Moon of Alabama Brecht quote
March 2, 2006
Legitimate Nukes

Bush in India is lauding relations with India now that India agreed to a ‘histioric’ nuclear control deal while being promising access to U.S. nuclear technology.

Turns out that India will only put a few of its older reactors, 65% of its nuclear energy output, under IAEA rules.

All the juicy stuff, the heavy water tritium breeders, the fast plutonium breeders under construction and the enrichment and conditioning plants, short – anything needed to extend the military nukes program, will stay outside of any international inspection.

Essentially, this deal blows apart any legitimacy of the non proliferation treaty 170 countries have signed. Whoever builds nukes will be rewarded with further nuke technology and fuel if the civil part of the program is dished out to IAEA control.

Congress will have to agree to this and maybe, after the Dubai disaster, there will be some sane Republicans who reject the deal. But India has some strong support.

Resident UN maniac John Bolton says, India and Pakistan did legitimately acquire nuclear weapons. They never signed the non proliferation treaty and therefore did not break it. Mr. Bolton has no trouble with such countries.

Within that logic any country not signing the human rights declaration and other senseless documents would of course "legitimately" torture, kill, commit genocide or whatever may come to its mind.

Quite an interesting view on legitimate behavior.

Comments

The Indians, like the Chinese, will play the weakened Bush for all he’s worth, while watching the empire slowly crumble.
American corporations’ profits would be in the ditch, they would go belly up now, if they didn’t have their Indian call centers. Who needs who more?
Outsourcing has become the garrotte around the imperialist’s necks. And all the while, the imperialists thought that control of global petroleum supplies would be their garrotte.
It would probably be fun to watch if I wasn’t intimately involved.

Posted by: Malooga | Mar 2 2006 22:39 utc | 1

According to my OS’s built-in dictionary (new Oxford American 2nd ed) “legitimate” means to conform to law or rules. If they didn’t sign a treaty (legally binding themselves to a commitment, rule or law) then their actions in reference to that treaty cannot be illegitimate. I can understand the sense of your argument, but on the legitimacy issue I don’t think you have a point.
Isn’t the U.S. is already working on “blowing apart” (nice pun, by the way) the non-proliferation treaty by its renewed research into tactical nuclear weapons?

Posted by: Pyrrho | Mar 3 2006 0:18 utc | 2

True, Amy covered this today on Democracy Now.

Posted by: Malooga | Mar 3 2006 0:40 utc | 3

“Legitimate” in this case means “consistent with our national interests”. Is there antoher definition in the world of international politics and power brokering?

Posted by: ralphieboy | Mar 3 2006 6:35 utc | 4

Why not start with google.
type in :- define: legitimacy
I’m sure we could debate the semantics of any word until the cows come home, but this “did it legitimately” line is a farce, as is Bolton, as is the US of A.

Posted by: DM | Mar 3 2006 6:40 utc | 5

A Guardian view: Spinning a web for IndiaUnderneath fuzzy talk of shared values, President Bush’s real concern is to hobble a potential rival

India’s energy policy has already come under serious pressure from America; the last petroleum minister had ambitious plans to build an Asian grid of oil and gas pipelines stretching from Ukraine to Japan. This plan, to be kickstarted by a pipeline from Iran to India via Pakistan, ran counter to Washington’s interests. Last month the minister lost the oil portfolio.
America is determined to ensure that the rise of India, and its larger neighbour China, will not mean the decline of the US. Washington may be prepared to concede that there might be bigger economies in the world, but aims to remain pre-eminent in industrial power.

Unlike the cold war, where America shut out its rivals from the world market and refused to trade with them, its policy in the coming decades is to entangle rising powers in a web of rules designed to favour itself. As India may find to its cost, getting into a hot embrace with Washington is easy; getting out may be much harder.

Posted by: b | Mar 3 2006 11:22 utc | 6

Industrial power? Do we even manufacture ipods here? C’mon. Is that a polite term for military force, which is the only way America is pre-eminent in the world.

Posted by: Malooga | Mar 3 2006 15:25 utc | 7

My thoughts echoed yours, Malooga. Our primary exports are weapons, movies/music, and our consumerist lifestyle. In such an environment, can the U.S. economy afford NOT to, as Gore Vidal would say, wage “perpetual war for perpetual peace”?

Posted by: Pyrrho | Mar 4 2006 19:00 utc | 8

The US has always been the great proliferator.
The US led the arms race with more devastating and more deadly nuclear technologies throughout the 1950’s, the 1970’s and 80’s, and we are embarking on a new weapons binge–the “bunker busters” now.
The NPT was always intended as a way of maintaining US control. This was not obvious at first–though clearly the Indians thought so–and back when America was more sparing and more careful in its lies, it was easy to believe the NPT was actually a step toward peace.
Well, now we know it was never anything of the sort, but what of that. Avoiding nuclear war now depends on the US not wanting to start one, but that too has changed: The pro-(nuclear) war faction that was kept down in the 50’s and just barely held at bay in the 70’s is now near ascendacy. In the Bush administration, launching nuclear war now counts as a serious policy alternative.
The NPT is deader than dead, though the lies it spawned continue to be useful . . .

Posted by: Gaianne | Mar 5 2006 7:06 utc | 9