Nuclear Threats

I’ve been trying to catch up on last week’s news, most of which I missed because I didn’t have time to do any reading during the office move.

Far and away, what horrified me the most is the development that the Bush Administration is considering – or, “won’t rule out,” or, “all options are on the table,” in their parlance – using “tactical” nuclear weapons on Iran.

Where to begin? As if we needed further proof that the White House is run by people who are insane, they’ve now handed us this definitive evidence that they are mad. Absolutely, unapologetically, unquestionably cuckoo.

As Condoleezza Rice recently helpfully pointed out in an interview with the British press, “Iran is not Iraq.”

Iran is “slightly larger than the combined area of the contiguous states of California, Arizona, Nevada, Oregon, Washington, and Idaho.” Iran is modern, it is wealthy, and even though experts declare that Iran’s claims of nuclear capability are exaggerated, there is no question about their ambitions.

Oh yes, Iran is not Iraq. Don’t let the people who tried to tell you that Iraq could be converted to democracy within six months at a cost of $1.7 billion plan out our strategy for dealing with Iran.

It’s time to have an open and honest debate about the doctrine of pre-emption: what it means, and what its limits should be, and what the standards for implementation ought to be. Clinton used it semi-successfully: the 1998 missile strikes on Iraq shut down what was left of Saddam’s WMD programs; he also blew up an aspirin factory in Sudan. Israel successfully bombed a nuclear reactor in Baghdad in 1981. Had Bush not rejected an option to bomb Zarqawi’s training camp in northern Iraq prior to the invasion, the occupation might have turned out very differently.

The world should not allow Iran to have nuclear weapons capability. Actually, no one should have it: nuclear weapons should be banned outright, and present weapons should be deactivated, their warheads used in power plants instead.

The United States, however, continues to maintain an enormous arsenal, by which it appears to claim authority to determine which other countries may have nuclear weapons: Israel, but not Iraq; India, but not Pakistan. The international community should strongly condemn this notion and actively seek to thwart it.

A mere sixty years into the history of a nuclear world, it is the height of arrogance to assume we know all the potential ramifications of using weapons with radioactive half-lives lasting decades or centuries, depending on size and ingredients. Nuclear weapons are immoral not because of their immediate and devastating explosive power, but because they poison the atmosphere, the water and the soil. They make a place literally unlivable. Those who are not killed instantly succomb to or suffer from radiation sickness. They may develop rare cancers or other diseases; children born years after the attack can be severely deformed.

During the Cold War, the concept of “mutually assured destruction” kept us at relative peace. Both sides knew that in the event of nuclear war, there would be no winner. Everyone would be annihilated. That would not be the case in a strike on Iran: the U.S., taking unfair advantage of superior weaponry, would unleash environmental hell. The Bushies see no apparent disconnect in the argument that they have the authority to use nuclear weapons to stop a country from doing the same.

Instead of a nuke, there’s something else we might try: friendship.