nuclear-news

Nuclear disarmament the only safe course in militarised world

Over Iraq, George W. Bush and his bush lawyers tried to develop a
doctrine of ”pre-emptive self defence”, namely the right of the US
to invade any nation that might one day have the weapons to threaten
the US – but this doctrine has no place in international law.

we are entering a new era of nuclear proliferation so
dangerous that we may soon be nostalgic for the Cold War.

Whether children will live in a world without nukes depends on whether
the international community can be made sufficiently fearful of a
nuclear war to reach an agreement on gradual but complete disarmament.
If there is a silver lining in the mushroom cloud hypothetically
hovering over the Middle East, it is that the prospect of merciless
Mullahs with fingers on nuclear triggers will frighten the world
sufficiently to produce and enforce a law to ban the bomb.

Explosive state of a nuke world order SMH,December 30, 2012  Geoffrey Robertson
With the potential for harm growing, it is time to ban the bomb. The
first war of 2013 – Israel’s attack on Iran – is threatened for
”spring or early summer”, the time by which the Israeli Prime
Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, who is likely to be re-elected next
month, believes that the Mullahs will be ”nuclear weapons capable”.The White House may prevail upon him to postpone until Mahmoud

Ahmadinejad is replaced in June, but his successor as president will
just be another proxy for the international criminal who really rules
Iran – its Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei.
The US President, Barack Obama, has promised that a US-led coalition
will prevent Iran from obtaining the bomb, and when a US president
talks of ”coalition” he generally means Britain and Australia.

Will next year see the West drift into another bloody Middle East
engagement? The evidence that Iran’s theocratic government wants the
bomb is compelling and it could choose to manufacture several over the
next few years. It is a criminal state – given under Khamenei’s rule
to killing those who disagree with its politics or religion. He was
the president in 1988 when his death squads entered Iran’s jails to
execute some 7000 Marxist, atheist and Islamic non-conformists. Mainly
students who had been imprisoned for protesting or pamphleteering,
these victims were buried in mass graves at which their families are
still not permitted to mourn.
Later, as Supreme Leader, Khamenei issued orders to assassinate
hundreds of the regime’s overseas enemies (the author Salman Rushdie
was one who got away) and to blow up a synagogue and community centre
in Buenos Aires. In 2009 he unleashed the militia that tortured and
killed many Green Movement protesters.
The prospect of this merciless mass murderer obtaining nuclear weapons
is certainly alarming – but does Israel, even if backed by a US-led
coalition, have any right to stop him? Israel and its allies are
entitled to attack an enemy in self-defence under Article 51 of the
United Nations Charter but only if an attack from that country is
”imminent” – meaning that the onslaught must be about to happen.
Over Iraq, George W. Bush and his bush lawyers tried to develop a
doctrine of ”pre-emptive self defence”, namely the right of the US
to invade any nation that might one day have the weapons to threaten
the US – but this doctrine has no place in international law. Iran
will not actually have a bomb in 2013 (even if it manages to enrich
its uranium to weapons-grade, it will still take time to weaponise and
to develop a delivery system), so a strike on its nuclear facilities
in 2013 would be flagrantly unlawful.
It would also be irresponsible. Supporters of Israel assume it will be
a ”surgical strike” such as the one on Osirak, the Iraqi facility
that Israel bombed in 1981 with few casualties. But Natanz – a prime
target in any strike on Iran because it is where most of its
centrifuges are whirring to enrich uranium – employs 5000 workers
around the clock. The other potential targets store 371 tons of
uranium hexafluoride, so bombing them would set off a toxic cloud that
could asphyxiate thousands if the wind were to blow in the wrong
direction. The attack would prompt reprisals – rockets on Israel from
Hezbollah and doubtless Iran would close or mine the strait of Hormuz
and attack US naval vessels there: a wider war might follow.
The flaw in the argument for attacking Iran is that nuclear capability
does not mean nuclear culpability. While Ahmadinejad is a vicious
anti-Semite, Iran has no quarrel with its own Jewish population and
although its leaders are fond of imagining a world without Israel,
they are referring to millennialist prophecies about wiping all
unbelievers from the map, and are not planning to drop a nuclear bomb
on Tel Aviv.
The Mullahs are at least as rational as a gang of serial killers and
are well aware that Israel itself has 200 nukes, some on submarines
stooging the eastern Mediterranean, which would be shot at Tehran in
immediate reprisal for any attack. The real danger of Iran’s
acquisition of nuclear weapons is that the ruling Mullahs will be
invincible and proliferation will follow throughout the Middle
East…….
The fact is that we are entering a new era of nuclear proliferation so
dangerous that we may soon be nostalgic for the Cold War.
Then, bombs were kept under tight security and the five nations that
possessed them were run by men with children, retirement plans and no
wish for Armageddon (when the Cuban missile crisis came, it was solved
by a rational deal: the US promised to withdraw its nukes from Turkey,
in return for Khrushchev pulling his nuclear-tipped rockets out of
Cuba). The supreme leaders of North Korea and Iran are not men of the
same mould and Pakistan under any leadership will remain
insecure………
Proliferation is here to stay and Obama’s promise of ”a world without
nukes”, which won him the Nobel peace prize in 2009, now seems
fraudulent. Ironically, international law has managed to outlaw the
poisoned arrow and the dum-dum bullet, the landmine and the cluster
bomb, but nuclear weapons have thus far been too hot for it to handle.
It is plain that their use is a breach of the law of war: their
ionising radiation cannot distinguish between soldier and civilian,
military target and hospital or school. They cause disproportionate
suffering and they pose an existential threat to the environment. Even
a limited war, for example between India (which has 100 nukes) and
Pakistan over Kashmir or between North Korea and the US, would
probably change the climate before climate change.
But how is the problem of proliferation to be addressed, short of
opportunistic use of force by the US and its allies on countries such
as Iran? Many states (the movement is led by Mexico and has not yet
been joined by Australia) plan to make the acquisition of nuclear
weapons a crime against humanity by amending the Treaty of the
International Criminal Court at its review conference in 2016. That
would entitle the Security Council to authorise an attack on Iran or
any other country outside the nine that already possess nuclear
weapons to stop it from assembling a bomb.
But this will have to be accompanied by a binding agreement between
the nuclear-armed states gradually to reduce the number of nukes in
their arsenals to zero and by the establishment of a powerful UN
inspection agency to replace the toothless International Atomic Energy
Agency, which cannot inspect suspicious facilities, in Iran or
elsewhere, without the permission of the suspect state.
Whether children will live in a world without nukes depends on whether
the international community can be made sufficiently fearful of a
nuclear war to reach an agreement on gradual but complete disarmament.
If there is a silver lining in the mushroom cloud hypothetically
hovering over the Middle East, it is that the prospect of merciless
Mullahs with fingers on nuclear triggers will frighten the world
sufficiently to produce and enforce a law to ban the bomb.

http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/politics/explosive-state-of-a-nuke-world-order-20121229-2c07g.html#ixzz2GeS9yNvq

December 31, 2012 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | general