Bouncers at the Club Door
Yup.
Yet this is hypocrisy to which we’ve grown so accustomed that nobody seems to notice it any more. The nuclear club is meant to be exclusive. The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty recognises the five permanent members of the UN security council as “nuclear weapons states”, committing them to act as bouncers at the club door. The treaty theoretically obliges these members to ditch their own nukes in the fullness of time – an aptly pompous expression, for an otherwise nuke-free world would make a rogue state with even one bomb so powerful that the chances of universal disarmament are zero. Ever since Hiroshima, we’ve been faced with the depressing fact that you cannot un-invent something.
You also cannot retain a device for yourself and then lecture others that they are not “entitled” to it. Iran is, alas, just as entitled to nuclear weapons as the US and Britain. Ditto North Korea. All the Obama administration has the moral and political right to assert is: “We don’t want Iran to have nuclear weapons.” To which Mahmoud Ahmadinejad would quite sensibly respond: “So what?”
Which, insofar as enrichment of uranium for domestic nuclear energy use goes, he has. Granted, the IAEA has been frustrated in its attempts to verify the existence of an Iranian nukes program at all, but Iran has maintained the right to develop one. And as I have said before, we can do nothing to stop them. Which doesn’t mean someone won’t try.
I’m not sure what you mean by this: “the IAEA has been frustrated in its attempts to verify the existence of an Iranian nukes program at all, but Iran has maintained the right to develop one. ”
The IAEA has indeed verified that Iran has a nuclear energy program, which Iran has maintained that they have the right to develop, correct. Iran has, however, explicitly denied that they have a nuclear weapons program and, as far as I understand it, not mentioned whether they think they have a right to one or not. In fact, Ayatollah Khamenei, has said in very strong terms that nuclear weapons are anathema to Islam. Now of course, he could be dissimulating, but that still doesn’t amount to Iran maintaining that they have the right to develop a nuclear weapons program.
Or perhaps you mean that Iran has maintained the right to develop one in the same sense that every one has maintained the right to develop one because they can’t be un-invented?
I also disagree w/ the quote above that a world free of nuclear weapons would make a “rogue” state with nukes all-powerful. That is utter nonsense disproved by the quote itself. Simply, nukes can’t be uninvented, so were a “rogue” state to use one or threaten to use one it would be quite a simple matter for other states to re-manufacture them. A world without nuclear weapons would be far preferable because it would mitigate the possibility of them being used rashly. There is absolutely no scenario that a “rogue” state would be able to hold nukes over the whole world in that scenario.
Not that I believe the elites of the current nuclear weapon states have any intention of disarming their own stockpiles, but that would still be my preference.
Whoops, my bad. I just posted a correction. Thanks for pointing that out.
I would prefer a nuke-free world, too, but that’s just not going to happen. Not so long as nation states covet each other’s resources and prey upon each other weaknesses, or feel the need to swing a big dick on the global stage. You may be right that the point about the rogue state contradicts itself, but it does underscore the impossibility of a nuke-free world: one rogue state starts stock-piling and threatening, other states will follow suit, as you point out. Any guesses who that rogue state will be? I think we’re living in it.
The larger point of US hyocritical lectures is of course valid, but the linked editorial also makes all kinds of unwarranted assumptions about Iranian intentions and proceeds to advocate threatening Iran with Israeli warmongering in order to get them to comply, thus undermining it’s own argument, why would Iran knuckle under to threats of nuclear-armed Israeli violence when they won’t to nuclear-armed American violence? And, to reiterate, there’s little evidence that they have a nuclear weapons program in the first place.
Do you mean the Josh Goldberg piece in the Atlantic? I linked to it because it’s been making the rounds as evidence of further talking head complicity in the ideological ramp up to another war in the middle east. My implied point is that whether or not Iran is actually developing a nuke program, there are a lot of warfappers who really hope they do, because it’s been sooooo long since they had a good boom-boom.
No, I meant the linked piece from which you extracted the quote. Anyway, w/ your correction, we now seem to be largely in agreement, although I still think efforts to move towards nuclear disarmament are worthwhile (if not allowed to be hijacked by hypocritical nuclear powers) even if not particularly hopeful.
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