@@ Why shouldn't Iran seek nuclear weapons? - It's the U.S. which is violating the "Article VI" of the NPT @@
Arash
June 18, 2004
Why Shouldn't Iran Seek Nuclear Weapons?
The Bush Administration's Counterproductive Foreign Policies and Nuclear Weapon
Policies provide ample Incentives for Tehran to go Nuclear
By Tad Daley
Daleyplanet2010[AT]cs.com
On Saturday, 12 June 2004, Iranian Foreign Minister Kamal Kharrazi, in a pugnacious
and defiant statement on the eve of this week's major IAEA meeting to discuss his
country's nuclear ambitions, finally came out and said that Iran "has to be
recognized by the international community as a member of the nuclear club". This, he
vowed, is "an irreversible path".
Iranian officials have repeatedly insisted that Tehran's nuclear program is intended
to generate electricity, not warheads. But many suspect -- not to put too fine a
point on it -- that they are lying. Why? Because the temptation for Iran to develop a
potent nuclear arsenal of its own -- driven by the contradictions of George Bush's
foreign and nuclear policies -- may in the end prove too seductive to resist.
Consider the outside world as viewed from Tehran. George Bush delivers his 2002 State
of the Union address, and of all the countries in the world he singles out three as
constituting an "axis of evil".
http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2002/01/20020129-11.html
Bush announces his intent to instigate unilateral preemptive wars against any nation
that his Administration subjectively determines to be a potential threat. Defying
almost universal world opinion, he actually commences such a war against one of those
three -- decapitating its regime, killing the supreme leader's sons, and driving that
leader himself into a pathetic hole in the ground. And he surrounds Iran on all four
sides with bristling American military power -- Iraq to its west, Afghanistan to its
east, sprawling new American bases in the former Soviet republics of Central Asia to
its north, and the unchallengeable U.S. Navy in the Persian Gulf to its south.
Iran, of course, cannot hope to take on the United States in any kind of direct
military confrontation. But it can aspire to deter what must seem to them to be a
quite real threat, someday, of American military aggression. How? By developing the
capability to inflict unacceptable catastrophic damage on American interests or
military forces abroad, on the American fleet in the Persian Gulf, or even on the
American homeland itself. And by holding out even the mere possibility that it would
respond to any American assault by employing that capability immediately, before it
became too late, following the traditional military maxim of "use them or lose them".
There is, of course, only one thing that can provide Iran with that kind of deterrent
capability. Hint: it's not nuclear electricity.
It is probably the case that for Tehran the perceived danger of a U.S. invasion is
lower today than it might have been in 2002 or 2003. It is difficult to envision any
U.S. president in the foreseeable future launching another unilateral preemptive
first strike in the wake of the fiasco in Iraq. Imagine the political firestorm --
even after a Bush reelection -- if the Administration began contemplating another
preemptive war, this time on Iran.
But Tehran has no reason to believe that that shift in geostrategic dynamics will be
permanent. It has resulted, after all, from external circumstances rather than an
internal American change of heart (or regime). On the contrary, it probably provides
the mullahs with all the more reason to press ahead, in order to obtain the Great
Deterrent before the Great Satan has a chance to regroup and refocus.
As Jonathan Schell (http://www.antiwar.com/engelhardt/?articleid=6098) has
persuasively argued, the great international irony of the Bush era is that both the
Iraq war specifically and the preemption doctrine generally were supposed to be
directed at curtailing the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. Instead, in
all likelihood, they have exacerbated -- in both frequency and intensity -- the quest
by others to acquire them. Isaac Newton's laws of action and reaction do not apply
solely to billiard balls.
The most glaring result of George Bush's foreign policies seems to be the phenomenon
of self-fulfilling prophecy. http://www.globalissues.org/Geopolitics/Empire/Bush.asp
Looming over Iran's immediate perception of American threat is the 800-pound gorilla
of America's nuclear double standard. George Bush insists that selected other
countries have no right to possess nuclear weapons, while at the same time making
abundantly clear that we intend to retain thousands into perpetuity. (To be fair, so
have other presidents before him -- Republican and Democrat alike.) To the rest of
the world this is sanctimonious and self-righteous, suggesting that in our view the
U.S. can be "trusted" with these weapons while others cannot. Such a position is
factually questionable. It is morally indefensible. And it is utterly politically
unsustainable.
This is especially true when the original Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) is
understood in its original context. The NPT was not just a framework to prevent the
spread of nuclear weapons. It was, instead, a grand bargain -- where the great many
"nuclear have-nots" agreed to forego nuclear weapons while the few "nuclear haves"
agreed eventually to get rid of theirs.
http://www.un.org/events/npt2005/npttreaty.html
Moreover, the United States recommitted itself to this covenant at the 30-year NPT
Review Conference in spring 2000, where the NPT's nuclear signatories pledged "an
unequivocal undertaking … to accomplish the total elimination of their nuclear
arsenals". http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/13_steps
But the Bush Administration, rather than moving toward abolition, is instead pursuing
perpetual possession. Its Strangelovian new nuclear war fighting posture contains
plans for new bunker busting "mini-nukes" -- an oxymoron if there ever was one. (Just
this past Tuesday, 15 June 2004, the Republican-controlled U.S. Senate -- in a move
probably not-unnoticed in Tehran -- endorsed new funding to study the development of
such weapons). It breaks down the historic firewall between conventional and nuclear
armaments. It broadens the scope of military scenarios in which the U.S. might
actually initiate a nuclear first-strike. It envisions new generations of strategic
nuclear missiles in 2020, 2030, and 2040! Yet it says not one word about any
"unequivocal undertaking" to move toward abolition.
It is the U.S. which is violating the "Article VI" of the NPT -- by insisting on
retaining a nuclear weapon capability for time everlasting.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/13_steps
Earlier this month the Bush Administration announced plans to reduce our active
nuclear inventory to no more than 2200 by 2012 (though thousands more would still be
maintained "in reserve"), to accord with the Moscow Treaty of 2002. But this would do
almost nothing to reduce the actual dangers posed by nuclear weapons today. How does
simple bean counting reduce the risk of nuclear terror, or a fatal nuclear
miscalculation in a hot political crisis, or accidental atomic apocalypse? (Nuclear
weapons, after all, are the prototypical example of the adage that "it only takes
just one.") Why don't the Moscow Treaty or the latest plan say anywhere that these
reductions are part of a larger vision, to be followed by further steps toward zero?
How does an intention to reduce our nuclear inventory to 2200 by 2012 make Iran feel
safer today (or, for that matter, in 2012)?
Sadly for both the principles of the Democratic Party and the prospects for nuclear
non-proliferation, Senator John Kerry has also not questioned the nuclear status quo.
He did release a plan to safeguard nuclear materials and reduce the risk of nuclear
terror on June 1st, calling it his "number one security goal". But while his plan
said a great deal about nuclear weapons and nuclear materials in the hands of
"shadowy figures" (who, presumably, cannot be trusted like us), it said very little
about those in the hands of ourselves.
Kerry did condemn Bush's mini-nuke initiative, and he should unquestionably be
commended for that. But it is one thing to oppose the development of new types of
nuclear weapons, another to put the thousands we already possess on the table.
Candidate Kerry may have plans to reduce the threat of nuclear terror. But he
apparently has no plans to confront what can only be called America's nuclear
hypocrisy.
The paradox of such an American nuclear posture is that the one country most
insistent about retaining its nuclear weapons indefinitely is the one country that
needs them the least. The paramount geostrategic reality of the early 21st Century is
America's unchallengeable conventional military superiority over any conceivable
combination of adversaries. Washington can inflict unacceptable catastrophic damage
on any country in the world with its conventional capabilities alone. If any country
can deter any attack and repel any enemy without resorting to an atomic arsenal, it
is us.
Our nuclear weapons, in fact, are worse than useless for the real threats to the
personal security of real Americans at the dawn of the 21st Century. Our armies and
air forces didn't protect us on 9/11. Our 13 aircraft carrier battle groups (no other
country has even one) didn't protect us on 9/11. And the thing that protected us the
least on that horrifying day was our bloated nuclear stockpile, our arsenal of the
apocalypse. What could a single nuclear warhead have done to stop Mohammed Atta, or
to have apprehended him, or even to have deterred him? What can all our nuclear
bombers and missiles and submarines do to prevent some odious creature from smuggling
a single nuclear warhead into an American city, and committing the greatest act of
mass murder in all of human history?
Nuclear weapons pollute the psyche with the arrogance of insuperable power. They
create delusions of domination. They dehumanize us all. In the age of American
hyperpower, they provide American decision makers with very few additional policy
options or political/military benefits. Yet their costs and risks approach the
infinite.
It is difficult not to conclude that the foreign policies and nuclear weapons
policies of the Bush Administration are leading us on a downward spiral toward
immediate nuclear proliferation and eventual nuclear disaster. If we insist on
retaining thousands of nuclear warheads forever until the end of time, other nations
will inevitably follow.
The only long-term choice is between a world of many dozen nuclear weapon states --
where the detonation in anger of a nuclear warhead in some great city of the world
will become only a matter of time -- or a world of zero nuclear weapon states.
The United States can state unambiguously that we intend to walk down a different
"irreversible path" -- toward a nuclear weapon free world. Or we can expect Iran and
many others to join us on the road to a darker destination.
* Tad Daley, is a Policy Studies Director for PROGRESSIVE VOTE
(http://www.progressivevote.org), a Section 527 political action committee.
http://www.commondreams.org/views04/0618-14.htm