Bad Aim

The United States and some allies invited the highest representatives of around sixty countries to South Korea to discuss the nuclear question.

Nothing could be more urgent and appropriate, we agree. Perhaps, however, the selection should have been less elitist, because the nuclear problem is universal. So universal, in fact, that if one of those countries that keep such weapons were to press the button, few would remain to tell the tale – and this only if there were conditions to do so.

Let’s say that it was a laudable initiative, sharing the presupposition that those present were few, but good, operating under conditions to draw possible paths so that “military” or “civilian” nuclear problems would not be transformed into a plague that menaces humanity.

To summarize what happened – in an evaluation as cool and as free from contaminating effects as possible – one can verify that the big summit was all an act, an act of propaganda and old-school threats that takes us back to the less polite times of the Cold War. When compared to the agenda of intentions and decisions, everything missed the mark of what was absolutely necessary to do these days. The summit was a conclave in which those with the atomic bomb, as well as those who practice all manner of malfeasance in their shadows – we cite the cases of Israel, Turkey, Qatar and Saudi Arabia, for reasons that are currently obvious – launched threats of destruction against those who, according to them, want to enter the club. The case of Israel is, however, particularly notable because it participated in the meeting in two capacities: As a nuclear country and as a country that says it does not have the bomb, and everyone else pretends to believe.

The countries present declared themselves worried about the use of atomic weapons by terrorists. Concerns surfaced in relation to al-Qaida and other Islamic fundamentalist groups. The concerns sounded strange, or false, because participating in the summit were those countries who supported these groups, especially Saudi Arabia, and it is well-known that there are individual alliances between these bands and various sponsors of the meeting, for example Libya and even Syria.

The major failing of this meeting, however, was the praise for the International Atomic Energy Agency – visibly manipulated and discredited, as recent documents demonstrate – and the inability to directly confront the problem of civil nuclear energy a year after the Fukushima tragedy, which showed that there are no secure nuclear centers, however many simulations are done on computers.

The moral of the story: The summit in South Korea served to satisfy and reinforce the keepers of the atomic energy monopoly – civil and military. It did not take a step on the road to worldwide nuclear security.