Current Events for March 2006

Eyes on Iran

Many eyes remain on Iran, last month’s nuclear crisis. The news and Internet are still abuzz with speculation. According to an Associated Press article in the International Herald Tribune for March 10, “The five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council weighed proposals on Thursday for an initial response to the Iran nuclear crisis, with Washington urging its allies to consider targeted sanctions and the entire council planning its first meeting on the issue next week.”

John Bolton, America’s UN ambassador, is taking his characteristically hard line. "We're going to press for as vigorous a response in the council as we can get and hope that that gets the Iranians' attention," Bolton said. "If the Iranians do not back off from their continued aggressive pursuit of nuclear weapons, we'll have to make a decision of what the next step will be." This comment came a few days after he threatened Iran with “harm and pain,” to which senior Iranian national security official Javad Vaeedi responded, “The United States may have the power to cause harm and pain but it is also susceptible to harm and pain. So if the United States wishes to choose that path, let the ball roll.”

It’s hard to imagine how either side can back down from this sort of rhetoric, and yet the dominant opinion in the nuclear disarmament community is that the situation will be resolved without violence, or at least without nuclear violence.

The Deal with India

Meanwhile, much of the disarmament community was distracted this month by the US agreement to sell nuclear fuel, reactors and equipment to India, a country slapped with sanctions in 1998 when it became a nuclear-weapon state without US permission. Alice Slater, director of the Global Resource Action Center for the Environment (GRACE), considers this US-India deal a crisis because it “undermines the law, provokes other countries to get nukes of their own, and dangles a perilous sword of Damocles, as John F. Kennedy characterized the nuclear threat, over the whole world. The Congress must reject Bush's deal to share nuclear technology with India, which leaves a good number of India's reactors out from under the protection of IAEA inspections and verification so they can be used for bomb factories without interference. This is a recipe for chaos!”

The India deal, however, highlights another danger. According to The Research Unit for Political Economy, based in Mumbai, India, a US War College study stated very clearly that,
“We [the US] need tangible Indian support because our strategic interests and objectives are global, while the military and other means at our disposal to pursue them are not keeping pace.... American force posture remains dangerously thin in the arc - many thousand miles long - between Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean and Okinawa and Guam in the Pacific....”

The same article goes on to quote an American Colonel as saying,
“The US Navy wants a relatively neutral territory on the opposite side of the world that can provide ports and support for operations in the Middle East. India not only has a good infrastructure, the Indian Navy has proved that it can fix and fuel US ships. Over time, port visits must become a natural event. India is a viable player in supporting all naval missions, including escorting and responding to regional crises.”

In other words, the US now expects India to become a base for operations in the Middle East. Thus, if the US expands the Iraq war to Iran or Syria, India will be an active, valuable partner. Does this sound like something that will enhance India’s relations with Pakistan, the Muslim nuclear power sitting right on India’s border with whom India has been exchanging bullets almost daily for 60 years? A few years ago, India and Pakistan were generally considered the area most likely to have a nuclear war.

A Polarizing Policy

This past February 23, the US and UK jointly conducted a subcritical nuclear test at the nuclear test site in Nevada. A subcritical test involves a nuclear chain reaction, but keeps it controlled without allowing it to blow up. The purpose of these tests is widely believed to be for computer-simulation nuclear testing and the development of new nuclear weapons. Taken together with the nuclear sales to India and our threats to Iran, the message the US is communicating to the world is, “We will decide unilaterally who may and may not have nuclear weapons. We will help our friends get them, and keep them from our enemies. Furthermore, we will hold our enemies strictly to the letter of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, but we will let our friends off without even signing the treaty (India has not), and we will ignore altogether Article VI of the treaty (in which the US and all nuclear-weapon states have promised to negotiate in good faith toward the elimination of all nuclear weapons).”

This message will certainly create and maintain a clearly polarized world of friends and enemies. One problem with such a world, apart from being morally obsolete, is that friends and enemies change places so quickly. In recent memory the US was funding Osama bin Laden and selling poison gas to Saddam Hussein. Aren’t we glad now we didn’t give them nuclear weapons? Furthermore, the blatant hypocrisy and injustice involved infuriates those who fall into the “enemies” category. Thus, current US nuclear policy seems perfectly designed to assure a nuclear disaster.

David Dionisi, a former military intelligence officer, starts his recent book American Hiroshima as follows:

“An American Hiroshima is the guaranteed outcome, unless we adopt a new way of thinking about fighting terrorism and the use of force. We face an unassailable fact: nuclear weapons have proliferated across the globe and do more to empower the weak than protect the strong. When chemical or biological weapons are considered, we are well beyond unilateral efforts to contain the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction.”

He supports this contention with the little-publicized fact that:

“The Presidential Daily Intelligence Briefing by George Tenet on October 11, 2001, informed President Bush that al Qaeda had acquired a ten-kiloton nuclear bomb…. Fortunately, the Dragonfire intelligence report was wrong. Unfortunately, reports that Osama bin Laden has an active al Qaeda Manhattan Project that he calls ‘American Hiroshima’ are accurate.”

Stay tuned to AtomicBombMuseum.org for more about al Qaeda’s Manhattan Project.