Nuclear weapons

By David Krieger The lead article in the July/August 2012 issue of Foreign Affairs is titled “Why Iran Should Get the Bomb.” The author, Kenneth Waltz, a former president of the American Political Science Association, argues that the world should stop worrying about Iran getting the bomb. He sums up his basic argument this way: “If Iran goes nuclear, Israel and Iran will deter each other, as nuclear powers always have. There has never been a full-scale war between two nuclear-armed states. Once Iran crosses the nuclear threshold, deterrence will apply, even if the Iranian arsenal is relatively small.” In essence, Waltz puts his faith in nuclear deterrence and justifies this in historical terms. But the history is short and there have been many close calls.

By Gunnar Westberg, TFF Board member In 1984 we, a group from IPPNW Sweden, met with the Norwegian general Tönne Huitfeldt, at that time Chief of the military Staff of NATO. He was a man with great confidence in himself and in the military system. “General Huitfeldt”, we asked, “when you work with your scenarios in the NATO Headquarters, with the destruction of the world through a nuclear world war looming as the outcome, are you not scared?”. “Oh no, never”, he said. “the Russians are as rational as we are. They will never let it go too far. I am never scared”. Well, we were. And are.

It seems surprising that the ultra-establishment journal, Foreign Affairs, would go to the extreme of publishing a lead article by the noted political scientist, Kenneth Waltz, with the title “Why Iran Should Get the Bomb” in its current issue. It is more the reasoning of the article than the eye-catching title that flies in the face of the anti-proliferation ethos that has been the consensus lynchpin of nuclear weapons states, and especially the United States. At the same time, Waltz takes pain to avoid disavowing his mainstream political identity. He echoes without pausing to reflect upon the evidence undergirding the rather wobbly escalating assumption that Iran is seeking nuclear weapons at this time. Waltz does acknowledge that Iran might be only trying to have a ‘breakout’ capability of the sort long possessed by Japan and several other countries, that is, the technological capacity if facing a national emergency to assemble...

In another resolution apparently designed to prepare for war against Iran, the U.S. House of Representatives, in an overwhelmingly bipartisan 401–11 vote, has passed a resolution (HR 568) urging the president to oppose any policy toward Iran “that would rely on containment as an option in response to the Iranian nuclear threat.” With its earlier decision to pass a bill that effectively sought to ban any negotiations between the United States and Iran, a huge bipartisan majority of Congress has essentially told the president that nothing short of war or the threat of war is an acceptable policy. Indeed, the rush to pass this bill appears to have been designed to undermine the ongoing international negotiations on Iran’s nuclear program. According to Iranian-American analyst Jamal Abdi, a prominent critic of both the Iranian regime and U.S. policy, the motivation for the resolution may be to “poison those talks by signaling...

/10/jonathanpower2.jpg”> Is it agreement time in Iran? Is Iran going to bend to the will of the UN Security Council and engineer a compromise that will allow it to enrich uranium – but only to a small degree – in return for allowing the UN’s International Atomic Energy Agency to intimately monitor its nuclear industry to assure it doesn’t enrich further to enable it to build a nuclear weapon? The West and Israel in particular have long been in a panic about a possible Iranian nuclear bomb. There is a strong “bomb Iran before it is too late” faction in the US Republican Party and even more so in Israel. This has never made sense if one reads the tea-leaves carefully.

IPS COLUMNIST SERVICE, APRIL 2012 © IPS and the author Editor’s note: The overall picture has turned much worse over the last few months. In particular, the Western demands to Iran made public prior to the Istanbul consultations on April 14, bodes ill for the next round of talks in Baghdad. Everyone has stated views, used rhetoric and taken concrete steps that bring us all closer to the a and the tightening of sanctions that already suffocate Iranian society. It is believed – ­falsely­ – that sanctions are somehow “soft weapons”. In Iraq, with one-third of the population of Iran, Western sanctions caused roughly one million Iraqi deaths. What is indicative of a will to promote future peace among the parties? Well, the following are not: pre-negotiation demands, threats to destroy, an oil embargo, sanctions directed at citizens, condescending rhetoric to and about a nation with one of the oldest...

A few days ago I was a participant in a well-attended academic panel on ‘the decline of violence and warfare’ at the International Studies Association’s Annual Meeting held this year in San Diego, California. The two-part panel featured appraisal of the common argument of two prominent recent publications: Steven Pinker’s best-selling The Better Angels of our Nature: Why Violence has Declined and Joshua Goldstein’s well-researched, informative, and provocative Winning the War on War: The Decline of Armed Conflict Worldwide. Both books are disposed to rely upon quantitative data to back up their optimistic assessments of international and domestic political behavior, which if persuasive, offer humanity important reasons to be hopeful about the future. Much of their argument depends on an acceptance of their interpretation of battlefield deaths worldwide, which according to their assessments have declined dramatically in recent decades. But do battlefield deaths tell the whole story, or even the...

TOKYO, Mar (IPS) – In recent months, the dispute over the nature and intent of the Iranian nuclear development programme has generated increasing tensions throughout the Middle East region. When I consider all that is at stake here, I am reminded of the words of the British historian Arnold Toynbee, who warned that the perils of the nuclear age constituted a “Gordian knot that has to be untied by patient fingers instead of being cut by the sword.” Amidst growing concerns that these tensions will erupt into armed conflict, I urge the political leaderships in all relevant states to recognize that now is the time to muster the courage of restraint and seek the common ground on which the current impasse can be resolved.

In his important article in the New York Times, March 17, 2012, James Risen summarized the consensus of the intelligence community as concluding that Iran abandoned its program to develop nuclear weapons in 2003, and that no persuasive evidence exists that it has departed from this decision. It might have been expected that such news based on the best evidence that billions spent to get the most reliable possible assessments of such sensitive security issues would produce a huge sigh of relief in Washington, but on the contrary it has been totally ignored, including by the highest officers in the government.

/10/jonathanpower2.jpg”> If in 2012 and 2013 the big nuclear weapons powers and UN Security Council permanent members – the U.S., Russia, China, Britain and France – don’t make significant reductions with their nuclear weapons then an important opportunity will be lost. Presidents Barack Obama and Dmitri Medvedev appear to be of a mind on this. One has to go back to the presidencies of John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson to get the full picture on the dismal progress on nuclear disarmament. Their Defence Secretary, Robert McNamara, told both presidents nuclear weapons were unusable.

After the atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the colossal scale of devastation disclosed, there was a momentary embrace of sanity and rationality by world leaders and cultural commentators. There was a realization that living with such weaponry was at best a precarious journey into the future, and far more likely, an appointment with unprecedented human catastrophe if not apocalypse. What to learn from the ongoing existence of nuclear weaponry This dark mood of foreboding did produce some gestures toward nuclear disarmament tabled initially by the U.S. Government, but in a form that reasonably struck others at the time, especially the Soviet Union, as a bad bargain — the U.S. was proposing getting rid of the weapons for the present, but retaining the materials, the technology, and the experience needed to win handily any nuclear rearmament race.

/10/janoberg.jpg”> On Monday the 23rd of January 2012, the EU’s 27 members unanimously decided to stop their oil import from Iran on July 1 this year. That sort of policy is considered benign in comparison with warfare. It won’t be when seen in the long run. Sanctions usually have the opposite consequences of those “intended”. Secondly, as we know from the Iraq case, they are part and parcel of a build-up to war and will have, in the longer run, devastating, cruel consequences for innocent civilians whose lives are already hard. How come EU leaders seem not to see the counterproductivity of their decisions? Do they not know that they contribute to a build up to a war that will be much more catastrophic than that on Iraq both for the region, for themselves and for the economy they otherwise try to keep from even deeper crisis? Virtually everyone speaking...