neither country will ever use them in a first strike due to geopolitical effects in the international community.
Everyone else has never bothered with nukes because they don’t need them in their geopolitical region. Japan is under the US umbrella so is protected from China and North Korea. No one in South America or Africa needs nukes. Most of Asia doesn’t need them. Most of the Middle East doesn’t need them because, like Iran, they can never match the Israeli arsenal or the US umbrella over Israel.
The sole exception is Israel. Israel had vastly better conventional forces than any or all of its neighbors put together. And Israel is under the US nuclear umbrella (not that there are nuclear threats to Israel anyway) But Israel wanted nukes to be able to further threaten their neighbors AND to blackmail the Western powers to allow it to do whatever it wants in the region (an example being the threat to nuke the Aswan dam in 1973 to force the US to rearm Israel.)
So we can quite logically say that without the US first development of nukes and Israel’s possession of nukes, nuclear proliferation and disarmament would not even be an issue.