[Peace-discuss] Nuclear weapons…

[C. G. Estabrook]

	Solution in Sight
	Noam Chomsky
	June 23, 2006

The urgency of halting the proliferation of nuclear weapons, and moving toward 
their elimination, could hardly be greater. Failure to do so is almost certain 
to lead to grim consequences, even the end of biology’s only experiment with 
higher intelligence. As threatening as the crisis is, the means exist to defuse 
it. A near-meltdown seems to be imminent over Iran and its nuclear programmes.

Before 1979, when the Shah was in power, Washington strongly supported these 
programmes. Today the standard claim is that Iran has no need for nuclear power, 
and therefore must be pursuing a secret weapons programme. "For a major oil 
producer such as Iran, nuclear energy is a wasteful use of resources," Henry 
Kissinger wrote in the Washington Post last year.

Thirty years ago, however, when Kissinger was secretary of state for President 
Gerald Ford, he held that "introduction of nuclear power will both provide for 
the growing needs of Iran’s economy and free remaining oil reserves for export 
or conversion to petrochemicals". Last year Dafna Linzer of the Washington Post 
asked Kissinger about his reversal of opinion. Kissinger responded with his 
usual engaging frankness: "They were an allied country."

In 1976 the Ford administration "endorsed Iranian plans to build a massive 
nuclear energy industry, but also worked hard to complete a multibillion-dollar 
deal that would have given Teheran control of large quantities of plutonium and 
enriched uranium — the two pathways to a nuclear bomb", Linzer wrote. The top 
planners of the Bush administration, who are now denouncing these programmes, 
were then in key national security posts: Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and Paul 
Wolfowitz.

Iranians are surely not as willing as the West to discard history to the rubbish 
heap. They know that the United States, along with its allies, has been 
tormenting Iranians for more than 50 years, ever since a US-UK military coup 
overthrew the parliamentary government and installed the Shah, who ruled with an 
iron hand until a popular uprising expelled him in 1979.

The Reagan administration then supported Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Iran, 
providing him with military and other aid that helped him slaughter hundreds of 
thousands of Iranians (along with Iraqi Kurds). Then came President Clinton’s 
harsh sanctions, followed by Bush’s threats to attack Iran — themselves a 
serious breach of the UN charter.

Last month the Bush administration conditionally agreed to join its European 
allies in direct talks with Iran, but refused to withdraw the threat of attack, 
rendering virtually meaningless any negotiations offer that comes, in effect, at 
gunpoint. Recent history provides further reason for scepticism about 
Washington’s intentions.

In May 2003, according to Flynt Leverett, then a senior official in Bush’s 
National Security Council, the reformist government of Mohammad Khatami proposed 
"an agenda for a diplomatic process that was intended to resolve on a 
comprehensive basis all of the bilateral differences between the United States 
and Iran".

Included were "weapons of mass destruction, a two-state solution to the 
Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the future of Lebanon’s Hizbullah organisation and 
cooperation with the UN nuclear safeguards agency", the Financial Times reported 
last month. The Bush administration refused, and reprimanded the Swiss diplomat 
who conveyed the offer.

A year later the European Union and Iran struck a bargain: Iran would 
temporarily suspend uranium enrichment, and in return Europe would provide 
assurances that the United States and Israel would not attack Iran. Under US 
pressure, Europe backed off, and Iran renewed its enrichment processes.

Iran’s nuclear programmes, as far as is known, fall within its rights under 
article four of the Non-Proliferation Treaty, which grants non-nuclear states 
the right to produce fuel for nuclear energy. The Bush administration argues 
that article four should be strengthened, and I think that makes sense.

When the NPT came into force in 1970 there was a considerable gap between 
producing fuel for energy and for nuclear weapons. But advances in technology 
have narrowed the gap. However, any such revision of article four would have to 
ensure unimpeded access for non-military use, in accord with the initial NPT 
bargain between declared nuclear powers and the non-nuclear states.

In 2003 a reasonable proposal to this end was put forward by Mohamed ElBaradei, 
head of the International Atomic Energy Agency: that all production and 
processing of weapon-usable material be under international control, with 
"assurance that legitimate would-be users could get their supplies". That should 
be the first step, he proposed, toward fully implementing the 1993 UN resolution 
for a fissile material cutoff treaty (or Fissban).

ElBaradei’s proposal has to date been accepted by only one state, to my 
knowledge: Iran, in February, in an interview with Ali Larijani, Iran’s chief 
nuclear negotiator. The Bush administration rejects a verifiable Fissban — and 
stands nearly alone. In November 2004 the UN committee on disarmament voted in 
favour of a verifiable Fissban. The vote was 147 to one (United States), with 
two abstentions: Israel and Britain. Last year a vote in the full General 
Assembly was 179 to two, Israel and Britain again abstaining. The United States 
was joined by Palau.

There are ways to mitigate and probably end these crises. The first is to call 
off the very credible US and Israeli threats that virtually urge Iran to develop 
nuclear weapons as a deterrent. A second step would be to join the rest of the 
world in accepting a verifiable Fissban treaty, as well as ElBaradei’s proposal, 
or something similar.

A third step would be to live up to article six of the NPT, which obligates the 
nuclear states to take "good-faith" efforts to eliminate nuclear weapons, a 
binding legal obligation, as the world court determined. None of the nuclear 
states has lived up to that obligation, but the United States is far in the lead 
in violating it.

Even steps in these directions would mitigate the upcoming crisis with Iran. 
Above all, it is important to heed the words of Mohamed ElBaradei: "There is no 
military solution to this situation. It is inconceivable. The only durable 
solution is a negotiated solution." And it is within reach.

http://www.chomsky.info/articles/20060623.htm

Morton K. Brussel wrote:
> Notes on proliferation. --mkb
> 
> *
> *
> *December 9, 2008, NYT*
> **
> 
> *Hidden Travels of the Atomic Bomb*
> 
> *By *_*WILLIAM J. BROAD*_ 
> <http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/b/william_j_broad/index.html?inline=nyt-per>
> 
> In 1945, after the atomic destruction of two Japanese cities, J. Robert 
> Oppenheimer expressed foreboding about the spread of nuclear arms.
> 
> “They are not too hard to make,” he told his colleagues on the Manhattan 
> Project at Los Alamos, N.M. “They will be universal if people wish to 
> make them universal.”
> 
> That sensibility, born where the atomic bomb itself was born, grew into 
> a theory of technological inevitability. Because the laws of physics are 
> universal, the theory went, it was just a matter of time before other 
> bright minds and determined states joined the club. A corollary was that 
> trying to stop proliferation was quite difficult if not futile.
> 
> But nothing, it seems, could be further from the truth. In the six 
> decades since Oppenheimer’s warning, the nuclear club has grown to only 
> nine members. What accounts for the slow spread? Can anything be done to 
> reduce it further? Is there a chance for an atomic future that is 
> brighter than the one Oppenheimer foresaw?
> 
> Two new books by three atomic insiders hold out hope. The authors 
> shatter myths, throw light on the hidden dynamics of nuclear 
> proliferation and suggest new ways to reduce the threat.
> 
> Neither book endorses Oppenheimer’s view that bombs are relatively easy 
> to make. Both document national paths to acquiring nuclear weapons that 
> have been rocky and dependent on the willingness of spies and 
> politicians to divulge state secrets.
> 
> Thomas C. Reed, a veteran of the Livermore weapons laboratory in 
> California and a former secretary of the _Air Force_ 
> <http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/a/us_air_force/index.html?inline=nyt-org>, 
> and Danny B. Stillman, former director of intelligence at Los Alamos, 
> have teamed up in “The Nuclear Express: A Political History of the Bomb 
> and its Proliferation” to show the importance of moles, scientists with 
> divided loyalties and — most important — the subtle and not so subtle 
> interests of nuclear states.
> 
> “Since the birth of the nuclear age,” they write, “no nation has 
> developed a nuclear weapon on its own, although many claim otherwise.”
> 
> Among other things, the book details how secretive aid from France and 
> China helped spawn five more nuclear states.
> 
> It also names many conflicted scientists, including luminaries like 
> Isidor I. Rabi. The Nobel laureate worked on the Manhattan Project in 
> World War II and later sat on the board of governors of the Weizmann 
> Institute of Science, a birthplace of Israel’s nuclear arms.
> 
> Secret cooperation extended to the secluded sites where nations tested 
> their handiwork in thundering blasts. The book says, for instance, that 
> China opened its sprawling desert test site to Pakistan, letting its 
> client test a first bomb there on May 26, 1990.
> 
> That alone rewrites atomic history. It casts new light on the reign of 
> _Benazir Bhutto_ 
> <http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/b/benazir_bhutto/index.html?inline=nyt-per> 
> as prime minister of Pakistan and helps explain how the country was able 
> to respond so quickly in May 1998 when India conducted five nuclear tests.
> 
> “It took only two weeks and three days for the Pakistanis to field and 
> fire a nuclear device of their own,” the book notes.
> 
> In another disclosure, the book says China “secretly extended the 
> hospitality of the Lop Nur nuclear test site to the French.”
> 
> The authors build their narrative on deep knowledge of the arms and 
> intelligence worlds, including those abroad. Mr. Stillman has toured 
> heavily guarded nuclear sites in China and Russia, and both men have 
> developed close ties with foreign peers.
> 
> In their acknowledgments, they thank American cold warriors like _Edward 
> Teller_ 
> <http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/t/edward_teller/index.html?inline=nyt-per> 
> as well as two former _C.I.A._ 
> <http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/c/central_intelligence_agency/index.html?inline=nyt-org> 
> directors, saying the intelligence experts “guided our searches.”
> 
> Robert S. Norris, an atomic historian and author of “Racing for the 
> Bomb,” an account of the Manhattan Project, praised the book for 
> “remarkable disclosures of how nuclear knowledge was shared overtly and 
> covertly with friends and foes.”
> 
> The book is technical in places, as when detailing the exotica of 
> nuclear arms. But it reads like a labor of love built on two lifetimes 
> of scientific adventure. It is due out in January from Zenith Press.
> 
> Its wide perspective reveals how states quietly shared complex machinery 
> and secrets with one another.
> 
> All paths stem from the United States, directly or indirectly. One began 
> with Russian spies that deeply penetrated the Manhattan Project. Stalin 
> was so enamored of the intelligence haul, Mr. Reed and Mr. Stillman 
> note, that his first atom bomb was an exact replica of the weapon the 
> United States had dropped on Nagasaki.
> 
> Moscow freely shared its atomic thefts with _Mao Zedong_ 
> <http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/m/mao_zedong/index.html?inline=nyt-per>, 
> China’s leader. The book says that Klaus Fuchs, a Soviet spy in the 
> Manhattan Project who was eventually caught and, in 1959, released from 
> jail, did likewise. Upon gaining his freedom, the authors say, Fuchs 
> gave the mastermind of Mao’s weapons program a detailed tutorial on the 
> Nagasaki bomb. A half-decade later, China surprised the world with its 
> first blast.
> 
> The book, in a main disclosure, discusses how China in 1982 made a 
> policy decision to flood the developing world with atomic know-how. Its 
> identified clients include Algeria, Pakistan and North Korea.
> 
> Alarmingly, the authors say one of China’s bombs was created as an 
> “export design” that nearly “anybody could build.” The blueprint for the 
> simple plan has traveled from Pakistan to Libya and, the authors say, 
> Iran. That path is widely assumed among intelligence officials, but 
> Tehran has repeatedly denied the charge.
> 
> The book sees a quiet repercussion of China’s proliferation policy in 
> the Algerian desert. Built in secrecy, the reactor there now makes 
> enough plutonium each year to fuel one atom bomb and is ringed by 
> antiaircraft missiles, the book says.
> 
> China’s deck also held a wild card: its aid to Pakistan helped _A.Q. 
> Khan_ 
> <http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/k/abdul_qadeer_khan/index.html?inline=nyt-per>, 
> a rogue Pakistani metallurgist who sold nuclear gear on the global black 
> market. The authors compare Dr. Khan to “a used-car dealer” happy to 
> sell his complex machinery to suckers who had no idea how hard it was to 
> make fuel for a bomb.
> 
> Why did Beijing spread its atomic knowledge so freely? The authors 
> speculate that it either wanted to strengthen the enemies of China’s 
> enemies (for instance, Pakistan as a counterweight to India) or, more 
> chillingly, to encourage nuclear wars or terror in foreign lands from 
> which Beijing would emerge as the “last man standing.”
> 
> A lesser pathway involves France. The book says it drew on Manhattan 
> Project veterans and shared intimate details of its bomb program with 
> Israel, with whom it had substantial commercial ties. By 1959, the book 
> says, dozens of Israeli scientists “were observing and participating in” 
> the French program of weapons design.
> 
> The book adds that in early 1960, when France detonated its first bomb, 
> doing so in the Algerian desert, “two nations went nuclear.” And it 
> describes how the United States turned a blind eye to Israel’s own 
> atomic developments. It adds that, in the autumn of 1966, Israel 
> conducted a special, non-nuclear test “2,600 feet under the Negev 
> desert.” The next year it built its first bomb.
> 
> Israel, in turn, shared its atomic secrets with South Africa. The book 
> discloses that the two states exchanged some key ingredients for the 
> making of atom bombs: tritium to South Africa, uranium to Israel. And 
> the authors agree with military experts who hold that Israel and South 
> Africa in 1979 jointly detonated a nuclear device in the South Atlantic 
> near Prince Edward Island, more than one thousand miles south of Cape 
> Town. Israel needed the test, it says, to develop a neutron bomb.
> 
> The authors charge that South Africa at one point targeted Luanda, the 
> capital of neighboring Angola, “for a nuclear strike if peace talks failed.”
> 
> South Africa dismantled six nuclear arms in 1990 but retains much 
> expertise. Today, the authors write, “South African technical 
> mercenaries may be more dangerous than the underemployed scientists of 
> the former Soviet Union” because they have no real home in Africa.
> 
> “The Bomb: A New History,” due out in January from Ecco Books, an 
> imprint of HarperCollins, plows similar ground less deeply, but looks 
> more widely at proliferation curbs and diplomacy. It is by Stephen M. 
> Younger, the former head of nuclear arms at Los Alamos and former 
> director of the Defense Threat Reduction Agency at the Pentagon.
> 
> Dr. Younger disparages what he calls myths suggesting that “all the 
> secrets of nuclear weapons design are available on the Internet.” He 
> writes that France, despite secretive aid, struggled initially to make 
> crude bombs — a point he saw with his own eyes during a tour of a 
> secretive French atomic museum that is closed to the public. That 
> trouble, he says, “suggests we should doubt assertions that the 
> information required to make a nuclear weapon is freely available.”
> 
> The two books draw on atomic history to suggest a mix of old and new 
> ways to defuse the proliferation threat. Both see past restraints as 
> fraying and the task as increasingly urgent.
> 
> Mr. Reed and Mr. Stillman see politics — not spies or military ambitions 
> — as the primary force in the development and spread of nuclear arms. 
> States repeatedly stole and leaked secrets because they saw such action 
> as in their geopolitical interest.
> 
> Beijing continues to be a major threat, they argue. While urging global 
> responses like better intelligence, better inspections and better 
> safeguarding of nuclear materials, they also see generational change in 
> China as a great hope in plugging the atomic leaks.
> 
> “We must continue to support human rights within Chinese society, not 
> just as an American export, but because it is the dream of the Tiananmen 
> Square generation,” they write. “In time those youngsters could well 
> prevail, and the world will be a less contentious place.”
> 
> Dr. Younger notes how political restraints and global treaties worked 
> for decades to curb atomic proliferation, as did American assurances to 
> its allies. “It is a tribute to American diplomacy,” he writes, “that so 
> many countries that might otherwise have gone nuclear were convinced to 
> remain under the nuclear umbrella of the United States.”
> 
> And he, too, emphasizes the importance of political sticks and carrots 
> to halting and perhaps reversing the spread of nuclear arms. Iran, he 
> says, is not fated to go nuclear.
> 
> “Sweden, Switzerland, Argentina and Brazil all flirted with nuclear 
> programs, and all decided to abandon them,” he notes. “Nuclear 
> proliferation is not unidirectional — given the right conditions and 
> incentives, it is possible for a nation to give up its nuclear aspirations.”
> 
> The take-home message of both books is quite the reverse of 
> Oppenheimer’s grim forecast. But both caution that the situation has 
> reached a delicate stage — with a second age of nuclear proliferation 
> close at hand — and that missteps now could hurt terribly in the future.
> 
> Mr. Reed and Mr. Stillman take their title, “The Nuclear Express,” from 
> a 1940 radio dispatch by Edward R. Murrow , who spoke from London as the 
> clouds of war gathered over Europe. He told of people feeling like the 
> express train of civilization was going out of control.
> 
> The authors warn of a similar danger today and suggest that only close 
> attention to the atomic past, as well as determined global action, can 
> avoid “the greatest train wreck” in history.
> 
> 
> _Copyright 2008_ 
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