Putin Says Ukraine Can Join EU

 Putin said he has no objection to Ukraine's joining the EU.  This is surprising since EU membership has been something that Russian-friendly politicians have opposed since the beginning of the rivalry between them and the Western-friendly politicians began almost ten years ago.  

Brazil wll investigate Petrobras

Bloomberg reports that Brazilian President Bolsonaro said that Brazil will investigate Petrobras' gas pricing policy.  Investors are worried that the government may force Petrobras to lose money in order to further the government's fight against inflation in Brazil.   

Nuclear Power Plants in Wars

 In an article in the Economist magazine, Ukrainian history professor Serhii Plokhy argues that nuclear power reactors pose an unacceptable risk to soldiers and civilians if they are damaged and release radioiactivity. He says:

No commercial nuclear reactors, as opposed to those which produce plutonium, have been built to withstand military attack. No protocols or regulations have ever been created to deal with the possibility of warfare at a nuclear power plant, and no body of international law, including conventions and agreements relating to conduct in war, adequately deal with the possibility.

 It is too easy today to make a credible case for the legality of any attack on a nuclear reactor. This is a dangerous situation.

Yet the war in Ukraine has raised new questions about the future of nuclear energy. To the dangers of nuclear accidents and unresolved issues over spent nuclear fuel, add one more problem: the possibility that nuclear reactors operating today could become dirty bombs in a war. Ukraine demonstrates how such a scenario could come to pass. For the first time, operational civilian plants were attacked by ground forces. It was pure luck that the shells fired by the Russian National Guard, who have little or no combat experience, did not hit any of the reactors at the Zaporizhia station.

The threat posed to nuclear plants in Ukraine raises uncomfortable questions about whether we should continue building them in the future, and the degree to which we can turn to nuclear energy as a means of mitigating climate change.  These questions deserve serious consideration. But one answer seems to be obvious even now: we should not build new nuclear plants unless we can find a way to protect existing ones in war.

Putin and Proliferation

 Foreign policy wonks are concerned that Putin’s war in Ukraine is undermining the nuclear non-proliferation regime, embodied primarily in the Nuclear Non-Proliferation treaty.  The Economist magazine and the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists have both warmed about the increasing danger. 

Non-nuclear countries like Ukraine that are threatened by nuclear powers like Russia may believe that in order to protect themselves they must develop nuclear weapons.  Countries with nuclear weapons may believe that like Russia they can use those weapons to intimidate potential enemies.  The Economist worries that as memories of World War II fade, the moral resistance to the use of nuclear weapons will weaken. 

At the moment the two countries that might be most influenced by this new acceptance of nuclear arsenals are Iran and North Korea, both of which have on-going nuclear programs. 

The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists points out that when the Soviet Union collapsed, Ukraine had 4,400 nuclear weapons, the third most after the US and Russia.  After extended negotiations, Ukraine agreed to return the nuclear weapons to Russia in return for security assurances from the US and Russia.  Ukraine agreed to join the Non-Proliferation as a non-nuclear state.  Ukraine may now regret its decision to give up nuclear weapons, which would have been a bargaining chip in its relations with Russia.