From: Joyeuse at CONFERENCE
To:   All
Week: 8

Proposal for a Planet-Buster disarmament treaty.

Your excellencies, ladies and gentlemen, this morning we start upon a great task, the task will be long and difficult, and require great efforts and vigilance from all of us, but the end is worthy and we must succeed. For our goal here today is to secure the future, not just of ourselves, but of the very worlds upon which most of us live, by agreeing to ban, and more importantly prevent, the use of any so called ‘planet busting’ weapons.

It seems to me that any such agreement cannot be enforced merely by relying upon the goodwill of the signatories, there always exists, as King John’s recent dispatches show all too clearly, the possibility of subterfuge and treachery. I therefore feel that any attempt to remove all such weapons is doomed to failure, instead we should strive to make the first use of any such weapons a suicidal option.

The government and people of Joyeuse therefore propose the following treaty for discussion:

1. We the undersigned powers, resolve never to make the first use of any ‘planet-buster’ weapon, but to respond in kind to any such use against us.

2. To this end we agree to place all our planet-busters under the joint command of all signatories and to dismantle all but eight weapons of our combined arsenal.

3. The private development of any planet-buster weapon by any signatory of this treaty constitutes a mandatory casus belli for the other signatories. We shall lay aside any petty squabbles between our worlds and remove the violating government from power by all means at our disposal short of planet-buster use.

4. We shall dispatch a mission to the government of the Third Imperium to request a force from the Imperial Interstellar Scout Service to oversee the joint deterrent force.

Any comments or suggestions would be greatly appreciated.