The "Other" Nuclear Option

Today in New York, delegates from almost two hundred nations will meet in a month-long conference to discuss "flaws" in the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. Just like the Senate, however, "the session appears deadlocked even before it begins," according to a David Sanger article in Sunday's New York Times. On Saturday, Iran said that it was going to begin enriching uranium for nuclear fuel as early as this week, and North Korea said that it was not coming back to the discussion table with the United States, calling Bush "a hooligan" and "a philistine whom we can never deal with." And then there was yesterday, when the totalitarian state test-fired a missile 65 miles out over the Sea of Japan. Probably not the best way to start a round of negotiations, in my opinion.

Sanger reports that - even aside from those eh, little hiccups - the conference was already off to a rather rocky start. The U.S., France, and Iran (what good company we're in) will oppose a proposal from the IAEA's head Mohammed ElBaradei to "impose a five-year moratorium on all new enrichment of uranium and reprocessing of plutonium." And other proposals were also meeting with little consensus support. Says Graham Allison, a Harvard nuclear expert "The administration wants to use the meeting to point to Iran and North Korea, and much of the rest of the world wants to use it to say that the Bush administration has flagrantly flouted its own responsibilities."

It would be sort of comical, if they weren't talking about massively-destructive weapons systems.