John Hallam
Since the first two times nuclear weapons were used to destroy cities 60 years ago, no further use has been made of them. Though it has nearly been broken a number of times, a "taboo" has existed against their use because the consequences have been thought to be so catastrophic.
The nuclear-weapons states that are permanent members of the UN Security Council — Britain, China, France, Russia and the US — have given public assurances that nuclear weapons will never be used against countries that are not armed with them.
US President George Bush's repeated refusal to take this option off the table in relation to Iran is in direct contradiction to these assurances. It is therefore all the more disturbing to read reports in the mass media that the Pentagon has been planning to use nuclear weapons against Iran.
According to the UN's International Atomic Energy Agency, which monitors Iran's nuclear program under the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, Iran has no nuclear warheads. Estimates of exactly how far Iran is from having the technical capability to produce a nuclear warhead vary from five to 10 years, with occasional claims that it is three years or even months, from actual production of a weapon.
The official position of the Iranian government is that nuclear weapons are un-Islamic. This is an understandable and morally very reasonable position. We should not be terribly surprised that religious leaders in a theocratic state think that weapons that are generally considered to be perilous to all life — and that are considered by the International Court of Justice to be illegal because they so egregiously violate the customary laws of war — are "un-Islamic". And, contrary to my colleagues in the Australian foreign affairs department, who tell me I am naive, I believe that we need to take a fatwa in an Islamic state seriously.
Russia and the US each have about 2000 nuclear-armed strategic missiles on hair-trigger Launch-on-Warning (LoW) status — the equivalent of 100,000 Hiroshima bombs ready to be launched in minutes at the first indication of a launch by the other side. This is the single most immediate threat to life on Earth. It is far more important than any potential Iranian nuclear threat.
Many calls have been made for taking strategic nuclear forces off LoW status, the most recent by over 330 NGO and MPs and 44 Nobel-prize winners. It has also been a component of a number of resolutions in the UN General Assembly.
The risk, even without the current Iranian crisis, that by malice, madness, miscalculation or malfunction, nuclear weapons might be used at some point, is all too real.
The Iranian crisis adds another dimension to all of this.
There has been article after article in the mainstream press on putative preparations for US military strikes on Iran's nuclear facilities, including strikes using "bunker-busting" nuclear weapons. Simulations done by the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) suggest that nuclear strikes on a number of nuclear facilities in Iran could result in as many as three million casualties.
The use of a number of "tactical" nuclear weapons on Iran (or any other country for that matter) would be a war crime of horrendous proportions. There would be widespread public revulsion. However, there might also be a widespread desire for vengeance on the part of the Muslim world, and the US would certainly lose any foothold of support it might have there.
But the nuclear-weapons "taboo" that has existed for the last 60 years would be broken. The possibility of other countries using nuclear weapons would become much more likely.
Should the US carry out conventional military strikes short of actual regime change (which would imply invasion and occupation of Iran), the position of those in Iran who might favour its acquisition of nuclear weapons would be immeasurably strengthened.
What is desperately needed is an outcome that neither pushes Iran toward nuclear-weapons acquisition, nor involves the use of either nuclear weapons or military power, or the threats of either, and that clearly rewards Iran for not seeking nuclear weapons. There are probably a number of ways of doing this, any one of which might work, but the ways being tried now are calculated to fail, so much so that one wonders if they are not actually designed to do so.
In the meantime, the US and Russian arsenals continue to be able to render the planet uninhabitable in 40 minutes, and could do so as a result of a mere computer glitch.
[John Hallam is a Friends of the Earth Australia anti-nuclear weapons campaigner.]
From Green Left Weekly, July 19, 2006.
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