What was George W. Bush doing when the Anti Ballistic Missile treaty was being signed back on 26 May 1972? Well, we can make a fair guess. He was just out of Yale and figuring out what to do with his life. At that moment Brezhnev and Nixon signed the treaty it's a bet that George's gaze was flicking between a sports game, a pretty girl and an open refrigerator. He probably didn't take much notice of the events in Moscow, but at some stage he may have grasped the treaty's underlying doctrine of Mutual Assured Destruction because there was a certain dreadful simplicity in the idea, which even the juvenile George W. Bush would have found arresting.

Thirty years later Bush comes to the White House, with no substantial achievements to his name or experience of international affairs, and announces that the ABM treaty is no longer appropriate to the modern world and the US is going to pursue its dream of a missile defence system. The reaction around the globe to his speech contained a common element and that was indignation that the fragile structures and trust of the nuclear stand-off had been ended by a man with neither the intellect nor humility which this issue requires. Slim Shady and his chainsaw were now in charge of world peace.

thanks to wood s lot