'Nuff said

(Taking context-optional note of thought-provoking quotes)

So should we, perhaps, be content with the virtual moratorium on nuclear testing?
No, because commitments that are not legally binding can easily be violated.

-- Mikhail Gorbachev, the last President of the Soviet Union and winner of the 1990 Nobel Peace Prize. These 2 sentences from Gorbachev's New York Times op-ed pithily point out the importance of treaties, on much the same reasoning as in a prior post by yours truly. Gorbachev's objective? He begins by welcoming the just-before-Christmas approval by the U.S. Senate of the New Start disarmament treaty (prior posts), which Russia's expected to ratify next month. Then he moves quickly to his main goal: secure U.S. ratification as well of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. Russia and 34 others of the 44 "nuclear technology holder states" have ratified. The United States is among the holdouts, the Senate having refused to give its advice and consent in 1999. U.S. approval of CTBT would break the logjam, Gorbachev argues, and so make way for "the next step to a world free of nuclear weapons"-- a stated goal of the current American President and many who have preceded him.

On November 19

On this day in ...
... 1990 (20 years ago today), at a summit meeting in Paris, leaders of more than a score of countries signed an agreement billed as "the end of the cold war that divided East and West for more than four decades." The agreement between the member states of NATO, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, and those of the Warsaw Pact promised to destroy "tens of thousands" of "nonnuclear weapons." Signing along with U.S. President George H.W. Bush was Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev. (credit for photo of the 2 leaders at a 1989 Malta summit) At the signing in Paris, the latter proclaimed:

'What a long way the world has come!'

A thought worth pondering given the current, new uncertainties about the fate of New START, the disarmament pact we've been tracking (prior IntLawGrrls posts).

(Prior November 19 posts are here, here, and here.)

On January 22

On this day in ...
... 1690, 80 sachems, or Native American leaders, met at Onondaga, in what is now upstate New York, and ratified a treaty of peace with the British and against the French. (credit for photo of Onondaga Lake)
... 1990, Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev went on television and stated that "he had no choice but to order his troops" to enter Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan, in order, in the words of the BBC, "to try and end the undeclared conflict between Muslim Azeris and Christian Armenians, and put down a separatist insurrection by Azerbaijani nationalists." As many as 60 persons already had died since the tanks arrived. Azerbaijan, in orange at right, gained independence a year later; ethnic unrest lingers.

On October 12

On this day in ...

... 1959, Anna Escobedo Cabral (right) was born in San Bernardino, California. She received a bachelor's degree in political science at the University of California, Davis, and then moved east to study public policy and law. After serving inter alia as a congressional staffer and as President of Hispanic Association on Corporate Responsibility, in 2004 Cabral assumed the post she continues to hold today: the 42d Treasurer of the United States.

... 1986, in Reykjavik, Iceland, a summit conference between President Ronald Reagan and Communist Party Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev amounted to a failed effort at U.S.-Soviet nuclear disarmament. According to the BBC, "the talks finally stalled over President Reagan's refusal to abandon his Strategic Defence Initiative (SDI)." (credit for image of original plan for SDI, a space-based defense system)

On December 8, ...

... 2007 (today), is CARICOM-Cuba Day, as named in the 2002 Havana Declaration on the 30th Anniversary of the Establishment of Diplomatic Relations between Member States of the Caribbean Community and the Republic of Cuba.
... 1987 (20 years ago today), after 3 days of meetings in Washington, U.S. President Ronald Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev signed an Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (right), in what the BBC called "a first attempt to reverse the nuclear arms race" by "reduc[ing] the size of their ground-based nuclear arsenals."
... 1945, Kellelo Justina Masafo-Guni, 1 of the 1st 11 judges of the still-new African Court on Human and Peoples’ Rights, and before that the 1st woman ever to serve as a Justice on the High Court of Lesotho, was born in Lenibe, Lesotho.