Obama's meeting this week about nuclear terrorism raises the question about nuclear weapons getting in to the wrong hands. World leaders are meeting to find ways to stop terrorists from getting their grubby mits on fissile material to the detriment of the rest of us.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/8616855.stm
It's a laudable aim, obviously no one can disagree that their is a risk to us all from terrorists getting hold of nuclear material and there is a lot of it out there. The idea of a group of crazed individuals detonating even a small nuclear device in a modern city is pretty horrible.
But who should have their finger on the button? Currently we have a nice sane chap in the White House, any of the candidates for Prime Minister in the UK don't seem to spend much time frothing at the mouth, and relations are thawing with China and Russia.
It wasn't always like this, interesting article from the Boston Globe about a strategy that was seriously considered in the Nixon era of the Cold War. This makes it all the more certain that we should not be renewing our nuclear weapons and ought to be disarming, while we have reasonably responsible people in power at the moment, we can't assume that we always will.
http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2005/06/14/nixons_madman_strategy/
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