Broken Bangles: Putting Together Life and the World

  The World and Its Arms Trading Nations The United States has the largest defence budget in the world. Each year, it allocates huge amounts to developing new weapons and weapon technologies. In each conflict in which it intervenes, America has two interests: pursuing its strategic goals and boosting its defence industry by enabling weapons sales.  The facts and views about America’s economic interests in any war have been exhaustively discussed in the public domain. During the Afghan and Iraq wars, the problematic premise of US interests in global conflicts were put under scrutiny like never before. Less known is how these interests evolved in the succeeding decades. A glimpse of this change can be seen in the words of Alexander C Karp in his recent book, ‘The Technological Republic’ in which he observes that the key US industries have moved away from serving the nation and its strategic and secuirty interests and found a new boss to serve- the consumer, the king of the mark...

  Is Iran a Full-fledged Nuclear State? Iran is a nuclear threshold state. It has in its possession enough enriched uranium to make several atomic bombs. The US intelligence has warned that if Iran wants to build a nuclear bomb, it can do it at some point in the future. Iran has always maintained that its nuclear programme was aimed at peaceful uses of nuclear energy. The world, especially the US-led western countries, however, generally disagrees and tends to portend all kinds of worst-case scenarios about Iran becoming a full-fledged nuclear power.    According to a 2024 US Congressional Research Service report, Iran had stopped its nuclear weapons programme and did not have all the technologies necessary to develop nuclear weapons. Iran’s uranium enrichment programme has been running since 2000. These facilities, in theory, could generate highly enriched uranium used in nuclear weapons. In nuclear reactors used for generating energy, low-enriched uranium is used, and I...