Pulling back from the nuclear precipice
by John Langmore.
'On 29 and 30 August 2007 six cruise missiles armed with nuclear warheads were loaded on a US Air Force plane, flown across the country and unloaded. For 36 hours no-one knew where the warheads were or even that they were missing.'
So reported a bipartisan US panel of American international relations celebrities including George Shultz and Henry Kissinger. The panel used this diabolical faux pas in the handling of nuclear weapons by their country as part of their case for a nuclear weapons free world.
The eminent Americans wrote in the Wall Street Journal on 15 January 2008 of 'the importance of the vision of a world free of nuclear weapons as a guide to our thinking about nuclear policies, and about the importance of a series of steps that will pull us back from the nuclear precipice'.
I couldn't agree more.
See the full article here.
John Langmore is Professorial Fellow at the University of Melbourne and National President of the UN Association of Australia. He was formerly a Labor MP and then a Director in the UN Secretariat in New York.
