nuclear-news

Nuclear Diplomacy: the Great Charade, The Humiliation of Iran CounterPunch,by CARL BOGGS, 4 Feb 14 “………Within the U.S. Congress, bipartisan consensus holds sway around the goal of modernizing “strategic nuclear offensive forces” that Republicans (and some Democrats) want to fund through cuts in Medicare, Social Security, and other social programs.  Such political agreement is rooted in a deeply-entrenched nuclear establishment going back to World War II, the Manhattan Project, atomic bombings of Japan, and first rumblings of the Cold War.

Nuclear agendas have thus been an easy sell to politicians, academia, scientists, the media, and of course the military, whatever the costs; fears of nonproliferation and loyalty  to the NPT become distractions once insatiable demands of the warfare state and corporate profiteers like Raytheon, Northrop-Grumman, and Lockheed-Martin enter the picture.

 The promise of a “world without nukes”, though uttered in Berlin, has gotten obscured in Europe: today, dictated by U.S. and NATO military interests, the continent hosts among the biggest concentrations of nuclear weaponry on earth.  Hundreds of warheads are dispersed, operational within the NATO doctrine of preemptive nuclear strike, meaning first-launch option.  Beyond sizable “official” French and British arsenals, Washington has deployed nearly 500 B61 nuclear bombs (tactical warheads) in Germany, Belgium, Holland, Italy, and Turkey.  Many of these “smaller” nukes (still 13 times more powerful than the Hiroshima blast) are fixed on Russia and Iran.   Incirlik, Turkey alone is site of an estimated 90 such warheads.  Any military attack on Iran would surely involve some or all of these host nations.  While the IAEA is preoccupied with other matters, large-scale joint U.S.-European nuclear projects continue unimpeded, with the aforementioned B61-12 warheads (improved “precision” bunker-busters), slated for European deployment over the coming years, ready to counter the great Iranian military danger……..http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/02/04/nuclear-diplomacy-the-great-charade/