America's Shocking Nuclear Hypocrisy
By Tad Daley, AlterNet. Posted November 9, 2007.
America's standard for saying which countries can go nuclear is
simple: Countries we like can. Countries we dislike can't.
Some call it "America's nuclear hypocrisy." Others call it the
"nuclear double standard," others still our "nuclear narcissism."
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, echoing the phrase used by
Indian Foreign Minister Jaswant Singh at the time of his own country's
nuclear tests in 1998, often calls it "nuclear apartheid." But it has
rarely been expressed as baldly as it was during the last days of
October 2007.
It started with two passings. Paul Tibbets, commander of the U.S. Army
Air Forces B-29, which dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima on Aug. 6,
1945, that killed at least 80,000 people, and Randall Forsberg, the
genius behind the 1982 Central Park nuclear freeze rally, which the
New York Times, in her obituary, called the largest political
demonstration in American history, both died -- with exquisite irony
-- within just a few days of each other.
As if that didn't illustrate enough the tensions of the nuclear age,
two separate Bush administration officials -- U.N. Ambassador Zalmay
Khalilzad and deputy State Department spokesman Tom Casey -- made
simultaneous remarks the day before Tibbets died that illuminated the
nuclear double standard more starkly than ever.
This time it was not, as it usually is, the divergence between the
rules of the game for countries like Iran (nuclear weapons permitted:
zero) and for countries like ourselves (nuclear weapons presently
possessed: 10,000-plus ... with concrete plans already unrolling to
design, develop and deploy new and improved nuclear weapon models
fully a third of a century down the road).
No, this time it was the double standard between our expectations for
countries we like and those for countries we don't like.
First, on Oct. 29, Khalilzad repeated the formulation about Iran that
has been expressed many times by many Bush administration voices.
"Given the record of this regime, the rhetoric of this regime, the
policies of this regime, the connections of this regime, it cannot be
acceptable for it to develop the capability to produce nuclear
weapons." It was a wearyingly familiar argument. Our assessment of the
character of the Iranian regime determines whether we will permit them
to pursue a nuclear "capability."
But on the same day that Khalilzad made his statement, America's good
friend Egypt announced that it intended to build several new nuclear
power plants over the next several decades. Washington was quick to
indicate that it did not disapprove. "Any country that fulfills its
obligations under the NPT and follows proper IAEA safeguards will have
a program that is perfectly acceptable to us," said Casey (emphasis
added). "They're fully within their rights to go that way."
The two remarks are well worth parsing. It is true that Iran,
illegally, kept many nuclear activities secret from the IAEA for many
years. It is a matter of some debate whether Tehran is fully
cooperating with the IAEA now.
But the Bush administration's standard for Iran has never been simply
that it must fully cooperate with the IAEA. It demands, instead, that
Tehran cease all uranium enrichment -- the crucial element for the
development of both nuclear power and nuclear weapons. The essential
administration position, in fact, which (military action or not) it
will unlikely abandon before the end of its term, is that it will not
even negotiate directly with Iran until Iran first concedes the
central issue of any negotiation.
Had Khalilzad said "develop nuclear weapons" instead of "develop the
capability to produce nuclear weapons," he would perhaps not have
found himself standing on such very thin ice. But the NPT forbids
non-nuclear signatories like Iran and Egypt from acquiring nuclear
weapons, not from acquiring the enrichment capabilities that can be
used for both nuclear power and nuclear weapons. On the contrary,
Article IV explicitly acknowledges that all parties possess an
"inalienable right" to pursue nuclear energy "without discrimination."
It is becoming more and more apparent that Article IV was a
fundamental flaw in the original terms of the NPT itself. But that
flaw is hardly Iran's fault or Iran's problem.
Here's more: http://www.alternet.org/audits/67368/
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