Chiles Terrible Year.

I was going to avoid telling this story just to spite Silvio Berlusconi but it turns out he's really not that important so:

Back in February 2010, long before the miners, Chile was struck by an 8.8 magnitude earthquake. Although the epicentre was off-shore and didn't result in any meaningful tsunami this was technically known as "A fu*king huge earthquake." If that wasn't bad enough at the time the 'quake struck the Chilean authorities were loading their stocks of unstable, weapons grade nuclear material onto US trucks to be transported to a more geologically stable storage facility within the United States. This was being done as a prelude to the US convened summit on nuclear security that was held in April 2010.

This turned out to be the shortest summit in history. The Chairperson simply stood up and said something like; "Across the World there are vast stockpiles of nuclear materials being held in politically and geologically unstable regions. For the safety of the World we need to agree how to move these stockpiles to safe and secure locations. The other delegates then all looked at the Chilean delegation who were rocking gently in the corner before turning as one and saying; "Right, where do we sign?!"

With the main business resolved in about ten minutes the rest of the summit was used to give the USA and the Russian Federation time to answer questions about how their newly signed START II Treaty would attempt to make the World safer by reducing both countries stockpiles of nuclear weapons. There was also an attempt by the Russian and Brazilian delegations to present their freshly negotiated fuel swap deal that would allow Iran to fuel it's nuclear reactors without gaining the ability to manufacture nuclear weapons. This quickly shot down by the Americans who decided to impose more sanctions anyway. During the process the Iranians gave everybody the impression that they must be up to something sinister because their diplomats quickly manage to turn every attempt at negotiating into a farce by leading people down endless and pointless blind alleyways. Although I cant support this assessment I can't help but agree that Iranian diplomats can be very hard work. Personally I blame the sanctions.

Obviously with Hugo Chavez and Evo Morale's "South American Socialist Miracle" simultaneously both failing and threatening to expand into Brazil the fact that Chile helped the "Evil Americans" secure a massive diplomatic victory by managing to reduce the number of nuclear weapons held by nations and reduce the chances of terrorist gaining nuclear weapons while also caving in to the dirty Jewish/ Zionist/ Lizardpeople conspiracy could not go unpunished. So Chile spent the next five months being ignored and insulted by their South American neighbours. So I think we can excuse them for getting a little over excited by the rescue of their miners.