US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice told the General Assembly at the beginning of its session on Saturday that countries like Iran threatened the "effectiveness of the global non-proliferation regime".Actually, physics threatens the non-proliferation regime. The problem is, as I've written before, that under the current non-proliferation regime, you can get 90-95% of the way towards having a nuclear bomb - without violating a single letter of international law. (See Japan.) Part of this is because the physics we invoke to make weapons are often the same physics we invoke to make electricity.
In a wider view, this is why we should be working towards a nuclear-less world. So long as the electrical uses remain, nuclear technology will have a veneer of legitimacy that it doesn't deserve. Get rid of the civilian uses, and it's much easier to prosecute - if a country is building a nuclear reactor, then by definition it's looking for trouble.
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