The Barrel of the Gun and the Barrel of Oil in North-South Equation *

The paper discusses the role of the newly discovered petropower and of the striving for nuclear status in the Third World politics, both between the various countries that comprise it and between the Third World as a whole and the West. The first has to do with the competition for leverage and influence determined mainly by ideology, economics (which, in the last analysis, means technology), and military power. The second has to do with the striving for dignity and equity. This politics is vastly complicated by the industrialized and nuclearized Western powers' intervention in pursuit of the dual goal of pacifying one form of energy, nuclear, to perpetuate its dominance through the monopoly of the atom, and militarizing another form of energy, oil, to be able to get it cheap, if possible, and in abundance.