New York City, January, 2078, Tuesday…

"Honorable delegates, the President of the United States of America, Mr. Tomas Delgado."

Delgado strode to the UN podium, knowing full well that his speech would be a waste of time. Minds were already made up on the issue. Nevertheless, he launched into what he considered was a reasonable argument for sanity.

He described the negotiations that had gone on in Bogotá, how Colombia and Venezuela had announced their entry into the nuclear club.

"We have no intel on whether or not this saber rattling - and I'm going to call it what it is - we have no intel on whether there are nuclear bombs to back up these threats. We do know that both militaries have the capacity to deliver these bombs, if they exist. I would plead for reason. The oil that is left in Venezuela, Colombia, and Ecuador is costly to exploit. The entire world needs that oil. Let us pull together as a world community and exploit it peacefully."

Delgado went on to describe how ironic it was that the development of peaceful uses of nuclear energy had empowered nations to begin such saber rattling over the little oil that was left. "Nuclear energy is both a resource and a weapon. Let us focus on it as a resource for powering our economies, not a weapon to destroy them."

The speech took about forty minutes.

Later that day the Chinese ambassador took the podium. Although he didn't carry the weight of Tomas Delgado, the delegates paid attention. He was delivering his response to the US position.

"The American President has proposed that we focus on nuclear energy for powering our economies and to not use it as a weapon. This is fine irony considering who dropped the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. China has long maintained that our world is safer when all countries have the means to stand up to the imperialists of America. They want to control the world economy in order to enrich themselves. We will have none of it. We applaud both Colombia and Venezuela. We welcome them to the nuclear club. May they have great success in beating down the industrialists to their north who have long exploited their countries."

In a conference room in another part of the building, Susan Winters, Pedro Cardenas, and Ky Fan Yang, a high-ranking Chinese diplomat, were hammering out the details of an agreement. It called for a seven-nation commission to adjudicate the Colombian-Venezuelan dispute. Its decisions would be non-binding but it was hoped that world opinion would agree with them and thus put pressure on the two South American countries to settle their differences.