by Dilip Hiro
For
countries -- small, middling, or great -- acquiring nuclear weapons is
all about the most basic requirement: the survival of the regime or
nation. Joining the "nuclear club" has proved an effective strategy for
survival. The possession of city-busting, potentially planet-ending
weaponry threatens to bring about a MAD -- the Cold War acronym for
"Mutually Assured Destruction" -- world. While the "madness" of this
strategy is apparent, a rarely mentioned aspect of today's geopolitics
is that acquiring nuclear arms has proven a logical step for a regime
to take when its survival is at stake.
The United States and
the Soviet Union, the superpowers of the Cold War, stacked up nuclear
weapons by the thousands as "deterrents," well aware that the use of
even a tiny fraction of them would annihilate the planet many times
over. The doctrine worked, maintaining a precarious peace until the
Soviet Union collapsed in 1991.
When Communist China acquired
an atom bomb in 1964, it joined the four permanent members of the
United Nations Security Council with veto power -- the United States,
the Soviet Union, Britain, and France -- which possessed nuclear arms,
thus gaining an entry to the "nuclear club."
The club's
monopoly was broken by a minor power, Israel, in 1967 -- stealthily,
because its leaders decided not to test the bomb they had built. Even
so, the Central Intelligence Agency got wind of it. What did
then-President Lyndon Johnson's administration do about it? Nothing.
And what about the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the UN
watchdog agency charged with administering the 1968 nuclear
Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT)? It was empowered to act, but only in
cases where a UN member had signed on to the Treaty. Israel did not.
In
June 1981, when the UN Security Council's resolution 487 directed
Israel to place its nuclear facilities under IAEA safeguards anyway,
Israel simply ignored it. President Ronald Reagan's White House
maintained a thunderous silence on the matter.
Compare that
with the Bush administration's present stance in the case of Iran.
Unlike Israel, Tehran initialed the Non-Proliferation Treaty early on
-- and that treaty allows a signatory non-nuclear power to enrich
uranium for civilian purposes. By not informing the IAEA when it
started to do so in 2002, however, Tehran failed to meet its treaty
obligations. That "original sin," combined with the Bush
administration's strong animus toward a hostile regional power, has in
its trail brought UN sanctions against Tehran, with Washington acting
as the prime mover.
The Lure of Deterrance
In 1998,
four years before Iran's push for nuclear power, India officially
detonated an atomic bomb and, soon after, its arch rival Pakistan
followed suit. Like Israel, neither of them had signed on to the NPT.
India exploded a "nuclear device" in 1974, claiming it was for
"peaceful purposes." U.S. sanctions followed but did not impede Delhi's
progress in this field.
India had embarked on this path after
acquiring a bloody nose in its 1962 border war with China over disputed
territories in the Himalayan region. Following its defeat in a
conventional war, its leaders concluded that only possession of atomic
weapons would deter Beijing from invading again. By so doing, they
underlined a growing belief in the deterrent power of nuclear arms -- a
route by which militarily inferior countries could hope to deter their
superior rivals or enemies.
Pakistan, engaged since 1947 in a
bitter struggle with India over the status of the disputed province of
Kashmir, was a case in point. Well aware of their country's inferiority
to India in population and economic development, Pakistan's leaders
knew that it would be no match in conventional warfare. The only way to
achieve parity with their larger, more powerful neighbor was by
acquiring nuclear weapons.
So they started a clandestine
nuclear-arms program in the late 1970s, reaching their goal a decade
later. They waited, however, to test their first bomb until after India
had officially admitted to doing so in May 1998. A year later, fighting
between Indian and Pakistani troops in the Kargil region of
Indian-administered Kashmir did not escalate into an all-out war
because both sides were nuclear-armed, with their leaders seemingly
prepared to use their arsenals in extremis . The episode, frightening
as it was, reassured Pakistani officials that their country was now
secure from being overpowered by India.
In the mid-1950s, the
same reasoning had led Israeli leaders to pursue the nuclear path.
Uncertain about how long they could maintain their edge over the
combined forces of their Arab neighbors in conventional weaponry and
the quality of their troops, they concluded that an effective deterrent
for a beleaguered country was the atomic bomb.
Indeed, during
the early days of the 1973 Arab-Israeli War, when the Israelis were
caught off-guard and invading Arab armies made striking gains, the
government ordered its entire arsenal, then 25 atomic bombs, mounted on
specially adapted bombers. Those bombers never took off, in part,
because the swift airlifting of military hardware and ammunition from
the U.S. soon helped turn the tide in Israel's favor. In short, Israeli
leaders equipped their military with atomic arms to ensure the survival
of the State of Israel. Such a process, once started, never ceases. By
now, Israel reportedly has an arsenal of at least 200 nuclear bombs.
More
recently, North Korea's leader Kim Jong-Il has acted in a similar
fashion. In January 2002, he noted with alarm the way his country was
included in an "Axis of Evil" -- along with Iraq and Iran -- by George
W. Bush in his State of the Union Address. "States like these, and
their terrorist allies, constitute an axis of evil, arming to threaten
the peace of the world," the President said. "By seeking weapons of
mass destruction, these regimes pose a grave and growing danger."
Bush
had already reversed the Clinton administration's policy of engagement
(launched in conjunction with the South Korean government) on the issue
of the North Korean nuclear program and had overseen the virtual
termination of the 1994 agreement to supply North Korea with two
light-water nuclear reactors at the cost of $4.6 billion in return for
a nuclear freeze. North Korea retaliated by expelling IAEA inspectors
and withdrawing from the nuclear NPT in 2003 -- the year the Bush
administration launched its invasion of Iraq and overthrew Saddam
Hussein's regime, claiming it had an ongoing nuclear-weapons program
that endangered the United States. (It didn't.)
Kim Jong-Il
then accelerated his country's nuclear program, testing a device in
October 2006. By so doing, he strengthened his hand to ensure the
survival of his regime. Thus did another minor state in search of
survival insurance join the nuclear club.
Iran Plays the Nuclear Card
With
Saddam's regime destroyed and North Korea armed and dangerous, Iran was
the member of that "axis" left exposed to the prospect of regime
change. Partly to avoid Saddam's fate, Iranian leaders signed the
IAEA's Additional Protocol in October 2003, giving the watchdog body
authority to conduct constant on-site inspections. A series of reports
by the agency followed.
In essence what these said was: While
the IAEA inspectors had not found evidence proving that Iran was
pursuing a nuclear-weapons program, they could not give it a clean bill
of health either because Iran had not answered all questions
satisfactorily. In the words of an IAEA official in Vienna, "The facts
don't support an innocent or guilty verdict at this point."
The
starting point in the nuclear-fuel cycle is the enrichment of uranium,
allowed by the NPT. A low figure of 5% enrichment makes uranium
suitable for generating electricity; at the high end, 90% is needed to
produce a nuclear weapon. The same machine -- a centrifuge -- yields
results at both ends of the spectrum.
From the Iranian
leaders' viewpoint, surrendering their right to enrich uranium, as
demanded by the Bush administration and its allies, means giving up the
path to a nuclear weapon in the future. Yet, the history of the past
half century indicates that the only effective way to deter Washington
from overthrowing their regime is by developing -- or, at least,
threatening to develop -- nuclear weaponry. Little wonder that they
consider giving up the right to enrich uranium tantamount to giving up
the right to protect their regime. (Anyone even suggesting that the
U.S. give up this right would be laughed off the premises. Indeed, the
Bush administration continues to update and upgrade its vast nuclear
arsenal, attempting, for instance, to develop bunker-busting atomic
weapons for possible future use against Iran's nuclear facilities.)
If
the U.S. were to give Iran cast-iron guarantees of nonaggression as
well as of noninterference in its domestic affairs -- just as North
Korea, armed with atomic bombs, is demanding -- that would undoubtedly
reassure Iran's leaders and form a real basis for resolving the problem
of that country's nuclear activities.
After receiving the Nobel Peace Prize in December 2005, IAEA chief Muhammad El Baradei said:
"Part
of the negotiations should be providing Iran with security assurances.
I hope…. that the United States at a certain point will become more
engaged. We look at the United States to do the heavy lifting in the
area of security."
Now, Baradei is once more offering pragmatic
advice. He has proposed that the U.S. and its allies should consider
allowing Iran limited enrichment rights within its own boundaries. He
argues that, since the Iranians have already successfully enriched
uranium, the Security Council's demand that it stop doing so has become
redundant. Instead, the world body should focus on seeing that Iran
conducts its enrichment activities under IAEA supervision and that,
unlike North Korea, it does not withdraw from the nuclear NPT.
As
it is, U.S. credibility in Tehran is low. On the eve of the January
1981 release of the hostages taken at the U.S. embassy in November
1979, the U.S. agreed in the Algiers Accord not to interfere in Iran's
internal affairs. In December 1995, however, it began violating that
agreement when, following the passage of a directive by Congress
sanctioning $18 million for a covert action program against Iran, the
Clinton White House announced that the sum would be spent inter alia to
cultivate new enemies of the Islamic regime.
Since then that
annual sum has risen to $75 million and the Bush White House has
launched a series of covert operations to undermine the Iranian regime,
dispatched aircraft-carrier strike forces through the Straits of Hormuz
in classic gunboat-diplomacy fashion, and had its Vice President issue
a series of warnings to Iran from the deck of the USS John C. Stennis,
floating barely 150 miles off the Iranian coast.
The Iranian
response, despite public denials, has been to play the single card that
history has stamped "effective" since 1949 -- raising the specter of a
nuclear-armed Iran. It is a classic act of self-defense guaranteed to
spread nuclear arms to other countries in a MAD world where Catch-22 is
the nuclear rule of the day.
For countries -- small, middling, or great -- acquiring nuclear weapons is all about the most basic requirement: the survival of the regime or nation. 
