![]() It lasted from the launch of Sputnik in 1957 through Yuri Gagarin's first spaceflight in 1961 and dissipated along with the fear in the couple of years following the Cuban missile crisis in 1962. And the voters buy it, white heat, "National Plan" and all. He has 12 of them." That same year, 1964, the classless and up-to-the-minute Harold Wilson makes it part of his pitch to the electorate that the sad old, creaky old British economy should be supercharged with some Soviet-style scientific efficiency. "Simitsa works with refrigerated ultra-centrifuges. Two years later in the sequel to The Ipcress File, an eggyolk-stained has-been explains pityingly to Harry that there's no way a low-rent place like England is ever going to induce a Soviet scientist to defect. Out beyond the bedsits and the stale crumpets and the golf-club ties, there's a giant waking, and it's proof positive that the old order of things is shiftable, that there can be novelty under the sun. He's fighting it, but its existence is an asset to a grammar-school oik on the rise, like him. Not just because our Harry (as we might as well call him) is a British spy, keeping up with the communist enemy, but also because Harry, unlike the uppercrust nitwits he works for, is classless and intelligent and up-to-the-minute, and so in a menacing way at this moment in the 20th century does communism seem to be, thanks to the public image of its homeland the USSR.įor Harry, knowing about the Soviet Union is a way of keeping the sad old, creaky old, shabby-genteel world of England ironically in its place. And then he adds a copy of the Daily Worker. For the flight he buys the New Statesman and History Today. At the airport, Harry Palmer – not yet played by Michael Caine, not in fact even named in Len Deighton's original novel – stocks up on his reading. This, however, adds less to global security than is subtracted from it by the fact that there are two more nuclear powers (Pakistan, North Korea) and there will be a third if, as seems certain, Iran is determined to be one.1962. Today there are fewer nuclear weapons in the world than there were during the Cold War. ![]() Six years later he was seeking $348 billion for a 10-year modernization of the U.S. Speaking in Prague in 2009 at the dawn of his presidency - six months before he harvested the first purely anticipatory Nobel Peace Prize - Barack Obama embraced the goal of ridding the world of nuclear weapons. and British - and Russian - security guarantees. Not enough is made of this: In 1994, after the disintegration of the Soviet Union left Ukraine in possession of the world’s third-largest nuclear arsenal, it gave this up in exchange for U.S. pressure, dismantled his pursuit of nuclear weapons - and later was toppled by U.S.-backed insurgents. ![]() Much has been made of the relevance, as North Korea might see it, of the fact that after America toppled Iraq’s Saddam Hussein (which would not have happened if he had had nuclear weapons), Libya’s Moammar Gadhafi, responding to U.S. Although vicious, it has been methodical and more or less predictable. To wager is to put something at risk, but it is strange to say that North Korea’s regime takes risks recklessly. North Korea has repeatedly won this wager. It also has wagered that the weapons, when wedded as they soon might be to intercontinental ballistic missiles, extort from other nations, especially the United States, attention, and economic benefits intended to wean North Korea from the nuclear weapons that are the only reason anyone pays attention to it. The regime has wagered that nuclear weapons would guarantee the loyalty of the only possible internal threat to the family, the armed forces, and would immunize the nation from external threats. This regime has been run exclusively by and for the Kim family since 1948, during which time it has demonstrated an unswerving willingness to immiserate its people to ensure the regime’s survival. This question is central as the president undertakes to bring about the “complete, verifiable and irreversible” dismantling of the nuclear weapons program that has been the North Korean regime’s obsession for more than 60 years. Digital Replica Edition Home Page Close Menuīack when the Soviet Union had a first-rate nuclear arsenal but a ramshackle third-world economy that produced no consumer goods other than vodka and caviar that anyone elsewhere would buy, the nation was disparaged as “Upper Volta with rockets.” Today the question is: Would North Korea like to become Upper Volta without rockets and without exportable vodka or caviar?
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