Word: agreement
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...tropical climes nagged him as much as his wife Lynne, whose zany behavior, like cursing out the Duke of Edinburgh, had turned them both into social pariahs. Add to that a bottle-of-gin-a-day drinking habit, and Burgess was pretty much pickled by September 1959, when an agreement was signed granting internal self-governance to Brunei, then a British protectorate. That month, Burgess one day crumpled like the empire around him onto the floor of his classroom. Later he would claim that he did it willfully, simply for existential kicks. But neurologists in London, where he was quickly...
...weapons - Britain, France and Russia. The truth is that Belgium, Germany, Italy and the Netherlands store nuclear bombs on their air-force bases and have planes capable of delivering them. There are an estimated 200 B-61 thermonuclear-gravity bombs scattered across these four countries. Under a NATO agreement struck during the Cold War, the bombs, which are owned by the U.S., can be transferred to the control of a host nation's air force in time of conflict. Twenty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Dutch, Belgian, Italian and German pilots remain ready to engage in nuclear...
These weapons are more than a historical oddity. They are a violation of the spirit of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) - the 1968 agreement governing nuclear weapons that provides a legal restraint to the nuclear ambitions of rogue states. Because "nuclear burden-sharing," as the dispersion of B-61s in Europe is called, was set up before the NPT came into force, it is technically legal. But as signatories to the NPT, the four European countries and the U.S. have pledged "not to receive the transfer ... of nuclear weapons or control over such weapons directly, or indirectly." That...
...failure to take serious steps toward nuclear disarmament - part of its obligation under the treaty. Last year a U.S. Air Force report found that the European bases storing the weapons were failing to meet security requirements to safeguard the weapons. These revelations cemented the unpopularity of the agreement. Belgium's Parliament had already unanimously requested that NATO withdraw the weapons, while a 2006 poll found that almost 70% of people in the four countries want the U.S. nukes withdrawn. In October, German Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle declared that Barack Obama's speech in Prague in April, in which...
...Iraq: By negotiating a Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) with the Iraqi government shortly before leaving office, Bush made Obama's job a lot easier - because that agreement sets a cast-iron deadline for withdrawing all U.S. troops. Obama may press for an earlier drawdown to free up resources for Afghanistan, but even if he doesn't, the SOFA requires that all U.S. troops be out of Iraq by the end of 2011. Iraq remains far from stable, and the Obama Administration is working through diplomatic channels to cajole the Iraqis into managing their ethnic and sectarian political struggles...