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This Week: WMDFZ Middle East

Finnish diplomat Jaakko Laajava starts a new job this week.

Finland, the cradle of the Helsinki process that played a vital role in ending the Cold War, is no stranger to international mediation. But this could be the toughest assignment yet for Finland’s undersecretary of state at the foreign ministry, who was named last Friday to be facilitator of the 2012 conference on a zone free of nuclear weapons and other weapons of mass destruction in the Middle East.

This Week: Reykjavik 25 years

It was cold, wet and windy but it was uniquely exhilarating. The Reagan-Gorbachev summit in Reykjavik, which I covered 25 years ago as a reporter, produced 24 hours of adrenalin-fuelled highs and lows as the Soviet and US leaders raised hopes of a historic agreement on a nuclear weapons free world only to spectacularly dash them.

This Week – NATO Ministerial

NATO’s defence ministers meet in Brussels this week (Wednesday-Thursday), and will discuss a number of priorities for NATO. Longer term planning and the Deterrence and Defense Posture Review (DDPR) is likely to be eclipsed, in public at least, by Colonel Gaddafi’s forces’ last desperate attempts to resist the transfer of power and the role NATO has in the coming months, by the plans for withdrawal from Afghanistan and by the debates over NATO’s missile defense plans and proposals for cooperation with Russia.