Word: nuclearization
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Ever since the U.S. announced several years ago that it planned to spread its missile-defense system to Europe, Moscow has seen it as a ploy designed to emasculate its last remaining claim to superpower status: its nuclear might. In the two decades since the Soviet Union?s demise, its slide into international irrelevancy has only been slowed by its nuclear arsenal-and the recent rise in oil prices, which has enabled Russia to begin to climb out of its post-superpower depression...
...agreement in Prague for the radar's move, designed to warn of missiles headed toward Europe from Iran. "We face with the Iranians, and so do our allies and friends, a growing missile threat that is growing ever longer and ever deeper and where the Iranian appetite for nuclear technology to this point is still unchecked," Rice said after inking the pact. "It's hard for me to believe that an American president is not going to want to have the capability to defend our territory [and] the territory of our allies...
...Pentagon officials have wooed the Russians with enticements to get them to participate in the shield, saying that Tehran threatens Moscow as well as other Eurasian nations. Iran's newest missile, the intermediate range Shahab 3, can reach European capitals, although marrying it to a nuclear warhead remains a daunting technical challenge, U.S. officials say. Moscow has steadfastly declined to cooperate, saying the shield actually is a ploy to blunt Russia's own missile force. "This system is not designed to counter a Russian threat - this system is designed to counter what is an emerging threat from the Middle East...
...Which brings us back to the environment, the bummer indicator to end all bummer indicators. If nuclear annihilation was the apocalyptic mainstay through the decades of the Cold War, the eco-apocalypse has clearly taken its place. In some ways, the "Al Gore Scare Machine," as Kutner puts it, is more of the same. Like nuclear war - or like the more fantastical possibilities that Kutner imagines, such as a robot uprising or an unleashed super-plague - global warming will be an apocalypse of our own making. End times stories are tales of sin punished, and climate change is no different...
...sure that rhetoric is good for the environmental movement. Compared to the instant drama of nuclear war, climate change makes for bad apocalyptic porn, as anyone who saw The Day After Tomorrow knows. Even the worst-case scenarios say that climate change will happen gradually, at least on a human scale. (For climate history, it will occur in the blink of an eye.) Climate crusaders risk being seen as crying wolf should they forecast Armageddon, only to be met instead with a world that remains mostly the same in the short term, especially for the rich - but one that gets...