Link Banana

This is very wonky, but someone might be interested in it. After all, I was. The latest New York Review of Books has a proposal to solve the Iran nuclear problem.

As a solution to the nuclear dispute, the US and its allies should propose turning Iran’s national enrichment efforts into a multinational program. Under this approach, the Iranian government would agree to allow two or more additional governments (for example, France and Germany) to participate in the management and operation of those activities within Iran. In exchange, Iran would be able to jointly own and operate an enrichment facility without facing international sanctions. Resolving the nuclear issue would, in turn, make it possible for Iran to enjoy a variety of other benefits such as membership in the World Trade Organization (WTO), increased trade with Europe, access to badly needed equipment for its aviation and energy industries, and perhaps normalized relations with the United States.

Joseph Corincione’s essay on nuclear proliferation gives a good introduction to the topic, and offers this upbeat note at the end.

For the first time since the initial efforts of the Truman administration in the 1940s, a movement to eliminate nuclear weapons has developed not from the political left but from the “realist” center of the security elite. This promises to give the cause of arms reduction a political plausibility and importance that previous efforts, including the broad-based Nuclear Freeze Movement of the 1980s, have lacked. Whether these efforts will succeed in their ultimate goal is far from clear; but if the movement can be sustained and gather wider support, this could dramatically reduce threats of nuclear war and nuclear terrorism—the greatest security threats now facing the United States.

The Economist begins its critical look at the status of Iran and the nuclear issue by strongly criticizing America’s intelligence officials. The whole piece is, as that opening hints, still (rightly) concerned about the prospects of a nuclear Iran.

IF YOU are locked eyeball to eyeball with an adversary as wily as Iran, it does not make much sense to do something that emboldens your opponent and sows defeatism among your friends. But that, it is now clear, is precisely what America’s spies achieved when they said in December that, contrary to their own previous assessments, Iran stopped its secret nuclear-weapons programme in 2003.

The Economist has a speculative look at how the new government in the Marshall Islands could create significant trouble for a country that scantly knows they exist.

FIFTY years have passed since America ended nuclear testing in the Marshall Islands. But its 52,500 people are still wrestling with the legacy. On January 7th they ditched the pro-American administration led by Kessai Note and elected instead a government backed by disgruntled chiefs and senators from the nuclear-affected atolls. The new leaders are unhappy with their nation’s “Compact of Free Association” (CFA) with the United States. They want to press the claims of nuclear victims on the islands of Bikini, Rongelap, Utrik and Enewetak. They are also considering opening diplomatic relations with China. […]

America paid $270m in compensation to nuclear victims under the first phase of the CFA (1986-2001), insisting that was a full and final arrangement. The new government claims this was far too little to compensate for the ill-health, birth defects and deaths suffered, or to cover the costs of cleaning up the damaged islands. The 67 tests conducted in the northern Marshalls between 1946 and 1958 released radioactive iodine said to be 150 times worse than the contamination from the nuclear disaster at Chernobyl in 1986. The new foreign minister claims that rising temperatures have caused irradiated bunkers once thought safe to leak, and that impoverished islanders are exporting toxic metals from their poisoned atolls.