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The semi-exempt from reality Washington Post buries the story on page 12, though not in the Style section. Also, the Post manages to quote the same fellow quoted by the FT, so copycat is good in this instance.
While the Post deems Hilary Clinton’s outburst on Iran as big news, where has the Post buried the bigger story on the IAEA refusal of a European demand to respond to Iran’s flouting the UN non-proliferation agreement. IAEA ElBaradei, fresh from a Peace Nobel, showed his true allegiance by taking the UN bureaucratic hedgehog mode, saying the report will not be due until next March.
But NONE OF THIS IS NEWS AT ALL IN THE NYT? Is Pinch incommunicado on one of his Harleys and Buffalo Bill Keller unable to make a judgment call on what is news?
The American MSM is silly and shallow and wilfully prejudiced [to the left] compared with the British examples of the Financial Times, which last year supplanted the NYT as the most influential in the world, and the Economist, which is packed with news that is relevant to people who live outside the US East and Left Coasts.
And to M. Chirac, thank you for a wake-up call.
The FT story follows, in case the links on this blog fail:
In a high-profile speech on Thursday to update military officers on France’s strategic doctrine, Mr Chirac said the end of the cold war had removed neither the threats to peace nor the justification for a nuclear deterrent.
Citing the dangers of regional instability, growing extremism and the proliferation of nuclear, biological and chemical weapons, Mr Chirac said France’s nuclear deterrence remained the fundamental guarantee of its security.
Although Mr Chirac conceded that the country’s nuclear arsenal could not deter fanatical terrorists, he said it could help prevent states sponsoring those terrorists.
“The leaders of states who use terrorist means against us, as well as those who would consider using, in one way or another, weapons of mass destruction, must understand that they would lay themselves open to a firm and adapted response on our part,” he said. “This response could be a conventional one. It could also be of a different kind.”
Mr Chirac’s comments come in the midst of deteriorating European and American relations with Iran, which last week indicated it would restart research into a nuclear programme. Analysts said Mr Chirac’s comments could directly affect the ability to negotiate a settlement with an increasingly belligerent Tehran.
“It expands the role of nuclear weapons and it makes it more difficult to argue against an Iranian nuclear weapons programme,” said John Wolfsthal, a nuclear arms expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. “It reaffirms the discriminatory nature of the current system.” Opposition politicians in France denounced Mr Chirac’s comments as irresponsible.
France, which acquired an autonomous nuclear deterrent in 1964, spends almost ?3bn ($3.6bn, £2bn) a year, or just under 10 per cent of its defence budget, to maintain its nuclear deterrent, including about 350 warheads. However, some politicians have questioned its relevance and complained about its cost in a post-cold war world.
Fran?ois Heisbourg, director of the Paris-based Foundation for Strategic Research, said Mr Chirac was signalling that France’s nuclear weapons were now aimed at political rather than demographic targets, the objective being to deter the command and control capacity of rogue states rather than to threaten to annihilate cities in the old Soviet bloc.
“This is a significant shift of emphasis that is made possible by the enhanced accuracy of nuclear weapons,” he said. “It also pulls together the nuclear deterrent with the issue of state-sponsored terrorism. That is a departure from the traditional French stance, which has been to emphasise the general nature of its vital interests.”
However, Mr Heisbourg said the new doctrine could raise a potential credibility problem – what yardstick would be used to measure a response to a terrorist attack? He said the president’s speech could also influence the international debate surrounding Iran’s nuclear programme. “It is rather difficult to persuade someone to renounce the acquisition of nuclear weapons when you are explaining how wonderful they can be,” he said.
Mr Chirac said France’s nuclear deterrent also formed a “core element in the security of the European continent” as the 25 members of the European Union developed a common security and defence policy.
His warning that nuclear weapons could be used against terrorist states puts him more in line with the US’s new controversial nuclear posture, unveiled in 2002, which also cites nuclear arms as a credible deterrent to rogue states armed with non-conventional weapons.
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