In the wake of Gaza, can the world afford to live with a nuclear Israel?
By Lech Biegalski
Global Research,
February 14, 2009
On February 14, Australian News Agency “The Age” reported:
A SENIOR Israeli diplomat has warned that Israel is ready to launch a military offensive against Iran to prevent it from developing nuclear weapons.
In an interview with The Age, Dan Gillerman, who was Israel's permanent representative at the United Nations from 2003 until last September, said time for diplomatic efforts to stop Iran acquiring a nuclear capability might have already expired.
“The world cannot afford to live with a nuclear Iran,” Mr Gillerman said.
The truth is that, after witnessing Israeli war crimes in Lebanon and in the illegally occupied Palestinian territories, the world cannot afford to live with nuclear Israel. As opposed to Iran, Israel has secretly developed hundreds of nuclear warheads and delivery weapons outside of any supervision by international community. Iran continues to run its nuclear program in cooperation with the UN's International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).
According to the Press TV report of February 13,
The new chief of US intelligence has confirmed the findings of a 2007 intelligence report that Iran has no nuclear weapons program.
Dennis Blair told the Senate Intelligence Committee that his organization has assessed that Tehran does not have nuclear weapons design and weaponization work.
A National Intelligence Estimate (NIE), issued in November 2007 by the sixteen US intelligence agencies, clarified that Iran was not pursuing a nuclear weapons program.
The 2007 intelligence report was widely seen as a setback for Bush administration efforts to pressure Iran and halt its nuclear program.
The UN nuclear watchdog, which has carried out the highest number of inspections in its history on Iranian nuclear sites, has also found nothing to indicate that the program has diverted toward weaponization.
In the meantime, both US and Israeli governments continue to press the issue of suspected development of military nuclear technology in Iran, slapping three rounds of sanctions against Tehran. Israel openly threatens to attack Iran in order to destroy its nuclear and scientific facilities.
The real problem, as we all know by now, is this:
Unlike the US and Israel, Iran has not attacked other countries in recent history. There is enough documented evidence indicating that the US planned the oil wars long ago and that Iran was one of the targets. Strong Iran is also an obstacle for Israeli territorial expansion in Arab countries. In this situation, EVEN IF Iran was trying to develop an effective nuclear deterrence capability IN SELF-DEFENCE, it would be perfectly understandable and perfectly justifiable.
If the US and Israel want other countries to give up their nuclear programs, they should give an example by doing same first. This, however, will not happen because these two “partners” believe that they can unilaterally bully other nations into submission. The clear pattern here is: disarm, so that we can take over your resources and your territories, or else we will attack you!
By the way, nobody has yet explained why “the world cannot live with a nuclear Iran”. The world lives with nuclear America, with nuclear Russia, nuclear China, and India, and Pakistan, and nuclear France, and United Kingdom, with nuclear Israel, and probably a host of other nuclear countries - and nobody threatens a war against them for this reason. Somehow, the world is safer, when countries have nuclear deterrence capabilities. Nobody questions their rights to develop nuclear programs for peaceful or military purposes. So why Iran? I think I have already answered that naive question.
Interestingly, Russia is not using their veto power in the UN Security Council to block the sanctions against Iran. Maybe Russia wants us to step into this mess and stretch ourselves flat? I wouldn't be surprised. Russia is extremely good at diplomacy and at long-term chess games.
Recently,
US Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, stated late Tuesday that the Obama administration might reconsider plans for a missile defense system in Europe, if Iran stops what U.S. officials believe is a drive for nuclear weapons. (Source)
This was a direct ultimatum addressed to Russia. “Help us bully Iran, or we will set up our rockets on your border”. Again, the real question is, “If the European missile defence system is to prevent Iranian nuclear warheads from reaching America, why are they being placed in Poland instead of Germany, the UK or France? Or in Iceland? Or, in Canada?” Obviously, the European missile defence system in Poland threatens Russia and this is why it became a bargaining chip in the geopolitical game for the Middle East and Caucasus. Hillary (who allegedly has an extensive experience in politics) has finally admitted it.
Surely, Mr. Lavrov is working on an appropriate move in response to this “invitation”. Perhaps, the answer should be, “In the spirit of cooperation and pending the UN investigation into Israel's war crimes in Gaza, if the US helps us force Israel to eliminate its nuclear weapons and to accept international inspections of its nuclear facilities, we will help you deal with Iran.”
NOTE:
I disagree with the author's suggestion that nuclear deterrence is something to be attained or that the world is safer when countries have nuclear deterrent capabilities. While some nuclear weapons capable countries "might" conceivably be saved from attack (a debatable point itself), the world in the aggregate experiences increasing risk of annihilation every time an additional nuclear warhead becomes operational. It is clearly immoral to create weapons which are designed to kill hundreds if not millions of innocent people at once. Nor could they ever be utilized in a morally licit and defensive way. The latter is true even for battlefield (tactical) nuclear weapons.
Moreover the idea that these weapons will never be used is not credible. We are fortunate that they were used only twice--tragically by the United States. Our doing so represented crimes against humanity. In the annals of war, no weapon once in existence has ever not been used and that includes nuclear weaponry. In the absence of a credible global nuclear disarmament effort--they will be used again. It is only a matter of time given the fallen nature of human beings--as history amply demonstrates. Nuclear weapons categorically violate the Just War Doctrinal Corpus on multiple accounts.
I do agree that Israel is currently more dangerous to the world than Iran especially in view of the fact that no credible evidence exists that Iran has or is close to developing a nuclear weapon (see the latest relevant NIE for example). Israel is reported to possess several hundred nuclear weapons none of which have ever been inspected by the IAEA or any other credible body. In that regard, Israel has refused to sign the NP--for obvious reasons. Given the crimes against humanity which Israel perpetrated in Lebanon (2007) and in Gaza (12/08) she cannot be trusted with a nuclear capability. In that regard, neither can the United States given our immoral invasion of Iraq.
All the nuclear weapon's states should actively/cooperatively reduce their arsenal's to zero in exchange for the non-nuclear weapon's states continuing to remain non-nuclear as the NPT demands. The United States is a signatory and is currently in violation of the treaty which by the way is also part of US law. This should be widely publicized and debated in the hope of changing national nuclear weapon's policy.
--Dr. J. P. Hubert
Showing posts with label Iraqi Nuclear Weapons. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Iraqi Nuclear Weapons. Show all posts
Monday, February 16, 2009
Wednesday, February 20, 2008
FOCUS: A world free of nuclear weapons -- a dream?
Kyodo World Service
STAFF
Feb 18, 2008
Can we make a world free of nuclear weapons?
If you are involved in shaping security policy, you would say, ''Unfortunately no. The world is not such an easy place.''
And you can explain why the United States and other powers need nuclear weapons to deter rogue nations, such as Iran and North Korea, and hostile nations like China and Russia, and to attack al-Qaida's underground headquarters.
''They are all wrong,'' 87-year-old George Shultz, architect of the Ronald Reagan administration's foreign policy, said in a recent interview. ''These weapons come to be unusable by civilized people and with the spread of nuclear weapons and the threat of them falling into the hands of terrorists, I think the concept of deterrence deteriorates.''
One year ago, Shultz, along with former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, former Secretary of Defense William Perry, and former Chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee Sum Nunn, wrote an article in the Wall Street Journal titled, ''A World Free of Nuclear Weapons,'' and proposed to the U.S. president and leaders of other nuclear weapon countries ''setting the goal of a world free of nuclear weapons and working energetically on the actions required to achieve that goal.''
What made Shultz, Reagan's secretary of state and the mastermind of the U.S. Cold War policies, and other Cold War warriors advocate a nuclear free world? Have they become peaceniks in their older years?
''It's something that I have felt was desirable for a long time,'' Shultz said at his home in the penthouse of a San Francisco high-rise apartment building. When Ronald Reagan met with Mikhail Gorbachev, then general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, in Reykjavik, Iceland, in 1987, making a world free of nuclear weapons was put on the table and ''those two leaders fundamentally agreed that was a good idea.''
But of course at that time there was a very negative reaction from militaries in both countries. They argued that nuclear weapons were the key to mutual deterrence. ''The subject has kind of languished. It's fallen off the table,'' Shultz said.
Shultz said he thinks nuclear weapons are ''immoral.'' Even in the Cold War when mutual deterrence was believed to have prevented the United States and the Soviet Union from going to war, Shultz said nuclear weapons made him feel uneasy.
He posed the question, ''What would I say to the president if I were in his office and he asked me my advice in using a nuclear weapon, knowing that hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of people are killed and who thinks they are in position to make that kind of decision?''
Shultz and his friends revitalized the idea of abolishing nuclear weapons and proposed concrete steps on the 20th anniversary of the Reykjavik summit. The spread of nuclear weapon technology to Iran and North Korea forced them to recognize the urgency of the proposal.
With increasing worries about global warming, the idea of expanding nuclear power has been embraced by many countries, but ''if you can enrich the uranium for a power plant, you can enrich it for a weapon. When you get through with the spent fuel, it's reprocessed and becomes plutonium and that's a basis of a bomb,'' Shultz said.
Some U.S. security experts argued that the proposal risks compromising the value that nuclear weapons continue to contribute to U.S. security and international stability. Shultz simply said, ''There is plenty of power,'' meaning nonnuclear weapons, and if you wanted to use it, you could do severe deterrent-type damage. He asked people believing in nuclear weapons, ''Would you really lay a nuclear weapon into North Korea and wipe out Pyongyang?''
So what can we do to deter North Korea and Iran, which are said to aspire to having nuclear weapons? Shultz said that the best option is to ''change the scene so that having a nuclear weapon is a problem for countries, not a boon to them...the nuclear club should be abolished and anybody who has a nuclear weapon is the enemy of mankind, so let's get rid of them.''
He said if the international community starts moving toward abolishing nuclear weapons, then it can strongly tell countries to give them up.
President George W. Bush's administration seems to have a different idea. In 2002 it released ''Nuclear Posture Review,'' which reiterated the nuclear deterrence and called for new types of small and penetrating nuclear weapons.
''That's the way you get proliferation. I disagree,'' Shultz said.
Another disagreement concerns the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. The Bush administration and the Republican Party oppose ratification of the treaty on the grounds that it cannot verify other countries' secret nuclear testing. But Shultz said, ''The Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty is a good treaty. We should ratify it.''
After one year of discussion, Shultz and his group contributed another article on the same subject to the Wall Street Journal last month and disclosed that Madeline Albright, James Baker, Zbigniew Brzezinski, William Christopher, Robert McNamara and Collin Powell indicated general support.
Gorbachev wrote his own essay in the Journal and said, ''It is becoming clearer that nuclear weapons are no longer a means of achieving security; in fact, with every passing year they make our security more precarious.''
Joseph Cirincione, director of nuclear policy of the Center for American Progress, said, ''People with such a long history of support for nuclear weapons are now declaring not only that we should reduce nuclear stockpiles but actually eliminate them. This is stunning, a dramatic change of the elite's opinion in the U.S.''
But we cannot know when ''a world free of nuclear weapons'' might become a reality. Shultz likened the question to his experience in the construction industry. Overlooking San Francisco Bay, Shultz said, when somebody tells you to build a bridge across the bay here, that's a hard problem. But ''if you work at it continuously, it turns out you can produce (the bridge),'' he said. ''It's attitude.''
Shultz also had thoughts about recent discussions in Japan that the country should possibly possess nuclear weapons.
A world free of nuclear weapons ''would mean a world with less military force. So that would be an environment in which the Japanese would feel very comfortable,'' he said, adding, ''Japan has to think about its demography. Japan's labor force is shrinking, so the more you spend on the military, the less you can spend on your standard of living.''
NOTE:
There is no question from a moral perspective (i.e traditional morality per the Aristotelian/Thomistic synthesis) that nuclear weapons are inherently evil. They are incapable of differentiating between innocent non-combatants and armed enemy forces. This of course assumes that it is still possible in light of the incredibly indiscriminate and destructive nature of modern conventional warfare to participate in a "just war" in which a nation (as a last resort) is forced to defend itself against unjust offensive aggression. Clearly some high-tech conventional weaponry is also immoral for similar reasons. I reserve that discusion for another day.
Given that it is always and everywhere wrong to intentionally kill innocent human beings, nuclear weapons by their very nature (both strategic and tactical) must be ruled out on categorical grounds; i.e. they are morally illicit even as part of a just war in which the innocent party has only mounted a defense against aggression. That being the case, all the original nuclear weapons states (NWS's) should proceed with their NPT promised agreement to progressively disarm (which of course includes the United States). This undoubtedly would require great courage and political leadership but the moral case is not at all difficult to make.
--Dr. J. P. Hubert
STAFF
Feb 18, 2008
Can we make a world free of nuclear weapons?
If you are involved in shaping security policy, you would say, ''Unfortunately no. The world is not such an easy place.''
And you can explain why the United States and other powers need nuclear weapons to deter rogue nations, such as Iran and North Korea, and hostile nations like China and Russia, and to attack al-Qaida's underground headquarters.
''They are all wrong,'' 87-year-old George Shultz, architect of the Ronald Reagan administration's foreign policy, said in a recent interview. ''These weapons come to be unusable by civilized people and with the spread of nuclear weapons and the threat of them falling into the hands of terrorists, I think the concept of deterrence deteriorates.''
One year ago, Shultz, along with former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, former Secretary of Defense William Perry, and former Chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee Sum Nunn, wrote an article in the Wall Street Journal titled, ''A World Free of Nuclear Weapons,'' and proposed to the U.S. president and leaders of other nuclear weapon countries ''setting the goal of a world free of nuclear weapons and working energetically on the actions required to achieve that goal.''
What made Shultz, Reagan's secretary of state and the mastermind of the U.S. Cold War policies, and other Cold War warriors advocate a nuclear free world? Have they become peaceniks in their older years?
''It's something that I have felt was desirable for a long time,'' Shultz said at his home in the penthouse of a San Francisco high-rise apartment building. When Ronald Reagan met with Mikhail Gorbachev, then general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, in Reykjavik, Iceland, in 1987, making a world free of nuclear weapons was put on the table and ''those two leaders fundamentally agreed that was a good idea.''
But of course at that time there was a very negative reaction from militaries in both countries. They argued that nuclear weapons were the key to mutual deterrence. ''The subject has kind of languished. It's fallen off the table,'' Shultz said.
Shultz said he thinks nuclear weapons are ''immoral.'' Even in the Cold War when mutual deterrence was believed to have prevented the United States and the Soviet Union from going to war, Shultz said nuclear weapons made him feel uneasy.
He posed the question, ''What would I say to the president if I were in his office and he asked me my advice in using a nuclear weapon, knowing that hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of people are killed and who thinks they are in position to make that kind of decision?''
Shultz and his friends revitalized the idea of abolishing nuclear weapons and proposed concrete steps on the 20th anniversary of the Reykjavik summit. The spread of nuclear weapon technology to Iran and North Korea forced them to recognize the urgency of the proposal.
With increasing worries about global warming, the idea of expanding nuclear power has been embraced by many countries, but ''if you can enrich the uranium for a power plant, you can enrich it for a weapon. When you get through with the spent fuel, it's reprocessed and becomes plutonium and that's a basis of a bomb,'' Shultz said.
Some U.S. security experts argued that the proposal risks compromising the value that nuclear weapons continue to contribute to U.S. security and international stability. Shultz simply said, ''There is plenty of power,'' meaning nonnuclear weapons, and if you wanted to use it, you could do severe deterrent-type damage. He asked people believing in nuclear weapons, ''Would you really lay a nuclear weapon into North Korea and wipe out Pyongyang?''
So what can we do to deter North Korea and Iran, which are said to aspire to having nuclear weapons? Shultz said that the best option is to ''change the scene so that having a nuclear weapon is a problem for countries, not a boon to them...the nuclear club should be abolished and anybody who has a nuclear weapon is the enemy of mankind, so let's get rid of them.''
He said if the international community starts moving toward abolishing nuclear weapons, then it can strongly tell countries to give them up.
President George W. Bush's administration seems to have a different idea. In 2002 it released ''Nuclear Posture Review,'' which reiterated the nuclear deterrence and called for new types of small and penetrating nuclear weapons.
''That's the way you get proliferation. I disagree,'' Shultz said.
Another disagreement concerns the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. The Bush administration and the Republican Party oppose ratification of the treaty on the grounds that it cannot verify other countries' secret nuclear testing. But Shultz said, ''The Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty is a good treaty. We should ratify it.''
After one year of discussion, Shultz and his group contributed another article on the same subject to the Wall Street Journal last month and disclosed that Madeline Albright, James Baker, Zbigniew Brzezinski, William Christopher, Robert McNamara and Collin Powell indicated general support.
Gorbachev wrote his own essay in the Journal and said, ''It is becoming clearer that nuclear weapons are no longer a means of achieving security; in fact, with every passing year they make our security more precarious.''
Joseph Cirincione, director of nuclear policy of the Center for American Progress, said, ''People with such a long history of support for nuclear weapons are now declaring not only that we should reduce nuclear stockpiles but actually eliminate them. This is stunning, a dramatic change of the elite's opinion in the U.S.''
But we cannot know when ''a world free of nuclear weapons'' might become a reality. Shultz likened the question to his experience in the construction industry. Overlooking San Francisco Bay, Shultz said, when somebody tells you to build a bridge across the bay here, that's a hard problem. But ''if you work at it continuously, it turns out you can produce (the bridge),'' he said. ''It's attitude.''
Shultz also had thoughts about recent discussions in Japan that the country should possibly possess nuclear weapons.
A world free of nuclear weapons ''would mean a world with less military force. So that would be an environment in which the Japanese would feel very comfortable,'' he said, adding, ''Japan has to think about its demography. Japan's labor force is shrinking, so the more you spend on the military, the less you can spend on your standard of living.''
NOTE:
There is no question from a moral perspective (i.e traditional morality per the Aristotelian/Thomistic synthesis) that nuclear weapons are inherently evil. They are incapable of differentiating between innocent non-combatants and armed enemy forces. This of course assumes that it is still possible in light of the incredibly indiscriminate and destructive nature of modern conventional warfare to participate in a "just war" in which a nation (as a last resort) is forced to defend itself against unjust offensive aggression. Clearly some high-tech conventional weaponry is also immoral for similar reasons. I reserve that discusion for another day.
Given that it is always and everywhere wrong to intentionally kill innocent human beings, nuclear weapons by their very nature (both strategic and tactical) must be ruled out on categorical grounds; i.e. they are morally illicit even as part of a just war in which the innocent party has only mounted a defense against aggression. That being the case, all the original nuclear weapons states (NWS's) should proceed with their NPT promised agreement to progressively disarm (which of course includes the United States). This undoubtedly would require great courage and political leadership but the moral case is not at all difficult to make.
--Dr. J. P. Hubert
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)