The Right Getting It Right II

Peter McKay writes:

Writing in the London Review of Books about nuclear non-proliferation politics, two British academics, Campbell Craig and Jan Ruzicka, ask: ‘Why should Iran or North Korea respect the principle of non-proliferation when the most powerful states lecturing them possess such enormous arsenals?’ Why indeed.

Warships from Iran enter the Mediterranean via the Suez Canal. A U.S. navy flotilla, including the giant carrier USS Abraham Lincoln, cruises through the Straits of Hormuz, within sight of the Iranian coast. The Israelis and Americans threaten to bomb Iran, creating a new Middle East war. They say this might be necessary to delay or destroy the regime’s ability to build nuclear weapons. Though the U.S. and Israel possess nuclear weapons, both say Iran must not be allowed to have any because its president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, has vowed to wipe Israel off the face of the earth.

Anti-war groups deny he ever said such a thing, claiming that the speech in question — Ahmadinejad’s first as Iran’s newly elected president — has been mistranslated. According to the website Antiwar.com, he spoke in Farsi and quoted what the late Ayatollah Khomeini, father of the 1979 Islamic Revolution, had said about Israel. This is Antiwar.com’s translation of the key sentence: ‘Mam (Khomeini) ghoft (said) een (this) rezhim-e (regime) ishghalgar-e (occupying) qods (Jerusalem) bayad (must) az safheh-ye ruzgar (from page of time) mahv shavad (vanish from).’ Whom do we believe?

Ahmadinejad is clearly hostile to Israel. So are the Arab nations with which Iran is allied. But he knows he couldn’t fire nuclear missiles at Israel without the certainty Iran would be obliterated by the U.S. Washington hawks who want Iran bombed say Ahmadinejad is mad enough to risk nuclear Armageddon in order to destroy Israel. But does that also go for the clerics who enjoy supreme power or the country’s educated, middle-class minority yearning not for a mushroom cloud but the freedoms enjoyed by citizens in the West?

When not citing Ahmadinejad’s alleged threat to wipe out Israel, the Americans mention the 1968 Non-proliferation of Nuclear Weapons Treaty (NPT), which most of the world’s sovereign states signed. Those nations without nuclear weapons were promised help in developing peaceful atomic energy while the nuclear club pursued disarmament. Soon afterwards, India and Pakistan acquired nuclear weapons. So did North Korea. Iraq’s Saddam Hussein was suspected of having them. So Iraq endured sanctions, a war, an occupation and the deaths of hundreds of thousands of civilians before it was conceded that Saddam didn’t have nuclear weapons.

During the Cold War, there was no hope of persuading the U.S., the Soviets or China of giving up their missiles. Neither was there much appetite for doing so when the Cold War ended. Non-nuclear nations worked it out in the end: the NPT regime was rigged to maintain the status quo. In 2010, the so-called New Start (Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty) agreement between America and Russia was ratified. New Start was vital, said the Americans, ‘because everything we need to do in the future, starting with halting the Iranian programme, requires working with Russia and showing we are serious about bringing down our own nuclear stockpiles’.

How serious are they? Not very. The Obama administration has committed $85 billion to modernising — i.e., making even more lethal — the U.S. nuclear arsenal between now and 2020. Obama wouldn’t have got New Start through the Senate without committing his administration to improving America’s bomb power. A catchy new name was devised for non-proliferation — Global Zero. Some 300 political, military, business, faith and civil leaders and 400,000 citizens worldwide were recruited to work for the ‘verified elimination of all nuclear weapons’. Which won’t happen until something even more deadly is invented in their place.