WASHINGTON, May 18 2013 (IPS) – A nuclear-armed Iran would not pose a fundamental threat to the United States and its regional allies like Israel and the Gulf Arab monarchies, according to a new report released here Friday by the Rand Corporation.
Entitled “Iran After the Bomb: [...]]]>
WASHINGTON, May 18 2013 (IPS) – A nuclear-armed Iran would not pose a fundamental threat to the United States and its regional allies like Israel and the Gulf Arab monarchies, according to a new report released here Friday by the Rand Corporation.
Entitled “Iran After the Bomb: How Would a Nuclear-Armed Tehran Behave?“, the report asserts that the acquisition by Tehran of nuclear weapons would above all be intended to deter an attack by hostile powers, presumably including Israel and the United States, rather than for aggressive purposes.
And while its acquisition may indeed lead to greater tension between Iran and its Sunni-led neighbours, the 50-page report concludes that Tehran would be unlikely to use nuclear weapons against other Muslim countries. Nor would it be able to halt its diminishing influence in the region resulting from the Arab Spring and its support for the Syrian government, according to the author, Alireza Nader.
“Iran’s development of nuclear weapons will enhance its ability to deter an external attack, but it will not enable it to change the Middle East’s geopolitical order in its own favour,” Nader, an international policy analyst at RAND, told IPS. “The Islamic Republic’s challenge to the region is constrained by its declining popularity, a weak economy, and a limited conventional military capability. An Iran with nukes will still be a declining power.”
The report reaches several conclusions all of which generally portray Iran as a rational actor in its international relations.
While Nader calls it a “revisionist state” that tries to undermine what it sees as a U.S.-dominated order in the Middle East, his report stresses that “it does not have territorial ambitions and does not seek to invade, conquer, or occupy other nations.”
Further, the report identifies the Islamic Republic’s military doctrine as defensive in nature. This posture is presumably a result of the volatile and unstable region in which it exists and is exacerbated by its status as a Shi’a and Persian-majority nation in a Sunni and Arab-majority region.
Iran is also scarred by its traumatic eight-year war with Iraq in which as many as one million Iranians lost their lives.
The new report comes amidst a growing controversy here over whether a nuclear-armed Iran could itself be successfully “contained” by the U.S. and its allies and deterred both from pursuing a more aggressive policy in the region and actually using nuclear weapons against its foes.
Iran itself has vehemently denied it intends to build a weapon, and the U.S. intelligence community has reported consistently over the last six years that Tehran’s leadership has not yet decided to do so, although the increasing sophistication and infrastructure of its nuclear programme will make it possible to build one more quickly if such a decision is made.
Official U.S. policy, as enunciated repeatedly by top officials, including President Barack Obama, is to “prevent” Iran from obtaining a weapon, even by military means if ongoing diplomatic efforts and “crippling” economic sanctions fail to persuade Iran to substantially curb its nuclear programme.
A nuclear-armed Iran, in the administration’s view – which is held even more fervently by the U.S. Congress where the Israel lobby exerts its greatest influence – represents an “existential threat” to the Jewish state.
In addition, according to the administration, Iran’s acquisition of a weapon would likely embolden it and its allies – notably Lebanon’s Hezbollah – to pursue more aggressive actions against their foes and could well set off a regional “cascade effect” in which other powers, particularly Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Egypt, would feel obliged to launch nuclear-weapons programmes of their own.
But a growing number of critics of the prevention strategy – particularly that part of it that would resort to military action against Iran – argue that a nuclear Iran will not be nearly as dangerous as the reigning orthodoxy assumes.
A year ago, for example, Paul Pillar, a veteran CIA analyst who served as National Intelligence Officer for the Middle East and South Asia from 2000 to 2005, published a lengthy essay in ‘The Washington Monthly’, “We Can Live With a Nuclear Iran: Fears of a Bomb in Tehran’s Hands Are Overhyped, and a War to Prevent It Would Be a Disaster.”
More recently, Colin Kahl, an analyst at the Center for a New American Security (CNAS) who also served as the Pentagon’s top Middle East policy adviser for much of Obama’s first term, published two reports – the first questioning the “cascade effect” in the region, and the second, published earlier this week and entitled “If All Else Fails: The Challenges of Containing a Nuclear-Armed Iran,” outlining a detailed “containment strategy” — including extending Washington’s nuclear umbrella over states that feel threatened by a nuclear Iran — the U.S. could follow to deter Tehran’s use of a nuclear bomb or its transfer to non-state actors, like Hezbollah, and persuade regional states not to develop their own nuclear arms capabilities.
In addition, Kenneth Pollack, a former CIA analyst at the Brookings Institution whose 2002 book, “The Threatening Storm” helped persuade many liberals and Democrats to support the U.S. invasion of Iraq, will publish a new book, “Unthinkable: Iran, the Bomb, and American Strategy”, that is also expected to argue for a containment strategy if Iran acquires a nuclear weapon.
Because both Brookings and CNAS are regarded as close to the administration, some neo-conservative commentators have expressed alarm that these reports are “trial balloons” designed to set the stage for Obama’s abandonment of the prevention strategy in favour of containment, albeit by another name.
It is likely that Nader’s study – coming as it does from RAND, a think tank with historically close ties to the Pentagon – will be seen in a similar light.
His report concedes that Iran’s acquisition of nuclear weapons would lead to greater tension with the Gulf Arab monarchies and thus to greater instability in the region. Moreover, an inadvertent or accidental nuclear exchange between Israel and Iran would be a “dangerous possibility”, according to Nader who also notes that the “cascade effect”, while outside the scope of his study, warrants “careful consideration”.
Despite Iran’s strong ideological antipathy toward Israel, the report does not argue that Tehran would attack the Jewish state with nuclear weapons, as that would almost certainly lead to the regime’s destruction.
Israel, in Nader’s view, fears that Iran’s nuclear capability could serve as an “umbrella” for Tehran’s allies that could significantly hamper Israel’s military operations in the Palestinian territories, the Levant, and the wider region.
But the report concludes that Tehran is unlikely to extend its nuclear deterrent to its allies, including Hezbollah, noting that the interests of those groups do not always – or even often – co-incide with Iran’s. Iran would also be highly unlikely to transfer nuclear weapons to them in any event, according to the report.
]]>When Iranian officials sit down at the negotiating table in Almaty with representatives from six international powers, Kazakhstan will gain kudos that will burnish its international diplomatic image and raise the prestige of President Nursultan Nazarbayev. The event may also encourage the United States and European Union members to restrain criticism of [...]]]>
When Iranian officials sit down at the negotiating table in Almaty with representatives from six international powers, Kazakhstan will gain kudos that will burnish its international diplomatic image and raise the prestige of President Nursultan Nazarbayev. The event may also encourage the United States and European Union members to restrain criticism of Kazakhstan’s democratization shortcomings. “Kazakhstan has long tried to shape the state’s image as an intermediary in various conflicts and offer a platform for discussion of regional problems,” said political analyst Dosym Satpayev, director of the Kazakhstan Risks Assessment Group think-tank.
Catherine Ashton, the European Union foreign policy chief who heads the six-nation group negotiating with Iran, confirmed in an e-mailed statement on February 5 that talks would take place in Almaty on February 26. She said the negotiations were agreed on between Helga Schmid, the European External Action Service’s deputy secretary general, and Ali Bagheri, deputy secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council. Ashton also thanked Kazakhstan’s government “for its generous offer to host the talks.”
The confirmation came after Tehran had signaled two days earlier that it was ready to talk to the six-nation group – comprised of Russia, the United States, China, Britain, France and Germany — after an eight-month hiatus. Speaking in Munich on February 3, Iranian Foreign Minister Ali Akbar Salehi first disclosed the “good news” that Kazakhstan would be hosting a meeting in late February.
Nazarbayev’s administration has on several occasions offered to act as host for talks on Iran’s nuclear ambitions. On February 4, Altay Abibullayev, a spokesperson for the Kazakhstani president’s Central Communications Service, reiterated the administration’s eagerness to lend a helping hand. “We as the receiving side will make all efforts to create the most favorable conditions for successfully holding these talks in Kazakhstan,” he said.
Hosting the Iran nuclear talks dovetails with Kazakhstan’s long-standing efforts to become a global diplomatic player. In connection with those endeavors, Kazakhstan chaired the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe in 2010 and is current lobbying for a temporary seat on the United Nations Security Council in 2016.
When it comes to agreement on the Iranian nuclear question, Astana’s influence over the negotiations will be limited, Satpayev pointed out. “There is Kazakhstan’s desire to present itself as an intermediary, and then there are the [real] possibilities [of what the talks can achieve],” he said. “It all depends on Iran’s political will.”
The discussions on Iran’s nuclear program have been deadlocked since negotiations in Moscow last June. The six-nation group is pressing Iran to comply with UN Security Council resolutions to end uranium enrichment and close an underground enrichment facility. The international community also wants Iran to hand over stockpiles of uranium already enriched to the level of 20 percent (a critical stage in the nuclear bomb-making process) for international safe-keeping. Tehran insists its program is for peaceful purposes, and wants international sanctions lifted.
Kazakhstan is a fitting host for the Iranian nuclear discussions, given its own history. The country voluntarily gave up the nuclear weapons arsenal it inherited following the 1991 Soviet collapse. It is also home to the mothballed Soviet nuclear testing site at Semipalatinsk that has left a devastating environmental and health legacy on the country.
Nazarbayev has sought to play a leading international role in anti-proliferation efforts. In an opinion piece published by the New York Times in March 2012, Nazarbayev asserted that Kazakhstani authorities “have worked tirelessly to encourage other countries to follow our lead and build a world in which the threat of nuclear weapons belongs to history.”
Nazarbayev went on to address the Iranian nuclear question directly, urging Tehran “to learn from our [Kazakhstan’s] example” and opt for “building peaceful alliances and prosperity over fear and suspicion.”
In a bid to reduce proliferation risks, Kazakhstan has offered to host an international nuclear fuel bank under the auspices of the International Atomic Energy Agency that would give states access to low-enriched uranium for peaceful purposes. And the fuel bank offer has won plaudits from Washington: last fall former US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton praised it, noting that “few countries can be compared to Kazakhstan in terms of its experience in non-proliferation.”
This suggests Washington sees Kazakhstan as an honest broker in nuclear talks involving Iran. Kazakhstan cultivates good relations with all the big powers, including the United States, Russia and China, and is viewed as a “more or less neutral state” to offer a platform for dialogue, Satpayev said.
Photo: A monument in to those who suffered during nuclear testing at Semipalitinsk serves as a reminder of Kazakhstan’s nuclear past. The country, which gave up its nuclear arsenal after the break-up of the Soviet Union, will host sensitive talks on Iran’s nuclear ambitions later this month. (Photo: David Trilling)
Since the collapse of the European effort to persuade Iran to renounce uranium enrichment, it has become a trope in British statements that if left unchecked, Iran’s nuclear programme will trigger a nuclear arms race in the Middle East. Even the Chief of Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) reportedly
Since the collapse of the European effort to persuade Iran to renounce uranium enrichment, it has become a trope in British statements that if left unchecked, Iran’s nuclear programme will trigger a nuclear arms race in the Middle East. Even the Chief of Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) reportedly believes this.
There seems to be a similar emphasis in US statements on Iran. This March, President Barak Obama said that an Iranian nuclear weapon “would trigger a nuclear arms race in the most dangerous part of the world” during a joint Press Conference with UK Prime Minister, David Cameron. Similar statements have been made by other officials over the years, including Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
So it may be worth subjecting the arms race claim to a little analysis.
Uppermost in British minds is the fear of Saudi Arabia becoming nuclear-armed. It seems to have been planted there by senior Saudis who may or may not see Iran’s nuclear activities as a threat to Saudi security, but who resent the nuclear achievements of an arch rival and fear that in some mysterious way a nuclear-weapons-capable Iran will acquire “hegemony” over neighbouring Arab states.
Yet a few minutes’ thought suffices to suggest reasons why Saudi policy-makers would hesitate to embark on a nuclear weapons programme. Saudi Arabia is a party to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). It has made a formal commitment not to manufacture or otherwise acquire nuclear weapons. It would risk international ostracism and UN Security Council counter-measures if it were to violate that obligation.
Saudi Arabia has been a close ally of the US since the 1930s. US friendship helps sustain in power the leaders of a tribe that acquired control of the Hejaz (and the Holy City of Mecca) by driving out the Hashemites less than a hundred years ago and that is unsure of its right to dominate the Arabian Peninsula. As partial and discriminatory as the US’s Middle East policy has sometimes appeared in the last decade, it is hard to imagine that the US would stand by while its Saudi ally set about proliferating, or, that Saudi rulers would risk that friendship by defying America’s wishes.
Jack Straw, a former British Foreign Secretary, recounts a senior Saudi’s reply when asked about Saudi nuclear intentions:
We say that we will have to keep step with Iran. But in reality our people would never forgive us for tolerating Israeli nuclear weapons for so many years and developing nuclear weapons to balance their acquisition by Islamic Iran.
So, Saudi proliferation seems an unlikely prospect. Saudi/Iranian rivalry, however, remains a problem. If ever the West were to decide to tolerate an Iranian enrichment capacity, this problem would have to be addressed.
One solution would be to build a multinational enrichment plant on Saudi soil. The Saudis themselves suggested such a plant to their Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) allies and to Iran in the mid-2000s. The United Arab Emirates, which has four nuclear power plants under construction, and other GCC states that are looking into nuclear power, could be interested in becoming stake-holders. Western enrichment technology could be “black-boxed” and the plant opened to the same degree of international inspection as enrichment plants in Europe and Japan. The result would be a boost to Saudi confidence in their ability to thwart Iran’s supposed hegemonic aspirations and a reminder to Iran that action can trigger reaction.
The other nuclear competitor posited by British politicians is Turkey. Yet Turkey, also an NPT party, is a member of NATO and thus already has indirect access to nuclear deterrent forces. For more than forty years, Turkey shared a border with a hostile nuclear-armed Soviet Union but never sought to acquire an independent nuclear deterrent. In recent years, Turkish Ministers have shown no sign of feeling obliged to compete with, or threatened by Iran’s nuclear activities.
At a recent meeting in London, the Turkish ambassador took strong exception to one speaker’s mention of Turkey in a regional arms race context.
A state that is a past regional rival of Iran is Egypt. But Egypt, also an NPT party, is economically and militarily dependent on US friendship and would thus be inhibited from nuclear adventurism by its proximity to Israel and its vulnerability to pre-emptive Israeli strikes.
Similar factors would weigh against a Syrian nuclear weapons programme if a Western-backed regime replaced the Iranian-backed Assad regime. (Ironically, Iranian-backed Syria is the only other state in the region that is suspected of having had a nuclear weapons programme in the last decade. Only the most ingenious sophist could claim that Iran provided the spur to that “race”.)
In sum, the claim that Iranian enrichment of uranium under IAEA supervision will trigger a Middle East nuclear arms race seems unreasonable. It should not pass unquestioned. Careless claims can have costly consequences.
]]>via Tom Dispatch
There was a time when nuclear weapons were a significant part of our national conversation. Addressing the issue of potential atomic annihilation was oncedescribed by nuclear theorist Herman Kahn as “thinking [...]]]>
via Tom Dispatch
There was a time when nuclear weapons were a significant part of our national conversation. Addressing the issue of potential atomic annihilation was oncedescribed by nuclear theorist Herman Kahn as “thinking about the unthinkable,” but that didn’t keep us from thinking, talking, fantasizing, worrying about it, or putting images of possible nuclear nightmares (often transmuted to invading aliens or outer space) endlessly on screen.
Now, on a planet still overstocked with city-busting, world-ending weaponry, in which almost 67 years have passed since a nuclear weapon was last used, the only nuke that Americans regularly hear about is one that doesn’t exist: Iran’s. The nearly 20,000 nuclear weapons on missiles, planes, and submarines possessed by Russia, the United States, France, the United Kingdom, China, Israel, Pakistan, India, and North Korea are barely mentioned in what passes for press coverage of the nuclear issue.
Today, nuclear destruction finds itself at the end of a long queue of anxieties about our planet and its fate. For some reason, we trust ourselves, our allies, and even our former enemies with nuclear arms — evidently so deeply that we don’t seem to think the staggering arsenals filled with weaponry that could put the devastation of Hiroshima to shame are worth covering or dealing with. Even the disaster at Fukushima last year didn’t revive an interest in the weaponry that goes with the “peaceful” atom in our world.
Attending to the Bomb in a MAD World
Our views of the nuclear issue haven’t always been so shortsighted. In the 1950s, editor and essayist Norman Cousins was typical in frequently tacklingnuclear weapons issues for the widely read magazine Saturday Review. In the late 1950s and beyond, the Ban the Bomb movement forced the nuclear weapons issue onto the global agenda, gaining international attention when it was revealed that Strontium-90, a byproduct of nuclear testing, was making its way into mothers’ breast milk. In those years, the nuclear issue became personal as well as political.
In the early 1960s, President John F. Kennedy responded to public pressure bysigning a treaty with Russia that banned atmospheric nuclear testing (and so further Strontium-90 fallout). He also gave a dramatic speech to the United Nations in which he spoke of the nuclear arms race as a “sword of Damocles” hanging over the human race, poised to destroy us at any moment.
Popular films like Fail-Safe and Dr. Strangelove captured both the dangers and the absurdity of the superpower arms race. And when, on the night of October 22, 1962, Kennedy took to the airwaves to warn the American people that a Cuban missile crisis was underway, that it was nuclear in nature, that a Soviet nuclear attack and a “full retaliatory strike on the Soviet Union” were possibilities — arguably the closest we have come to a global nuclear war — it certainly got everyone’s attention.
All things nuclear receded from public consciousness as the Vietnam War escalated and became the focus of antiwar activism and debate, but the nuclear issue came back with a vengeance in the Reagan years of the early 1980s when superpower confrontations once again were in the headlines. A growing anti-nuclear movement first focused on a near-disaster at the Three Mile Island nuclear plant in Pennsylvania (the Fukushima of its moment) and then on the superpower nuclear stand-off that went by the name of “mutually assured destruction” or, appropriately enough, the acronym MAD.
The Nuclear Freeze Campaign generated scores of anti-nuclear resolutions in cities and towns around the country, and in June 1982, a record-breaking million people gathered in New York City’s Central Park to call for nuclear disarmament. If anyone managed to miss this historic outpouring of anti-nuclear sentiment, ABC news aired a prime-time, made-for-TV movie, The Day After, that offered a remarkably graphic depiction of the missiles leaving their silos and the devastating consequences of a nuclear war. It riveted a nation.
The collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of that planetary superpower rivalry less than a decade later took nuclear weapons out of the news. After all, with the Cold War over and no other rivals to the United States, who needed such weaponry or a MAD world either? The only problem was that the global nuclear landscape was left more or less intact, mission-less but largely untouched (with the proliferation of the weapons to other countries ongoing). Unacknowledged as it may be, in some sense MAD still exists, even if we prefer to pretend that it doesn’t.
A MAD World That No One Cares to Notice
More than 20 years later, the only nuclear issue considered worth the bother is stopping the spread of the bomb to a couple of admittedly scary and problematic regimes: Iran and North Korea. Their nuclear efforts make the news regularly and garner attention (to the point of obsession) in media and government circles. But remind me: when was the last time you read about what should be the ultimate (and obvious) goal — getting rid of nuclear weapons altogether?
This has been our reality, despite President Obama’s pledge in Prague back in 2009 to seek “the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons,” and the passage of a modest but important New START arms reduction treaty between the United States and Russia in 2010. It remains our reality, despite adawning realization in budget-anxious Washington that we may no longer be able to afford to throw money (as presently planned) at nuclear projects ranging from new ballistic-missile submarines to new facilities for building nuclear warhead components — all of which are slated to keep the secret global nuclear arms race alive and well decades into the future.
If Iran is worth talking about — and it is, given the implications of an Iranian bomb for further nuclear proliferation in the Middle East — what about thearsenals of the actual nuclear states? What about Pakistan, a destabilizing country which has at least 110 nuclear warheads and counting, and continues to view India as its primary adversary despite U.S. efforts to get it to focus on al-Qaeda and the Taliban? What about India’s roughly 100 nuclear warheads, meant to send a message not just to Pakistan but to neighboring China as well? And will China hold pat at 240 or so nuclear weapons in the face of U.S. nuclear modernization efforts and plans to surround it with missile defense systems that could, in theory if not practice, blunt China’s nuclear deterrent force?
Will Israel continue to get a free pass on its officially unacknowledged possession of up to 200 nuclear warheads and its refusal to join the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty? Who are France and the United Kingdom targeting with their forces of 300 and 225 nuclear warheads, respectively? How long will it take North Korea to develop miniaturized nuclear bombs and deploy them on workable, long-range missiles? And is New START the beginning or the end of mutual U.S. and Russian arms reductions?
Many of these questions are far more important than whether Iran gets the bomb, but they get, at best, only a tiny fraction of the attention that Tehran’s nuclear program is receiving. Concern about Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal and a fear of loose nukes in a destabilizing country is certainly part of the subtext of U.S. policy towards Islamabad. Little effort has been made of late, however, to encourage Pakistan and India to engage in talks aimed at reconciling their differences and opening the way for discussions on reducing their nuclear arsenals.
The last serious effort — centered on the contentious issue of Kashmir — reached its high point in 2007 under the regime of Pakistani autocrat Pervez Musharraf, and it went awry in the wake of political changes within his country and Pakistani-backed terrorist attacks on India. If anything, the tensions now being generated by U.S. drone strikes in Pakistan’s tribal borderlands and other affronts, intended or not, to Pakistan’s sovereignty have undermined any possibility of Washington brokering a rapprochement between Pakistan and India.
In addition, starting in the Bush years, the U.S. has been selling India nuclear fuel and equipment. This has been part of a controversial agreement that violates prior U.S. commitments to forgo nuclear trade with any nation that has refused to join the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (a pact India has not signed). Although U.S. assistance is nominally directed towards India’s civilian nuclear program, it helps free up resources that India can use to expand its nuclear weapons arsenal.
The “tilt” towards India that began during the Bush administration has continued under Obama. Only recently, for instance, a State Department official bragged about U.S. progress in selling advanced weaponry to New Delhi. Meanwhile, F-16s that Washington supplied to the Pakistani military back in the heyday of the U.S.-Pakistan alliance may have already beenadapted to serve as nuclear delivery vehicles in the event of a nuclear confrontation with India.
China has long adhered to a de facto policy of minimum deterrence — keeping just enough nuclear weapons to dissuade another nation from attacking it with nuclear arms. But this posture has not prevented Beijing from seeking to improve the quality of its long-range ballistic missiles. And if China feels threatened by continued targeting by the United States or by sea-based American interceptors deployed to the region, it could easily increase its arsenal to ensure the “safety” of its deterrent. Beijing will also be keeping a watchful eye on India as its nuclear stockpile continues to grow.
Ever since Ronald Reagan — egged on by mad scientists like Edward Tellerand right-wing zealots like Lt. Gen. Daniel O. Graham — pledged to build a perfect anti-nuclear shield that would render nuclear weapons “impotent and obsolete,” missile defense has had a powerful domestic constituency in the United States. This has been the case despite the huge cost and high-profile failures of various iterations of the missile defense concept.
The only concrete achievement of three decades of missile defense research and development so far has been to make Russia suspicious of U.S. intentions. Even now, rightly or not, Russia is extremely concerned about the planned installation of U.S. missile defenses in Europe that Washington insists will be focused on future Iranian nuclear weapons. Moscow feels that they could just as easily be turned on Russia. If President Obama wins a second term, he will undoubtedly hope to finesse this issue and open the door to further joint reductions in nuclear forces, or possibly even consider reducing this country’s nuclear arsenal significantly, whether or not Russia initially goes along.
Recent bellicose rhetoric from Moscow underscores its sensitivity to the missile defense issue, which may yet scuttle any plans for serious nuclear negotiations. Given that the U.S. and Russia together possess more than 90% of the world’s nuclear weapons, an impasse between the two nuclear superpowers (even if they are not “super” in other respects) will undercut any leverage they might have to encourage other nations to embark on a path leading to global nuclear reductions.
In his 1960s ode to nuclear proliferation, “Who’s Next,” Tom Lehrer includedthe line “Israel’s getting tense, wants one in self-defense.” In fact, Israel was the first — and for now the only — Middle Eastern nation to get the bomb, with reports that it can deliver a nuclear warhead not only from land-based missiles but also via cruise missiles launched from nuclear submarines. Whatever it may say about Israel’s technical capabilities in the military field, Israel’s nuclear arsenal may also be undermining its defense, particularly if it helps spur Iran to build its own nukes. And irresponsible talk by some Israeli officials about attacking Iran only increases the chance that Tehran will decide to go nuclear.
It is hard to handicap the grim, “unthinkable” but hardly inconceivable prospect that August 9, 1945, will not prove to be the last time that nuclear weapons are used on this planet. Perhaps some of the loose nuclear materials or inadequately guarded nuclear weapons littering the globe — particularly, but not solely, in the states of the former Soviet Union — might fall into the hands of a terrorist group. Perhaps an Islamic fundamentalist government will seize power in Pakistan and go a step too far in nuclear brinkmanship with India over Kashmir. Maybe the Israeli leadership will strike out at Iran with nuclear weapons in an effort to keep Tehran from going nuclear. Maybe there will be a miscommunication or false alarm that will result in the United States or Russia launching one of their nuclear weapons that are still in Cold War-style, hair-trigger mode.
Although none of these scenarios, including a terrorist nuclear attack, may be as likely as nuclear alarmists sometimes suggest, as long as the world remains massively stocked with nuclear weapons, one of them — or some other scenario yet to be imagined — is always possible. The notion that Iran can’t be trusted with such a weapon obscures a larger point: given their power to destroy life on a monumental scale, no individual and no government can ultimately be trusted with the bomb.
The only way to be safe from nuclear weapons is to get rid of them — not just the Iranian one that doesn’t yet exist, but all of them. It’s a daunting task. It’s also a subject that’s out of the news and off anyone’s agenda at the moment, but if it is ever to be achieved, we at least need to start talking about it. Soon.
–William D. Hartung is the director of the Arms and Security Project at the Center for International Policy, a TomDispatch regular, and the author ofProphets of War: Lockheed Martin and the Making of the Military-Industrial Complex. (To catch Timothy MacBain’s latest Tomcast audio interview in which Hartung discusses the upside-down world of global nuclear politics, click here or download it to your iPod here.)
Follow TomDispatch on Twitter @TomDispatch and join us on Facebook, and check out the latest TD book, Terminator Planet: The First History of Drone Warfare, 2001-2050.
Copyright 2012 William Hartung
]]>“The United States and the international community seek a resolution to our differences with Iran, and the door remains open to diplomacy should Iran choose to [...]]]>
“The United States and the international community seek a resolution to our differences with Iran, and the door remains open to diplomacy should Iran choose to walk through it,” Obama said. “But the Iranian government must demonstrate a clear and credible commitment and confirm to the world the peaceful intent of its nuclear program.”
In a speech that focused on the Israeli-Arab conflict, Obama dedicated a scant three paragraphs to the issue that has dominated the ongoing international summit in New York.
He reasserted, as the P5+1 did on Wednesday, his desire to see a resolution to the standoff over Iran’s alleged pursuit of nuclear weapons. But Obama added that if Iran did not fulfill its responsibilities, there would be consequences, specifically mentioning the last round of sanctions in the UN Security Council earlier this summer.
Obama’s remarks on Iran:
]]>As part of our effort on non-proliferation, I offered the Islamic Republic of Iran an extended hand last year, and underscored that it has both rights and responsibilities as a member of the international community. I also said — in this hall — that Iran must be held accountable if it failed to meet those responsibilities. And that is what we have done.
Iran is the only party to the NPT that cannot demonstrate the peaceful intentions of its nuclear program, and those actions have consequences. Through U.N. Security Council Resolution 1929, we made it clear that international law is not an empty promise.
Now let me be clear once more: The United States and the international community seek a resolution to our differences with Iran, and the door remains open to diplomacy should Iran choose to walk through it. But the Iranian government must demonstrate a clear and credible commitment and confirm to the world the peaceful intent of its nuclear program.
This time, the sky is surely falling. At the very least, the world is at a “tipping point” in the direction of a nuclear armed crowd with far more countries actively pursuing and acquiring nuclear weapons. On this point, Hillary Clinton, Benjamin Netanyahu, Ban Ki-moon and John McCain all agree.
This proliferation pessimism often finds expression in metaphors about nuclear dominoes, chains, cascades and waves. In most cases the gloomy scenario anticipates a reactive process in which Iran’s “going nuclear” leads to decisions by other states in the region and possibly elsewhere to follow suit in quick succession.
Such prognoses are often cited in support of arguments for urgent action to stop Iran’s nuclear program. And yet, as was the case with the “domino theory” of the spread of Communism, little evidence is marshaled to support assertions about reactive proliferation.
A review of declassified U.S. national intelligence estimates (NIEs), as well as scholarly prognoses, shows that nuclear alarmism has been a feature of U.S. threat assessments throughout most of the nuclear age.
A new NIE on Iran is expected soon, and its findings are already being questioned before its publication. As covered in Wednesday’s Talking Points, Stuart Eizenstat and Mark Brzezinski have an opinion piece in Politico where they deem the 2007 NIE on Iran insufficiently damning and insist the intelligence agents who compose the upcoming NIE “answer the right questions and get the analysis straight.”
]]>Roger Simon, blogging at Pajamas Media, claims to be quoting an article published in the Israeli daily Maariv:
…. workers at the Dimona reactor who submitted VISA requests to visit the United States for ongoing university education in Physics, Chemistry and Nuclear Engineering — have all been rejected, specifically because of their association with the Dimona reactor. This is a new policy decision of the Obama administration, since there never used to be an issue with the reactor’s workers from study in the USA, and till recently, they received VISAs and studied in the USA.
Simon goes on to infer that, according to the Maariv article, “Israeli defense officials are stating these workers have no criminal records in the U.S. or Israel and have been singled out purely because of their place of employment.”
Nestled in Simon’s (or an uncredited source’s) “exclusive Pajamas Media translation” is the revelation that the English version Simon is quoting what he admits “is from a Google translation that I’ve tried to fix up a little bit.”
A little bit? Let’s play “Simon Says” and compare his (or his source’s) efforts to what Maariv writer Uri Binder actually wrote:
Simon says:
NRG/Maariv reports today that workers at the Dimona reactor who submitted VISA requests to visit the United States for ongoing University education in Physics, Chemistry and Nuclear Engineering — have all been rejected, specifically because of their association with the Dimona reactor. This is a new policy decision of the Obama administration, since there never used to be an issue with the reactor’s workers from study in the USA, and till recently, they received VISAs and studied in the USA.
Israeli Defense Officials have stated that these reactor researches have no criminal background in Israel or in the USA, and yet they are being singled out purely because of their place of employment at the reactor.
In point of fact, the Maariv article in the original Hebrew (English translation courtesy of and copyright by Israel News Today, used by permission here and for subsequent block quotes) opens:
The Americans are toughening their behavior toward the Nuclear Research Center Negev (NRCN) in Dimona. NRCN workers say that while the Americans are behaving in a conciliatory and non-aggressive way regarding the Iranian nuclear program, President Obama’s people have chosen to behave in a humiliating manner toward a country that is friendly toward them.
NRCN officials said yesterday that Obama’s government has imposed restrictions and toughened its behavior toward them, as has never happened before in relations between the two countries. For decades, NRCN employees have traveled to universities in the United States for advanced professional training in physics, chemistry and nuclear engineering. In order to study at those universities, the NRCN researchers had to request entry visas for the United States, as any Israeli citizen must. Yet recently, several of them encountered humiliating treatment and were refused visas, while their only crime has been that they are NRCN employees. According to security officials, the people in question are researchers with clean records who have never been in any trouble with the law either in Israel or in the United States, so the new manner in which they are being treated constitutes a severe offense against them and their families.
So, at the outset it is obvious that:
1. Binder’s Maariv article is part of a larger discourse of grievance emanating from Israel about Iran, and what appears (to Israelis) to be President Obama’s harsh treatment of Israel in sharp contrast to his conciliatory and gentle treatment of Iran. (Iranians don’t quite see it that way.)
2. Simon asserts not only that all Dimona workers who have requested visas to study in the US have been turned down, but also that they have been refused visas explicitly because they worked at the Dimona nuclear facility. In Blau’s original article in Maariv, he doesn’t elaborate on what the alleged “humiliating treatment,” consisted of, nor does he provide any hint as to the number of Dimona employees who requested study visas, how many received them and how many had their visa requests denied. (Do consular officials routinely provide a reason why a visa has been denied?)
The original Hebrew is kamah mey’hem, which translates as “a few” or “some” of them. Toward the end of the article, Professor Ze’ev Alfasi, the director of the nuclear engineering department at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, is quoted as saying, “Some of the people did not receive visas to the United States because they are employees of the Nuclear Research Center.” Some, not all. (How Professor Alfasi is privy to US State Dept. deliberations concerning visa issuance is not clear.)
3. Simon’s translation claims that (unnamed) “Defense officials” have attributed the rejection of the visa applications to the applicants working for NRCN. In Binder’s article, “security officials” attest to the fact that the applicants have never run afoul of the law either in Israel or the US. It is not clear whether it is these (unnamed) officials or Binder himself who believe(s) that this, in and of itself, automatically entitles the individuals in question, and their families, to US entry visas.
4. Also interesting is that Simon’s headline refers to the victims of visa denial as “scientists,” whereas in Binder’s article, they are merely “workers.” (Perhaps they are technicians at the level of Mordechai Vanunu?) Nowhere in the Maariv piece is the word “scientist” used.
Most remarkably, Simon , the right wing blogosphere, and the hysterical rantings of the Republican Jewish Coalition, as well as the few progressives to have caught this story (Paul Woodward, Juan Cole), seem to have missed the significance of the larger and far more germane issue raised in Binder’s article. Dimona workers are objecting: the US apparently has not been providing some of the dual use (civilian and military) nuclear technological equipment to Israel that it wants. Exactly how long this has been the case is not clear, although Binder tries to exculpate the Bush administration. This has forced Israel to procure this technology from (gasp!) France.
According to officials who are familiar with the details, attempts to purchase certain components from the Americans have also encountered difficulties, with some of the items under a de facto embargo. To put it mildly, officials at the nuclear center are not pleased with the tougher treatment, which did not take place during President Bush’s term.
According to Professor Alfasi,“The United States is not selling anything nuclear to the Nuclear Research Center, and that includes everything. For example, radiation detectors for nuclear research are purchased in France because the Americans do not sell to people of the Nuclear Research Center.”
Even more offensive and outrageous to Israelis is that “The Americans have asked for a detailed report on the purpose of some of the items that they wish to buy from the United States.” Professor Alfasi complains: “The Americans want to know what every item of equipment is used for.”
The Maariv article ends, as it began, with Iran. Alfasi says peevishly, “I don’t know whether they [the US] will sell to Iran what they’ve been refusing to sell to us.” According to Binder, “Officials of the Nuclear Research Center refused to comment.”
The Maariv article concludes rather oddly with what appears to be a stinging indictment of “the upper echelons of the security establishment” who apparently are not as upset by the US’s alleged perfidy as anonymous retiree thinks they ought to be:
A retired employee of the Nuclear Research Center said yesterday, “I don’t understand it. Why are the upper echelons of the security establishment silent when our best friend is working against us so blatantly and behaving leniently toward the makers of nuclear terror? The whole world is seeing the circus that the Iranian regime has created for the United States.”
Is it possible that President Obama really is serious about curbing nuclear proliferation–for Iran, for the US, and, unthinkably, even for Israel. Israelis love non-proliferation as long as his target is Iran, but get awfully upset if the POTUS–or anyone in his administration–dares to challenge the Israeli presumption that its own nuclear programs, and the people who work for them, are exempt from American and international scrutiny. The “top echelons” of the Israeli may be the first to have gotten the message, or they may be allowing their underlings to grab the headlines and speak for them.
Even more to the point, what is Obama’s message to France, who, as a nuclear state which is party to the NPT, has pledged to provide nuclear technology only to non-nuclear states which have signed the NPT? Israel has never signed the NPT, either as a non-nuclear or nuclear state. Obama may have finally noticed that the NPT actually bars support for Israel’s nuclear program. The French have been turning a blind eye to the NPT when it comes to Israel, apparently providing anything the US won’t. France, after all, was the source of Israel’s nuclear infrastructure back in the 1950s and 60′s. France often claims (with a wink) to have been duped by the Israelis into providing their nuclear know-how.
What about now?
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