UNITED STATES: Nuclear fundamentalism and Iran
taxirevolution
Norman Solomon
Years from now, when historians look back at agenda-building for a
missile attack on Iran, they should closely examine a story that took
up the USA's most coveted space for media spin - the upper right
corner of the New York Times' front page on the first day of May
2005.
Under the headline "Threats Shadow New Conference on Nuclear Arms",
the lead article in the Sunday edition set a tone that was to echo in
US media during the next several days. The review conference for the
May 2-6 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty "was meant to offer hope of
closing huge loopholes in the treaty, which the United States says Iran
and North Korea have exploited to pursue nuclear weapons", the NYT
reported. "Instead, the session appears deadlocked even before it
begins, according to senior American officials and diplomats."
But the NYT could have led off by pointing out that "huge loopholes
in the treaty" have been exploited by the United States and a few
other countries to maintain their nuclear-arms dominance. And, instead
of resorting to fuzzy euphemisms, the story could have clearly reported
that the US, Japanese and French governments are so committed to the
commercial nuclear power industry that they still insist on promoting
it - and further boosting nuclear arms proliferation in the process.
For more than five decades now, US government leaders - along with
countless reporters and pundits - have insisted that the split atom
can be wondrous rather than just ominous. In a speech to the United
Nations in December 1953, President Dwight Eisenhower proclaimed a
commitment to "atoms for peace". He portrayed nuclear power as
redemptive: "The United States pledges before you - and therefore
before the world - its determination to help solve the fearful atomic
dilemma - to devote its entire heart and mind to find the way by
which the miraculous inventiveness of man shall not be dedicated to his
death, but consecrated to his life."
One-third of a century later, the New York Times was in the midst of a
protracted crusade on behalf of the Shoreham nuclear power project on
Long Island. In July 1986, Jack Newfield wrote in the Village Voice
that he had counted 22 different times when the New York Times had
editorialised in favour of the Shoreham nuclear plants during the
previous 40 months. As it happened, members of the NYT board of
directors also sat on the boards of nuclear-invested utilities and
banks.
Grassroots activism was often successful when it challenged the
utilities seeking to generate more electricity with atomic power. Along
the way, activists pointed out that nuclear power plants and nuclear
weapons share the same basic fuel cycle. And the anti-nuclear movement
warned that fervent efforts to export nuclear power technology all over
the globe would lead to the development of atomic weapons in more and
more countries. But enormous media campaigns on behalf of the nuclear
power industry are still with us.
On May 4 - despite the dangers of catastrophic reactor accidents, the
horrendous folly of creating massive amounts of atomic waste, and the
proven role of nuclear power technology in nuclear weapons
proliferation - a New York Times editorial contended "there is
mounting evidence that damage from global warming may dwarf any
environmental risk posed by nuclear power. It is therefore critical to
keep nuclear power as part of the nation's energy mix." Such
commentaries encourage us to believe that widespread conservation and
renewable resources aren't viable, as if the only real choices are a
radioactive future or an overheated globe.
This kind of nuclear fundamentalism is exactly what has smoothed the
way for countries to acquire nuclear weapons technologies - and in
some cases nuclear bombs - in recent decades. Like an institution run
by religious fanatics, the New York Times still cannot let go of its
corporate faith in the great god nuclear power.
These days, there is ugly irony in the emergence of Jimmy Carter as an
advocate for nuclear sanity. In 1979, when the Three Mile Island
nuclear power disaster occurred in Pennsylvania, then-President Carter
went out of his way to defend the atomic-energy industry. And like his
predecessors and successors in the Oval Office, he pushed nuclear power
on people in many other countries.
Now Carter is singing a somewhat different tune. In an op-ed piece that
appeared in the International Herald Tribune on May 2, he warned:
"Iran has repeatedly hidden its intentions to enrich uranium while
claiming that its nuclear program is for peaceful purposes only. This
explanation has been given before, by India, Pakistan and North Korea,
and has led to weapons programs in all three states."
Meanwhile, Carter is suitably adamant about the importance of not
allowing nuclear test explosions. "The comprehensive test ban treaty
should be honoured", he wrote in the same article, "but the United
States is moving in the opposite direction." You wouldn't know it
from Carter, or from the US media, but his administration chose to
jettison the appreciable prospects that a comprehensive test ban could
have been locked into place a quarter-century ago.
When I visited the State Department early in the fourth year of the
Carter presidency, an arms-control specialist asked me to turn off my
tape recorder before he talked about ways that top officials at the
government's nuclear weapons labs were successfully sinking the
test-ban efforts. Several months later, in October 1980, I summed up
the situation in a Nation magazine article: "While proclaiming a
desire to halt the nuclear arms race, the US government has been
quietly undermining chances for the most far-reaching disarmament
treaty on the horizon - a comprehensive international ban on atomic
bomb tests. The latest round of talks in Geneva ended in failure -
with the United States' tactics of delay drawing criticism from other
delegations. And no wonder: The Carter administration has caved in to
the nuclear-weapons laboratories, which want to continue to test bombs
and are opposed to a meaningful agreement that will stop the spread of
nuclear weapons."
In 2005, it's bad enough that such history is scarcely on the US media
radar screen, while propaganda looms larger for an attack on Iran
either by the Pentagon or by the US-backed Israeli government. But in
the present day, the hypocrisy of Washington's righteous
finger-pointing toward Iran is extremely dangerous. Carter has it right
when he now calls the United States "the major culprit" in erosion
of the Non-Proliferation Treaty: "While claiming to be protecting the
world from proliferation threats in Iraq, Libya, Iran and North Korea,
American leaders not only have abandoned existing treaty restraints but
also have asserted plans to test and develop new weapons, including
antiballistic missiles, the earth-penetrating 'bunker buster' and
perhaps some new 'small' bombs. They also have abandoned past pledges
and now threaten first use of nuclear weapons against non-nuclear
states."
The odds are good that if the Pentagon doesn't launch a major missile
attack on Iranian facilities in the next year or so, the Israeli
government will - with a wink and nod from President George Bush.
Yet, unlike Iran's government, Israel is not even a signer of the
Non-Proliferation Treaty. With a nuclear bomb stockpile now estimated
at more than 200 warheads, Israel is fuelling the nuclear arms race in
the Middle East. But, from the White House to Capitol Hill to newsrooms
across the United States, the Israeli nuclear arsenal draws scant
mention let alone criticism.
The person who has done more than anyone else to inform the world about
that nuclear weapons program, Mordechai Vanunu, left his job as a
technician at Israel's Dimona nuclear facility before spilling the
beans to the Sunday Times of London in 1986. The Israeli government
promptly sent agents to kidnap Vanunu from Rome and take him back to
Israel. As a result, Vanunu spent 18 years behind bars, mostly in
solitary confinement. Since his release in April 2004, the Israeli
authorities have imposed a travel ban along with other restrictions on
Vanunu - and they're threatening to put him back in prison if he
keeps talking to journalists.
If Vanunu were Iranian instead of Israeli, the US press would be
hailing him as a hero instead of giving him short shrift.
Like almost every other mainstream US media outlet, the New York Times
has provided little coverage of Vanunu. Likewise, the NYT has little to
say about Washington's extreme hypocrisies while the newspaper and the
government denounce certain other countries for their nuclear programs.
But the New York Times has not skimped on coverage that adds to
momentum for a military attack on Iran. And evidently the newspaper of
record is just getting started.
[Norman Solomon's latest book, War Made Easy: How Presidents and
Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death, will be published in June. For more
information visit, <http://www.normansolomon.com>. This article first
appeared on Z-Net <http://www.zmag.org>.]
>From Green Left Weekly, May 11, 2005.