Nuclear Age Peace Foundation

Tag: WMD

  • Iran in the Crosshairs Again

    This article was originally published by Red Pepper.

    Here we go again with the Iran hysteria. It is tempting to think this time will be just like previous periods of sabre rattling against Iran. But there are significant new dangers. The Arab Spring, Israel’s position, changes in the regional and global balance of forces, and national election campaigns, all point to this round of anti-Iranian hysteria posing potentially graver risks than five or six years ago.
     
    We have seen all this before. The US ratchets up its rhetoric, Israel threatens a military attack, escalating sanctions bite harder on the Iranian people, Iran refuses to back down on uranium enrichment. But at the same time, top US military and intelligence officials actually admit Iran does not have a nuclear weapon, is not building a nuclear weapon, and has not decided whether to even begin a building process.
     
    In 2004 Israel’s prime minister denounced the international community for not doing enough to stop Iran from building a nuclear weapon. In 2005 the Israeli military was reported to ‘be ready by the end of March for possible strikes on secret uranium enrichment sites in Iran’. In 2006 the US House Armed Services Committee issued a report drafted by one congressional staffer (an aide to hard-line pro-war John Bolton, then US ambassador to the UN), claiming that Iran was enriching uranium to weapons-grade 90 per cent. That same year a different Israeli prime minister publicly threatened a military strike against Iran. In 2008, George W Bush visited Israel to reassure them that ‘all options’ remained on the table.
     
    The earlier crisis saw a very similar gap between the demonisation, sanctions, threats of military strikes against Iran, and the seemingly contradictory recognition by US, Israeli, United Nations and other military and intelligence officials that Iran actually did not possess nuclear weapons, a nuclear weapons programme, or even a decision to try to develop nuclear weapons.
     
    The 2005 US National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) determined that even if Iran decided it wanted to make a nuclear weapon, it was unlikely before five to ten years, and that producing enough fissile material would be impossible even in five years unless Iran achieved ‘more rapid and successful progress’ than it had so far. By 2007, a new NIE had pulled back even further, asserting ‘with high confidence that in fall 2003 Tehran halted its nuclear weapons programme … Tehran had not started its nuclear weapons programme as of mid-2007’. The NIE even admitted ‘we do not know whether it currently intends to develop nuclear weapons’. That made the dire threats against Iran sound pretty lame. So maybe it wasn’t surprising that Newsweek magazine described how, ‘in private conversations with Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert last week, the president all but disowned the document’.
     
    The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA – the UN’s nuclear watchdog) issued report after report indicating it could find no evidence that Iran had diverted enriched uranium to a weapons programme. The UN inspection agency harshly rejected the House committee report, calling some of its claims about Iran’s alleged nuclear weapons activities incorrect, and others ‘outrageous and dishonest’. And outside of the Bush White House, which was spearheading much of the hysteria, members of Congress, the neo-con think tanks, hysterical talk show hosts, and much of the mainstream media went ballistic.
     
    Then and now

    All of that sounds very familiar right now. Military and intelligence leaders in Israel and the US once again admit that Iran does not have nukes. (Israel of course does, but no one talks about that.) Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta asked and answered his own Iran question: ‘Are they trying to develop a nuclear weapon? No.’ Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper, Jr. admitted the US does not even know ‘if Iran will eventually decide to build nuclear weapons’. The latest 2011 NIE makes clear there is no new evidence to challenge the 2007 conclusions; Iran still does not have a nuclear weapons programme in operation.
     
    According to the Independent, ‘almost the entire senior hierarchy of Israel’s military and security establishment is worried about a premature attack on Iran and apprehensive about the possible repercussions.’ Former head of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said ‘it is quite clear that much if not all of the IDF leadership do not support military action at this point.’
     
    But despite all the military and intelligence experts, the threat of war still looms. Republican candidates pound the lecterns promising that ‘when I’m president…’ Iran will accept international inspectors – as if the IAEA had not maintained an inspection team inside Iran for many years now. We hear overheated rumours of Iranian clerics promising nuclear weapons to their people – as if Iran’s leaders had not actually issued fatwas against nuclear weapons, something that would be very difficult to reverse.
     
    Some strategic issues are indeed at stake, but the current anti-Iran mobilisation is primarily political. It doesn’t reflect actual US or Israeli military or intelligence threat assessments, but rather political conditions pushing politicians, here and in Israel, to escalate the fear factor about Iranian weapons (however non-existent) and the urgency for attacking Iran (however illegal). And the danger, of course, is that this kind of rhetoric can box leaders in, making them believe they cannot back down from their belligerent words.
     
    Israel at the centre

    One of the main differences from the propaganda run-up to the Iraq war is the consistent centrality of Israel and its supporters, particularly AIPAC in the US, in this push for war against Iran. Israel certainly jumped aboard the attack-Iraq bandwagon when it was clear that war was indeed inevitable, but US strategic concerns regarding oil and the expansion of US military power were first and primary. Even back then, Israel recognised Iran as a far greater threat than Iraq. And now, Israelis using that alleged threat to pressure US policymakers and shape US policy – in dangerous ways. During this campaign cycle, Obama is under the greatest pressure he has ever faced, and likely ever will face, to defend the Israeli position unequivocally, and to pledge US military support for any Israeli action, however illegal, dangerous, and threatening to US interests.
     
    Iran simply is not, as former CIA analyst and presidential adviser Bruce Reidel makes clear, ‘an existential threat’ to Israel. Even a theoretical future nuclear-armed Iran, if it ever chose that trajectory, would not be a threat to the existence of Israel, but would be a threat to Israel’s longstanding nuclear monopoly in the Middle East. That is the real threat motivating Israel’s attack-Iran-now campaign. Further, as long as top US political officials, from the White House to Congress, are competing to see who can be more supportive of Israel in its stand-off with Iran, no one in Washington will even consider pressure on Israel to end its violations of international law and human rights regarding its occupation and apartheid policies towards Palestinians. Israel gets a pass.
     
    Israel is more isolated in the region than ever before. The US-backed neighbouring dictatorships Israel once counted on as allies are being challenged by the uprisings of the Arab Spring. Egypt’s Mubarak was overthrown, the king of Jordan faces growing pressure at home, and the threats to Syria’s regime mean that Israel could face massive instability on its northern border – something Bashar al-Assad and his father largely staved off since Israel occupied the Syrian Golan Heights in 1967.
     
    Syria’s two struggles in one

    The calamity underway in Syria is also directly linked to the Iran crisis. There are two struggles going on in Syria, and unfortunately one may destroy the potential of the other. First was Syria’s home-grown popular uprising against a brutal government, inspired by and organically tied to the other risings of the Arab Spring, and like them calling first for massive reform and soon for the overthrow of the regime. Syria is a relatively wealthy and diverse country, in which a large middle class, especially in Damascus and Aleppo, had prospered under the regime, despite its political repression. As a result, unlike some other regional uprisings, Syria’s opposition was challenging a regime which still held some public support and legitimacy.
     
    The regime’s drastic military assault on largely non-violent protests led some sectors of the opposition to take up arms, in tandem with growing numbers of military defectors, which of course meant waging their democratic struggle in the terrain in which the regime remains strongest: military force. The government’s security forces killed thousands, injuring and arresting thousands more, and in recent weeks even the longstanding support for Assad in Damascus and Aleppo began to waver. Simultaneously, attacks against government forces increased, and the internal struggle has taken on more and more the character of a civil war.
     
    The further complication in Syria, and its link to Iran, is that it has simultaneously become a regional and global struggle. Syria is Iran’s most significant partner in the Middle East, so key countries that support Israel’s anti-Iran mobilisation have turned against Syria, looking to weaken Iran by undermining its closest ally. Perhaps because the Assad regimes have kept the occupied Golan Heights and the Israeli-Syrian border relatively quiet, Israel itself has not been the major public face in the regionalisation of the Syrian crisis. But clearly Saudi Arabia is fighting with Iran in Syria for influence in the region. The Arab League, whose Syria decision-making remains dominated by the Saudis and their allied Gulf petro-states (such as Qatar and the UAE), is using the Syria crisis to challenge Iran’s rising influence in Arab countries from Iraq to Lebanon. And of course the US, France and other Western powers have jumped on the very real human rights crisis in Syria to try to further weaken the regime there – in the interest again of undermining Iran’s key ally far more than out of concern for the Syrian people.
     
    Diminishing US power

    Facing economic crisis, military failures in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the loss or weakening of key client states in the Arab world, the US is weaker and less influential in the Middle East. But maintaining control of oil markets and US strategic capacity are still key regional goals for the US, which means that military power remains central. The nature of that military engagement is changing – away from large-scale deployments of ground troops in favour of rapidly expanding fleets of armed drones, special forces, and growing reliance on naval forces, navy bases and sea-based weapons.
     
    Thus the US backs Saudi intervention in Bahrain to insure the US Fifth Fleet maintains its Bahraini base; Washington’s escalating sanctions give the West greater leverage in control of oil markets; the Iranian rhetorical threat to close the Strait of Hormuz (only in desperation since it would prevent Iran from exporting its own oil) is used to justify expansion of the US naval presence in the region. Along with the possibility of losing Syria as a major military purchaser and regional ally, concerns about those US strategic moves played a large part of Russia’s veto of the UN resolution on Syria.
     
    In Iran, the pressure is high and the sanctions are really starting to bite, with much greater impact felt by the Iranian population, rather than the regime in Tehran. The assassination of Iranian nuclear experts, particularly the most recent murder of a young scientist which was greeted by Israeli officials with undisguised glee and barely-disguised triumph, are more likely aimed at provoking an Iranian response than actually undermining Iran’s nuclear capacity. So far, Iran has resisted the bait. But if Israel makes good on its threat of a military strike – despite the virtually unanimous opposition of its own military and intelligence leadership – there is little reason to imagine that Iran would respond only with words. The US and Israel are not the only countries whose national leaders face looming contests; Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and its president face huge political challenges as well.
     
    The consequences of a strike against Iran would be grave – from attacks on Israeli and/or US military targets, to going after US forces in Iran’s neighbours Afghanistan, Iraq, and Kuwait, to attacks on the Pentagon’s Fifth Fleet in Bahrain, to mining the Strait of Hormuz … and beyond. An attack by the US, a nuclear weapons state, on a non-nuclear weapons state such as Iran, would be a direct violation of the Non-Proliferation Treaty. Iran might kick out the UN nuclear inspectors. The hardest of Iran’s hard-line leaders would almost certainly consolidate ever greater power – both at home and in the Arab countries, and the calls to move towards greater nuclearisation, perhaps even to build a nuclear weapon, would rise inside Iran. Indeed, the Arab Spring’s secular, citizenship-based mobilisations would likely lose further influence to Iran – threatening to turn that movement into something closer to an ‘Islamic Spring’.
     
    Nuclear weapons-free zone

    At the end of the day the crisis can only be solved through negotiations, not threats and force. Immediately, that means demanding that the White House engage in serious, not deliberately time-constrained negotiations to end the current crisis – perhaps based on the successful Turkish-Brazilian initiative that the US scuttled last year. That means that Congress must reverse its current position to allow the White House to use diplomacy – rather than continuing to pass laws that strip the executive branch of its ability to put the carrot of ending sanctions on the table in any negotiations. And it means an Iran policy based on the real conclusions of US intelligence and military officials, that Iran does not have and is not building a nuclear weapon, rather than relying on lies about non-existent nuclear weapons, like the WMD lies that drove the US to war in Iraq.
     
    In the medium and longer term, we must put the urgent need for a nuclear weapons-free zone in the Middle East back on the table and on top of our agenda. Such a multi-country move would insure Iran would never build a nuclear weapon, that Israel would give up its existing 200 to 300 high-density nuclear bombs and the submarine-based nuclear weapons in its arsenal, and that the US would keep its nuclear weapons out of its Middle East bases and off its ships in the region’s seas. Otherwise, we face the possibility of the current predicament repeating itself in an endless loop of Groundhog Day-style nuclear crises, each one more threatening than the last.

  • UC must use position to lead WMD debate: U.S. move toward more offensive weapons signals dangerous trend

    The situation surrounding the University of California’s potential bid to manage the Los Alamos National Laboratory is complex. The UC never has had to bid to manage Los Alamos. It was asked by the federal government to manage the labs and develop nuclear weapons as a public service. Competing to continue the research and development of weapons of mass destruction – a relationship that always has been in contradiction with the core mission of a university that promotes the principles of academic openness – is ethically questionable. Competing against defense contractors like Lockheed Martin and Bechtel Corp. is even more questionable.

    It is true that the ethical dimensions of this managerial role have changed greatly since the original Manhattan Project, when we justified our pursuit of the original weapons of mass destruction as necessary to counter Hitler’s program of atomic weapons development.

    Similarly, the ethical dimensions have changed since the end of the Cold War, during which our justification was the vital necessity to balance the threat posed by the Soviet Union.

    Now, we use the “War on Terror” to justify the development, planned production and threatened use of new nuclear weapons. But the role of nuclear weapons has changed as well.

    The current administration has implemented a major strategic shift in U.S. foreign/defense policy, discarding the “threat-based approach” of the Cold War and assuming an “abilities-based approach” as outlined in the 2001 Nuclear Posture Review. This means that rather than producing nuclear weapons for defensive purposes – deterrence – we are now researching and designing a new generation of offensively designed nuclear weapons. Meet the euphemistically termed “bunker buster” and “mini-nuke” that UC employees are creating.

    “Mini-nukes” are still designed to be immensely powerful. Even worse, the planned bunker busters would most likely create huge clouds of radioactive dirt after detonation. Studies have shown that weapons detonated close to the ground or in shallow pits actually create more fallout than weapons detonated as an airburst. Supposedly, these weapons would be used against enemy command posts and weapons stockpiles.

    As nuclear strategies and policies change, so should our highly prestigious and respected university. Furthermore, students should have substantial say in these changes.

    Whose university is this? Am I wrong in believing that universities exist for students? Shouldn’t students be welcomed (not to mention correctly informed) to enter this critical debate? Isn’t it our right as an inseparable part of the UC to be consulted on major decisions such as this, one that will affect the course of the university and the world for decades to come? I say yes. Is Los Alamos the real UCLA? I say no.

    But this debate is bigger than who should manage the nuclear weapons complex. Catastrophic terrorism – terrorism plus WMD – is now regarded as the most significant threat to global security. The German foreign minister went so far as to call catastrophic terror a new “totalitarian threat” because it is not deterrable. So how do we meet this challenge? Preemptive strikes and nation-building are both very limited and inefficient strategies.

    In the face of this new “totalitarian” threat, many new questions must be posed and debated – by everyone. What effect on the psyche and policy of other nations is produced through the continued research, development and threat to use weapons of mass destruction by the nation who spends more on the military then the next nine nations combined? Can the United States have weapons of mass destruction without everyone else having them? If everyone has them, how can we stop terrorists from acquiring these weapons? Is it possible to stop terrorists from acquiring biological and nuclear weapons?

    If we truly and objectively ask and answer these questions to the best of our ability as rational human beings, I think the debate about the U.S. nuclear weapons complex would quickly shift from who should manage the nuclear weapons complex to whether there should be a nuclear weapons complex to manage.

    The UC, despite its deep contradictions, is the greatest university system in the world. Why else would we have been trusted to manage Armageddon for 60 years? Since the nuclear age began with us, we are the most qualified institution to lead a much needed international debate about the future of WMD, the future of catastrophic terror and, ultimately, the future of Earth. It is not only our privilege, it is our responsibility.

    *Micheal Cox is the student organizer for the Foundation’s UC Nuclear Free Chapter at UCLA. This article was orginially published in the Daily Bruin Online athttp://www.dailybruin.ucla.edu/news/articles.asp?ID=26587

  • Let Us Inspect Everywhere

    After Sept. 11, the risk of a further spread of weapons of mass destruction is seen in a new light. There is a fear that terrorist groups or reckless states might launch attacks with such weapons. The United States and its allies have now shown their readiness to deal with the risk through armed action in the case of Iraq. A horribly brutal regime has been eliminated and can no longer reactivate a weapons program — if there still was one. How are other suspicious cases to be tackled?

    First, which are the suspicious cases, and which weapons are we talking about? Listening to the debate one might sometimes get the impression that the world is full of terrorist organizations and rogue states bent on proliferation. The matter is serious enough without such exaggerations. Chemical and biological weapons might be within the reach of terrorists — whether these are groups or individuals. That risk is taken seriously and there seems to be relatively little problem achieving cooperation between police and financial institutions.

    However, the greatest concerns relate to states. The spread of long-range missiles seems to be only somewhat impeded by export controls. As for nuclear weapons, we know that the U.S. and Russia, the UK, France, China, Israel, India and Pakistan have them. We know further that Iraq was developing them and that its capability was eliminated under International Atomic Energy Agency, or IDEA, supervision after the Gulf War. North Korea currently claims it has developed nuclear weapons, while Iran denies it has any ambitions to do so.

    If North Korea is not induced to abandon its present course of action, it may create incentives for a further nuclear buildup in East Asia. If Iran were to move toward a nuclear-weapon capability the Middle East situation may be further aggravated.

    Clearly, we are no longer where we were only a few years ago, namely, in an almost universally shared effort to write the final chapters of the nuclear nonproliferation book. The U.S. is developing a missile defense, has rejected the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty and may be interested in constructing new types of nuclear weapons.

    What can be done to resume the remarkably successful efforts that were under way only a few years ago? Nuclear-weapon-free zones had come to extend from Latin America across the whole of Africa to Southeast Asia and the South Pacific. These developments were brought about not through armed actions but through regional and global détente, patient negotiation and the good example of the great powers participating in real disarmament.

    The crucial point was always that the foreign and security policies of individual states in the regions, and of the great powers, helped to reduce the incentives to acquire nuclear weapons and to pave the way for a renunciation of them. Security guarantees, including alliances, are among the means of reducing incentives.

    It is not hard to see even now that peaceful solutions of the political and security problems in the Middle East, on the Indian subcontinent, and the Korean peninsula probably are the most important elements both to prevent armed conflicts and to tackle the problem of proliferation in these areas. Multilateral assurances to North Korea that it will not be attacked must be a central part of the effort to lead that country away from the possession and export of nuclear materials and missiles. Security Council resolution 687 on Iraq states that disarmament in Iraq constitutes steps toward the goal of establishing a zone free of weapons of mass destruction in the Middle East. That thought should not be missed at the present time, when disarmament is being secured in Iraq and the road map for peace is on the table. Steady movement along the map is clearly fundamental not only for peace but also to the eventual freedom from weapons of mass destruction in the whole region, including Iraq, Iran, Israel and Syria.

    It has not been questioned that export controls remain important. Effective long-term international on-site inspection similarly remains a vital instrument in the efforts to counter proliferation. Inspection is designed to create confidence among neighbors and in the world by verifying the absence of weapons programs and by deterring such programs through the risk of detection. In open societies, like Japan’s and South Korea’s, the task is relatively straightforward. The transparency of the societies combined with the international inspection process gives a high degree of confidence. In closed totalitarian societies, like Iraq and North Korea, the task is more difficult.

    Inspections in Iraq brought a high degree of confidence that there remained no nuclear-weapon capability and few, if any, SCUD-type missiles. However, despite very far-reaching rights of immediate access to sites, authorities and persons, and despite access to national intelligence and overhead imagery, many years of inspection did not bring confidence that chemical and biological weapons had been eliminated in Iraq. In March, the U.S. gave up on the possibility of attaining adequate and durable assurance on the elimination of proscribed weapons in Iraq through U.N. inspections and instead moved to seek it through armed action.

    Does this suggest that international inspection is meaningless in closed societies? No, it can be relied on to verify the absence of the large installations that are likely to be indispensable for nuclear weapons and long-range missiles. Full guarantees against research and development are hardly attainable and possible hidden stores of biological and chemical weapons may also be very hard to discover. Armed action and occupation can obviously deal with these risks, but these approaches have great costs and problems and the assurance obtained from them is not likely to last forever.

    Inspection and long-term monitoring requires patience and persistence, scarce commodities in national and international politics. While it requires support by individual states it is clearly more easily accepted — and more credible — if managed by authorities which are independent of the states which assist them, for instance, by providing intelligence. Used in this manner, inspection and long-term monitoring through international organizations could provide an important element in the prevention of the spread of weapons of mass destruction in the Middle East, on the Korean peninsula and elsewhere.

    In the fields of missiles and biological weapons, there are presently no specialized intergovernmental organizations that could provide inspection in the manner that the IAEA and the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons do in the nuclear and chemical fields. Over the years, the United Nations Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission — Unmoved — has acquired much experience in the verification and inspection of biological weapons and missiles as well as chemical weapons — but only in Iraq. It has scientific cadres who are trained and could be mobilized for cases other than Iraq. If the Security Council gave it a broader mandate, it could provide the Council with a capability for ad hoc inspections and monitoring, whenever this might be needed in the efforts to prevent proliferation.
    * Hans Blix is executive chairman of the United Nations Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission.