Nuclear Disarmament

John Quiggin at Crooked Timber has something of a blinder of a post on nuclear disarmament.

Britain, France and Germany are busy trying to persuade Iran to abandon efforts to develop nuclear weapons, so far with little success. Cajolery and bribery having tried and failed, how about a bit of leadership by example? Two of the three parties in this effort have nuclear weapons of their own, even though they don’t face any conceivable threat of invasion[1]. Perhaps if they agreed to disarm themselves, the Iranians would be impressed enough to follow suit.

OK, I’m joking about Chirac and France. There’s no way that France is ready to admit that it is no longer a Great Power, and certainly Chirac is not the man to start the process. But, why shouldn’t Blair do something like this? It’s a perfect example of the non-ideological willingness to embrace radical alternatives to established dogma that New Labour is supposed to symbolise. And even if it didn’t produce any immediate payoff with Iran it would have to help the cause of non-proliferation in the medium term.

So let me see if I’ve got this logic straight. Iran, he accepts, is going for nuclear weapons. This is the country that refers to us as the Little Satan. (Or, to be precise, a significant chunk of their current ruling oligarchy does.) It’s a theocracy, not something conducive to working out the pros and cons of a course of action based on the results solely in this world.

And the reaction to their acquiring a weapon that could (note could, not would) do us serious damage is that we should give up that same weapon ourselves. And this would so impress the people who are, by the social democratic standards that John (and, in this case, I too agree with the thought) holds to, complete religious fruticakes (and thus by the standards that both of us share, not susceptible to rational reasoning) that they’ll abandon their plans.

Oh, and the French don’t have to do this because, well, because they’re French.

Umm, I think this plan might require just a touch more thought. Can’t quite put my finger on the exact problem myself, but I do have this niggly little feeling that there is one there.