Emphasis, as always, added.
The UN Temperance League
“We make the modest proposal that the negotiating rooms should in future be an inebriation-free zone,” Joseph Torsella, deputy U.S. ambassador to the United Nations for management and reform, told the General Assembly’s budget committee.
“While my government is truly grateful for the strategic opportunities presented by some recent past practices, let’s save the champagne for toasting the successful end of the session, and do some credit to the Fifth Committee’s reputation in the process,” he said.
An annual vote of the budget committee … tends to come at Christmas time in late December. The debates often become heated marathon sessions that run into the early hours of the morning.
Diplomats who participate [in] sessions have told Reuters that it is not unusual to see delegates showing visible signs of having imbibed heavily.
U.S. urges ban on drunk diplomats at UN budget debates, Reuters
Reserve First Use of Nukes for Hackers Along With Nuclear and Biochemical Weapon Attacks!
The United States should be prepared to use every military option, including nuclear retaliation, in response to a huge computer attack, an independent Department of Defense task force said.
… “It would have to be extreme,” Paul Kaminski, chair of the Science Board and a member of the President’s Intelligence Advisory Board, said about the kind of attack that might trigger a nuclear response. “It would have to be the kind of attack that we would judge would be threatening our survival.”
Well, as long as it’s extreme.
Report: US Should Keep Nuke Option for Cyberattack, Andrew Conte, Pittsburgh Tribune-Review
Would Sanctions Drive Iran from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty?
Enmity with Iran is deeply institutionalized in the US political system. This explains many lost opportunities to improve relations, as well as the swiftness with which Obama’s initial diplomatic failure was translated into a determination to sanction the Iranian economy into ruins. Given Obama’s unprecedented success on the sanctions front, it might just be too tempting to keep Iran on its knees until it capitulates or its regime changes. [But] Absent a way out of the current predicament, Iran has little to lose in withdrawing from the Treaty of Nuclear Non-Proliferation.
With Iran posed to be a regional player, US should find ways to repair relations, Tytti Erästö, Global Post
Be There or Be Square: the Annual Nuclear Deterrence Summit
At this conference, like the previous ones, the most tedious aspect is the fundamentalist flavor of much of the discourse – the intense intellectual and psychological attachment and rehearsal of a nebulous and highly abstract construct. … Nuclear Deterrence. … It reminded me of Santa Claus, or the Tooth Fairy, or their evil twins. … The nuclear tooth fairy leaves billions of dollars under the pillow each and every year.
… This year, like other years, aging cold warriors are brought forth to lead the hosannas, renew the faith, recall the glory days when the enterprise was running on all eight cylinders (when it was as large and “important” as the U.S. automobile industry itself) and contribute their ideas as to how to keep faith alive in an age of doubt.
Reflections on the Deterrence Summit, Greg Mello, the Los Alamos Study Group