Summary
- Tumultuous Iran elections leave future of P-5+1talks unclear
- Iran's nuclear chief resigns
In this issue: BASIC and Getting to Zero ; Commitments to disarmament and arms control ; Country reports ; Missile defense
Gordon Brown’s roadmap towards the NPT Review Conference appears under-developed in key areas.
As a follow up to the July 6 announcement on the START Follow-on Treaty, today the White House provided the full text of the Joint Understanding (JU) between Russia and the United States.
The JU acknowledges prominent areas of difficulty related to missile defense and conventional warheads on strategic delivery vehicles by calling for:
In conjunction with the Obama-Medvedev Summit in Moscow today, the United States and Russia reached a Joint Understanding (White House press release) for establishing new limitations on the number of strategic nuclear warheads and delivery vehicles under the START Follow-on Treaty.
During the past month or two, getting to zero has seemed to resemble the early phase of the butterfly effect of Chaos Theory. The thinking goes as follows: the movement of air caused by a butterfly flapping his wings could contribute to the formation of a hurricane, or other major weather event. Without that one extra factor of the flapping of the butterfly's wings, the event may not have occurred. Of course, the flapping of a butterfly's wings alone cannot cause a weather event.