http://blogcritics.org/ A sinister cabal of superior bloggers on music, books, film, popular culture, politics, and technology - updated continuously. en Copyright 2005-2007 by the authors Sun, 20 Jul 2008 20:44:54 EDT http://backend.userland.com/rss Blogcritics.org custom software http://blogcritics.org/archives/2008/07/18/203804.php#comment-734116 Initially the USSR, only agreed in principle to a testing ban with no verification regime or protocols. Hence the Limited nuclear test ban treaty became the meeting ground defined as the current state. Is that correct? A bit of history according to wiki: "Furthermore, the Soviet Union proposed a testing ban along with a disarmament agreement dealing with both conventional and nuclear weapon systems. The Western nuclear powers and the Soviet Union traded positions on this issue over the course of negotiations in the 1950s through offers and counteroffers proposed under the aegis of the U.N. Disarmament Commission. It was only later during 1959 and into the early 1960s that the United States, the United Kingdom, and the Soviet Union agreed to detach a general agreement on nuclear disarmament from a ban on nuclear weapons testing." Your blurb suggests the U.S. is at fault for not ratifying a treaty that no one could agree on. Why would anyone do that? Wouldn't that render it a useless scrape of paper. Further, the USSR wanted everyone to beat their weapons into plow shares WITHOUT VERIFICATION. Given the less that halcyon attitude of the cold war I wouldn't suppose that it would have been labled a "good idea" -- in fact given that leadership on all accounts had just recently completed a global World War and the after effects, I could reasonable ascertain that those mettled leaders during that period would have excepted such a preposterous assumption on the USSR's part. Imagine their train of thought. The USSR wants everyone to disarm without verification... so they can do what? That would have been lunacy. And still would be. 734116@blogcritics.org Sun, 20 Jul 2008 20:44:54 EDT