One effect of the Republic of the Marshall Islands (RMI) initiative is to throw a spotlight on the policies of the nuclear weapons states, which claim to be committed to a nuclear weapons free world while showing not the slightest willingness to reach that goal.
It is time for a closer look at the self-serving claim by nuclear weapons states that one of the greatest dangers is that of nuclear weapons being built or falling into the hands of ‘terrorist groups’.
Despite a terrible history with nuclear technology, corporate and state actors try to disconnect these mega disasters from the energy industry in order to "normalise" that which continues threatens our very existance.
Wilbert van der Zeijden is a political scientist and former Coordinator of the International Network for the Abolition of Foreign Military Bases. He works with the Dutch organisation IKV Pax Christi as researcher on nuclear issues
The United States' protracted fight against insurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan have raised the spectre of the Vietnam war. A review on recent literature on US wartime policies from Vietnam to Iraq and Afghanistan.
Israel's defence minister spends much more time in Washington than the nation's pro-"ethnic cleansing" foreign minister; no wonder when the US is committing hundreds of billions of US taxes to Israel's militarization.
The latest US government nuclear review shows that Obama's nuclear policy - rhetoric aside - is no different to previous administrations, seeking to retain nuclear weapons for the indefinite future and accepting scant constraint on how these weapons might be used.
Recently declassified 'top secret' documents show that Israel offered to sell nuclear warheads to South Africa’s white-racist apartheid regime in 1975.
Renewed U.S. efforts to bring sanctions against Iran are more backlash for being snubbed in favour of a tripartite deal with Turkey and Brazil than they are about nuclear proliferation. A UN Security Council coalition may be able to block U.S. pressure for sanctions that would only punish Iranian civilians.
The hyped up discourse at this month's nuclear summit centred on preventing the transfer of nuclear weapons to non-state actors or “irresponsible” state actors, thus skirting away from the primary problem – that of state terrorism in both its nuclear and non-nuclear forms.
The tensions over Iran's nuclear programme resemble the prelude to the Iraq war of 2003. But the new conditions of international politics could yet be turned to advantage in finding a solution.
The discourse of concern about nuclear non-proliferation by the biggest and most obscene of all nuclear culprits – the US – serves admirably as one line of attack on countries like Iran and as a disguise for the US’s deeper and wider motives in West and East Asia.
Zia Mian is a research scientist with the programme on science and global security, based at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University. He is a columnist of Foreign Policy in Focus, and contributor to TNI's Militarism and Globalisation project
