[BBKing]

f country A gives up their nuclear deterrent unilaterally, then what is to stop country B holding them to ransom? "Agree to our demands, or we will flatten your capital city in 45 minutes."

Or, to put it another way, get nukes and you're safe. Seems to be a recipe for proliferation. Iran, Libya, North Korea, Pakistan, Indai and Iraq (who only pretended to after 1991) seem to be acting perfectly logically, particularly given that, from their point of view, they're dealing with unstable, irrational people armed with WMDs and apparently now the desire to use them.

Oh, and that report from the NATO Generals? Neoconservative stooges, it turns out. There's some small print that says:

"to assist in the writing process, the authors were joined by Benjamin Bilski, who lectures in philosophy at the Faculty of Law of the University of Leiden in the Netherlands; and by Douglas Murray, an author and Director of the Centre for Social Cohesion in Westminster."

Murray wrote something called 'Neoconservatism - Why We Need It', which rather gives the game away. The thing about neocons is that they're always hysterical about some Great Threat and always wrong about it. File under WPB.

There's more:

The report by the five former NATO generals was financed through "generous sponsorship" of the Dutch Noaber Foundation. The foundation is the private fiefdom of the Christian fundamentalist Paul Baan, a failed 1990s "new market" entrepreneur.

Kerching. Another tick in the neo-con box. Bilski, as it turns out, is another Dutchman who has previous for smearing Islam, the current neocon Great Threat. I think I spot a pattern here.

I therefore conclude that it's a propaganda front designed to con people into
accepting a NATO that's pro-actively imperialist and designed to wage the kind of Great War For Civilisation that the neocons have been having wet dreams about for years (full of all sorts of usual neocon rubbish about 'lack of public will' and 'resolve'). They did have the US Army earmarked for the job, but that appears to be broken, so they want ours as well, and if we give it to them they'll break it too.

Get stuffed, I say, the reason there's a lack of public will is that the only time the neocons got to run policy unchecked was in Iraq, where it's so startlingly successful that the US is having to do deals with nationalist Islamic parties full of ex-Baathists in order to prop up the central government run by parties set up in Iran to export the 1979 theocratic revolution to Iraq. Not a great track record, really.