The consensus of 17 U.S. agencies, as reported by National Intelligence Estimates of 2007 and 2011, finds that Iran has not enriched uranium above 20 percent purity, far short of the nearly 90 percent essential to weapons development.  Further, no viable nuclear delivery system or command structure has been uncovered.  High-powered U.S. surveillance and espionage operations, many inside Iran, have revealed nothing beyond (an entirely legal) civilian energy program.  Recent International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) investigations, the latest in November 2011 and February 2012, cite “continuing enrichment processes” but nothing beyond the 20 percent level.  The IAEA merely states what should be obvious – that some Iranian sites “could be” used for a weapons program at some point in the future…..

The Iranians have every right within existing international rules to carry out their program – a fact conveniently obscured by the Western media and politicians.  Their Israeli antagonists, on the other hand, not only possess a nuclear arsenal of up to 400 warheads – possibly fifth largest in the world – but breezily dismiss the NPT as a worthless nuisance…..

Make no mistake:  despite the media fiction of a small, weak, relatively defenseless country isolated and surrounded by aggressive foes, Israel currently rivals Britain, France, and China as a world nuclear power, central to its shared goal (with the U.S.) of military supremacy in the Middle East.  Credible sources indicate that Israel possesses not only neutron bombs but an array of tactical nukes, ballistic missiles, atomic land mines, cruise missiles, nuclear-armed subs, and high-explosive artillery shells.   The subs alone are armed with four cruise missiles each, replete with multiple warheads.   The general Israeli military arsenal dwarfs the actual or potential armed forces of all other Middle Eastern nations combined.  Several U.N. resolutions calling for Israel to join the NPT, open up its nuclear facilities to inspection, and agree to a regional nuclear-free zone have been stonewalled by the U.S. and Israel.   After the CIA reported that Israel had the Bomb in 1968 (fully 18 years before Mordecai Vanunu’s insider revelations), no outside visits to Israeli military sites have been allowed.

Meanwhile, India – still a non-NPT state – has long benefitted from a massive transfer of atomic resources and technology from the U.S., dating to years before the Indian weapons breakthrough of 1974.   As an imagined counterweight to Chinese military power, India was empowered to build as many as 65 warheads, manufactured and deployed in the absence of external monitoring and made possible by the work of 1100 U.S.-trained scientists.  Like Israel and also Pakistan, India maintains a hostile attitude toward IAEA monitoring.  In July 2005 the U.S. signed an historic deal with New Delhi for nuclear cooperation, just when India was busy modernizing its illegal atomic stockpile and delivery systems.  (The deal was approved by Congress in October 2008.) Those profiting, of course, included dozens of U.S. technical and military corporations……

n the end, the Iranian “crisis” is symptomatic of a deeper predicament:  nothing will be resolved until every state – not just the targeted villains – is held accountable to the same universal norms.   This means, above all, the U.S., Israel, and other nuclear outlaws.  Blix noted that the NPT “is not a treaty that appoints the nuclear-weapons states individually or jointly to police non-nuclear weapons states and threaten them with punishment.  It is a contract in which all parties commit themselves to the goal of a nuclear weapons-free world.”  There can be no meaningful “contract” without an internationalization of security arrangements that, in the end, will require a dismantling of the American warfare state that underpins its nuclear outlawry and that of its clients. http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/04/04/the-real-nuclear-outlaws/#.T33s-UO4hjA.facebook