Look, Ma! A mushroom cloud!

Western governments must take seriously the possibility of terrorists exploding a nuclear bomb as the necessary materials and know-how become easier to acquire, security analysts argue in two new reports. Read more…

Saddam is guilty. I guess he's sorry now that all that chumminess with Rummy back in the day didn't pay off. Or something. As most of the blogosphere has noted, ah, such timing. So....yawn inducing. Meanwhile, we're still not winning in Iraq or Afghanistan, police forces in both countries are a joke, and military and political leadership continues to live upon the River in Egypt.

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Interesting historical parallels from Steve Coll in the always essential New Yorker:

The election season required a shouting match about whose negotiating tactics with North Korea were the most doomed. Certainly the Bush Administration contributed more than its share to the final result. By invading Iraq and failing there, it depleted every variety of American power fighting one enemy that possessed no nuclear weapons, while emboldening a second that was building a store of them, and a third, Iran, that has evidently decided that it must get some, and soon.

Nice codpiece ya got there, Commander!

The Administration’s fitful attempts at nuclear diplomacy have been undermined by its proud contempt for multilateral-treaty regimes. Its arms-control specialists, such as John Bolton, fantasize that they can stop nuclear proliferation the way the British Navy once tried to stop the slave trade: through military force and interdiction at sea. Moral suasion and sustained bargaining, the proven mechanisms of nuclear restraint in addition to deterrence, interest this Administration much less. Perhaps North Korea would have tested its nuclear bomb even if Bush had, from the outset of his Presidency, embraced the vision of nuclear abolition articulated by Ronald Reagan, or if he had advanced the policies of his father, and of Bill Clinton, by using American influence to negotiate actively to diminish the role of nuclear arms as instruments of state power. We’ll never know.

The more important question now is whether we are witnessing the end of the formal nuclear order defined by the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, which was opened for signature in 1968.

Well, who cares? When we put nukes and other wunderwaffen in space (see the PNAC) "we"--and by "we," I do not mean us--can do whatever the fuck we want! Right? Read more…