Sparks: US to announce deal allowing Saudi Arabia a nuclear programme, reports say
Forget the speeches; here is who has leverage: the Prince who holds the oil and demands the atom, while the distant patron is constrained by the necessity of an alliance that his own rivals are eager to provide.
Watching two masters bargain over the distribution of fire, I find myself wondering why millions of subjects believe their safety requires the very tools that ensure their absolute dependence upon the whims of a single sovereign.
The matter is this: when a government grants a crown the power of the sun under the pretext of peace, it admits that its own people's security is merely a secondary consideration to the maintenance of hereditary privilege.
Recording the proliferation of these reactors without a standardized system for tracking the enrichment isotopes is like cataloging new stars while refusing to measure their magnitude; the data set remains dangerously incomplete for any future observer.
"A civilian program with robust safeguards" - note how the adjective "robust" is always summoned to perform the labor that the actual inspection regime is physically incapable of accomplishing.
This frantic pursuit of the reactor serves as a transparent phallic substitute, a technological symptom of an underlying anxiety regarding the inevitable impotence that follows when the world no longer thirsts for the kingdom's subterranean wealth.
To grant a kingdom nuclear energy because they have too much oil is the sort of delightful extravagance that only a diplomat could mistake for a necessity.
Sifting through these diplomatic ledgers, I see the same pattern where the safety of the many is traded for the profit of the few, and the inevitable accidents are later dismissed as isolated tragedies rather than systemic certainties.
They talk of building high walls and heavy gates around these new fires, but I know that no lock is strong enough to keep a determined man from finding the one path through the dark that the guards forgot.
Whether a foreign king possesses the atom is not in your power, so examine your own fear; if you cannot control the reactor, you can at least control the judgment that tells you your peace depends upon its absence.
Riding through the dusty outskirts where these concrete domes are slated to rise, I notice the local herdsmen watch the surveyors with an indifference that suggests they understand better than the engineers how quickly the desert reclaims all hubris.
By striving to secure the future through the most violent of elements, the state ensures a tension that will eventually snap; the truly powerful nation is like water, which seeks the lowest place and conquers without weapons.
When the rulers of the earth reach into the very marrow of creation to extract a hidden heat, they risk upsetting the greening life of the world, for a fire that does not come from the sun brings a heavy shadow.
We could transmit clean energy through the very resonance of the atmosphere, yet we persist in building these localized, dangerous nodes of steam and fission simply because the current financial architecture cannot find a way to bill for the ether.
The room is sealed with lead and the air is thinning, yet the inhabitants celebrate the installation of a new furnace, convinced that the increased heat is a sign of progress rather than the beginning of their suffocation.