I thought Bush and his slam-dunk helpers were making the world safer! :sarcasm:.... But wait, this says....
America’s Broken Nuclear Promises Endanger NPT
Robin Cook, The Guardian
LONDON, 28 May 2005 — Not A day goes by without a member of Bush team lecturing us on the threat from weapons of mass destruction and assuring us of the absolute primacy they give to halting proliferation. How odd then that the review conference on the Non-Proliferation Treaty should break up with no agreed conclusions.
And how strange that no delegation should have worked harder to frustrate agreement on what needs to be done than the representatives of George Bush. The tragedy is that, for all its faults, the Non-Proliferation Treaty has hitherto been the best barrier put up by the international community against the spread of nuclear weapons. With the support of all but a handful of nations, the treaty provided a robust declaration that the development of nuclear weapons is taboo. That peer-group pressure has since resulted in more countries abandoning nuclear weapons than acquiring them.
South Africa disowned and dismantled its nuclear weapons after the collapse of the apartheid regime. New states to emerge from the Soviet Union, such as Ukraine, renounced the nuclear systems they inherited on their territory. Argentina and Brazil dropped the nuclear capability they were developing after negotiating a non- nuclear pact between themselves. Even Iraq turned out to have abandoned its nuclear weapons program, although in that particular case the success of the non-proliferation regime was more of an embarrassment to George Bush.
Previous review conferences, which come round every five years, have been used as an important opportunity to regenerate support for the treaty. Not this time. The full weight of Washington diplomacy was focused on preventing any reference in the agenda to the commitments the Clinton administration gave to the last review conference. As a result, the first two weeks of negotiation were taken up with arguing over the agenda, leaving barely one week for substantive talks. Robert McNamara, the former US defense secretary and no peacenik, has observed that if the people of the world knew “they would not tolerate what’s going on in the NPT conference”.
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http://www.arabnews.com/?page=7§ion=0&article=64473&d=28&m=5&y=2005