Posted: 22 Nov 2009 08:57 PM PST
by Julian Ku
I don’t know what I think about this report by two Switzerland-based NGOs analyzing a number of popular video games for their consistency with rules of international humanitarian law (h/t kotaku). Apparently, many video games encourage blatant and unrepentant violations of the laws of war.
...
There is something to this. Check out this photo from Call of Duty 4. Looks like a war crime to me. Do we need international law requiring video game makers to follow international law in their video games? Sure, as long as this resulted in lucrative consulting gigs for law professors….
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December 4, 2009
Time Runs Out On U.S.-Russia Arms Control Treaty
MICHELE NORRIS, host: The 1991 Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty expires tonight. That's the landmark arms control treaty that brought the Cold War nuclear arms race to an end. The U.S. and Russia have been working round-the-clock to replace the treaty with a new one, but that work is not yet completed. In the meantime, both governments say they will abide by the terms of the current treaty. NPR's Mike Shuster explains.
MIKE SHUSTER: U.S. and Russian negotiators have been working for months on a replacement for the START treaty, especially some way to extend key verification measures that have allowed each side to maintain a timely and accurate accounting of the strategic nuclear weapons the other side has deployed. The START treaty called for the reduction of each side's deployed strategic nuclear arsenal on long-range bombers, missiles and submarines to about 6,000. Those targets were reached years ago, and now the U.S. and Russia each deploy less than 2,000 strategic nuclear warheads. But maintaining the verification measures of the START treaty is very important to the Obama administration. It was on the agenda today when Secretary of State Hillary Clinton met with her Russian counterpart, Sergei Lavrov, in Brussels.
Secretary HILLARY CLINTON (State Department): We always knew this would be very difficult. Remember, the prior administration didn't believe in arms control treaties.
(Soundbite of laughter)
Sec. CLINTON: And so we were pretty much starting from scratch. And these are highly complex, technical negotiations.
SHUSTER: The George W. Bush administration did sign the Moscow Treaty that brought the nuclear arsenal of both sides down to current levels, but President Obama has mapped out far more ambitious goals for the reduction of nuclear weapons. Clinton explained the rationale for this in a speech on arms control this fall.
Sec. CLINTON: Clinging to nuclear weapons in excess of our security needs does not make the United States safer, and the nuclear status quo is neither desirable nor sustainable. It gives other countries the motivation or the excuse to pursue their own nuclear options.
SHUSTER: Russia and the U.S. have already agreed to new levels for nuclear warheads, roughly 1,600. That turns out to have been the easy part.
Verification has been one of the hard parts, in particular, reciprocal verification. The U.S. stopped making long-range missiles years ago, and Russian personnel who monitored that production in the U.S. returned home. But the Russians continue to produce long-range missiles at a facility at Votkinsk on the Volga River, about 800 miles east of Moscow.
With the expiration of the START treaty tonight, about 20 American monitors at Votkinsk were set to leave. Arms control experts argue that even though the U.S. and Russia are no longer enemies or adversaries, verification measures like this are still very important.
Mr. JOSEPH CIRINCIONE (President, Ploughshares Fund): The lower you go on nuclear weapons, the more verification matters.
SHUSTER: Joe Cirincione is president of the Ploughshares Fund.
Mr. CIRINCIONE: Once you start going down to, say, a thousand or a few hundred deployed weapons, then it really starts to matter. You want to be sure that you can account for those weapons, that there's no secret stock of weapons that the other side is using, that there's no breakout capability where one side could suddenly double or triple the number of weapons they have.
SHUSTER: The possibility of miscalculation is another good reason to maintain verification measures, says Jeffrey Lewis, who runs the Web site armscontrolwonk.com.
Mr. JEFFREY LEWIS (Armscontrolwonk.com): We do constantly see on the Russian side and on the American side ridiculous overestimates of each other. You know, the Russians think the United States is 10 feet tall, and sometimes we think the same thing about them.
SHUSTER: There are other issues that still divide the U.S. and Russia. There are disagreements about how deployed nuclear warheads and their delivery systems are counted. Russia wants to include missile defenses. The U.S. does not.
Despite the expiration of the START treaty tonight, it looks like the U.S. and Russia will continue working on these issues. Any new treaty to replace START will have to be ratified by the U.S. Senate and the Russian Duma.
Mike Shuster, NPR News.
