A farewell to nuclear arms. MOSCOW, Russia - Twenty-five years ago this month, I sat across from Ronald Reagan in Reykjavik, Iceland to negotiate a deal that would have reduced, and could have ultimately eliminated by 2000, the fearsome arsenals of nuclear weapons held by the United States and the Soviet Union. For all our differences, Reagan and I shared the strong conviction that civilised countries should not make such barbaric weapons the linchpin of their security. Even though we failed to achieve our highest aspirations in Reykjavik, the summit was nonetheless, in the words of my former counterpart, “a major turning point in the quest for a safer and secure world.” The bomb, civilisation, and the human race. New York, NY - Not so many decades ago, many around the world hoped that the great civilisations and traditions of the non-European world would do better than the West when it came to nuclear weapons.
This was part of a larger idea that the formally colonised peoples would change the character of modern statecraft. They would lead the human race out of the murderous depths of imperialism, total war and genocide into which the West had taken it. 'Sacred values' and the development of nuclear weapons. Beneath the intensifying crisis over Iran's nuclear programme is a startling disconnect between what the two sides perceive to be the target of the West's sanctions.
To the US and its allies, the sanctions aim to cripple the Iranian economy to the point that Iran's government will realise the error of developing nuclear weapons. To Iranians, however, the sanctions represent an encroachment on their country's sovereignty over an issue - nuclear energy - they believe goes to the core of national identity.