Scientific American has a cheery article on up their website right now, estimating the global impact of a nuclear war between India and Pakistan. The result: sunlight is reduced, the planet cools, and the growing season shortens. Drought ensues. The ozone layer erodes. Global agriculture is decimated.
This clip is a few days old, but worth passing along.
Spencer Ackerman says:
there’s no doubt that diplomatic outreach to Iran on the nuclear question suffers tremendously if Iran rejects the Vienna deal. Desired strategies have to bow to emergent realities, in the final analysis, and Iran just doesn’t appear like it will accept an eminently reasonable deal that would buy time for a diplomatic thaw. If this is indeed Iran’s formal response to Vienna, than sanctions look more likely now, and, frankly, appropriate.
The saga of the potential Iranian low-enriched uranium export deal continues. The New York Times reports that Iran is preparing a counter-offer, which may or may not include sending partial shipments of its low-enriched-uranium outside the country for further processing. This sort of back and forth is to be expected. But what caught my eye was this:
Secretary Clinton hit all the right notes about the International Atomic Energy Agency during her big non-proliferation speech yesterday.
Enhancing the IAEA’s capabilities to verify whether states are engaging in illicit nuclear activity is essential to strengthening the nonproliferation regime. The IAEA’s additional protocol, which allows for more aggressive, short-notice inspections should be made universal, through concerted efforts to persuade key holdout states to join.
Last night, Joshua Pollack of ArmsControlWonk wrote: "I do hope I won’t have to eat these words in a few hours, but here goes...the odds are quite good that the IAEA soon will be able to announce a deal between Iran and the American-Russian-French sides." Credit where credit is due.
I'm live-tweeting the Security Council meeting on non-proliferation and disarmament for UN Dispatch
Full text of President Obama's opening statement below the fold:
On Friday, Bloomberg reported that the United Arab Emirates seized a shipment of munitions, detonators, explosives and rocket-propelled grenades, headed from North Korea to Iran. The shipment was in direct violation of UN sanctions on Iran.
...the ship, owned by an Australian subsidiary of a French company and sailing under a Bahamian flag, was carrying 10 containers of arms disguised as oil equipment.
The council committee that monitors enforcement of UN sanctions against North Korea wrote letters to Iran and the government in Pyongyang asking for explanations of the violation, and one to the UAE expressing appreciation for the cooperation, the envoys said. No response has been received and the UAE has unloaded the cargo, they said.
This, as you might expect, also contributes to my ongoing nervousness over Burma and what it may have received from North Korea.