{"id":56420,"date":"2015-04-13T12:00:44","date_gmt":"2015-04-13T11:00:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=56420"},"modified":"2015-05-05T21:25:52","modified_gmt":"2015-05-05T20:25:52","slug":"the-real-nuclear-threat","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2015\/04\/the-real-nuclear-threat\/","title":{"rendered":"The Real Nuclear Threat"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"robert<\/a><\/strong>If war were only \u201citself\u201d \u2014 the violence and horror, the conflagration and death \u2014 it would be bad enough, but it\u2019s also an abstraction, a specific language of self-justifying righteousness that allows proponents to contemplate unleashing it not merely in physical but in moral safety.<\/p>\n

War, the abstraction, is an instrument of policy, an \u201coption\u201d that can be waged or threatened to get one\u2019s way. It is always contained and sure of itself, limited in its goals and, of course, necessary. Its unintended consequences are minimal and quickly neutralized with an official apology, then forgotten. If we didn\u2019t forget, the next<\/em> war wouldn\u2019t seem like such a viable, enticing option.<\/p>\n

The next war that has been gestating for so long now is the one with Iran, and its proponents, I\u2019m sure, will do what they can to dismantle the framework of the agreement recently negotiated between Iran and the P5+1 nations. The incompleteness of the agreement \u2014 the fact that only Iran has accountability in the realm of nuclear weapons \u2014 raises profound questions about the future of the planet, but this flaw is obscured, certainly in most mainstream coverage, by the \u201ccontroversy\u201d that the agreement has been reached at all, supplanting the possibility of a military response to Iran\u2019s nuclear energy program.<\/p>\n

The interests opposed to the agreement, which wouldn\u2019t be possible without mutual trust, maintain a belief in nothing but one-sided force to achieve their ends: either ongoing sanctions against Iran or military action.<\/p>\n

Former Iranian diplomat Seyed Hossein Mousavian, interviewed recently by Democracy Now, noted that the sanctions have been \u201c100 percent counterproductive,\u201d causing an increase, not a reduction, in the Iranian nuclear program.<\/p>\n

\u201cBefore sanctions,\u201d he said, \u201cIran had a few hundred centrifuges. After sanctions, Iran reached to 22,000 centrifuges. Before sanctions, Iran had a few hundred kilograms of stockpile of enriched uranium. After sanctions, about 9,000 kilograms. Before sanctions, Iran was enriching below 5 percent. After sanctions, Iran increased the enrichment to 20 percent.<\/p>\n

\u201c. . . More pressure, more threat, Iran would become more aggressive. But if you go for mutual respect, negotiating with Iran based on mutual respect and based on international rules and regulations, you would find a very, very cooperative, a flexible Iran.\u201d<\/p>\n

Regarding the more extreme option, a military takeout, Robert Parry recently wrote at Consortium News: \u201cBombing Iran\u2019s nuclear facilities could cause a massive human and environmental catastrophe, unleashing radiation on civilian populations and possibly making large swaths of Iran uninhabitable.\u201d<\/p>\n

Here we begin to get at the extreme recklessness and foolishness that is the context of so much geopolitical pontification. War is evoked with such brainless ease. A dozen years ago, Team Bush and its legion of political and media crusaders were screaming for the invasion of Iraq. One pseudo-argument for the invasion invoked World War II: We don\u2019t want another Munich (where Hitler and British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain reached an agreement to allow Nazi Germany\u2019s annexation of Czechoslovakia).<\/p>\n

As Juan Gonzalez noted on Democracy Now, Republican Sen. Mark Kirk of Illinois recently dismissed the Iran agreement by proclaiming, \u201cMinister Neville Chamberlain got a better deal from Adolf Hitler.\u201d War and its justifications spring eternal. Scholar Peter Conolly-Smith, for instance, has pointed out that Munich has been invoked to justify virtually every American military action or threatened action since World War II: Korea, Vietnam, Cuba, Grenada, Nicaragua, Iraq.<\/p>\n

The icons of military righteousness are endlessly reusable. They\u2019re never damaged, apparently, by the slaughter that follows in the wake of their invocation. But I suggest that hearing this justification for a potential new military action should alert one to the shallowness of the thinking behind it.<\/p>\n

The deeper problem with the P5+1 agreement with Iran is not the controversy it has generated among the bomb-Iran contingent but the unacknowledged hypocrisy of the P5 nations \u2014 the U.S., Russia, China, Great Britain and France \u2014 which, of course, are all nuclear powers themselves. They have made no real effort to pursue global nuclear disarmament by getting rid of their own arsenals, as they agreed to do when they signed the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, which went into effect in 1970.<\/p>\n

Four and a half decades later, and despite the end of the Cold War, many thousands of nuclear weapons, in nine nations (also including Israel, India, Pakistan and North Korea, none of which have signed the non-proliferation treaty), remain poised to destroy Planet Earth. The focus on the possibility that Iran might someday develop a nuclear weapon too, while perhaps not irrelevant to the goal of global disarmament, is a minute part of the enormous danger we\u2019re in.<\/p>\n

Indeed, the United States is in the process of investing billions of dollars \u2014 as much as $1 trillion over 30 years \u2014 to rebuild its whole nuclear arsenal, \u201cincluding the warheads, and the missiles, planes and submarines that carry them,\u201d according to Stephen Young of Union of Concerned Scientists, writing at Defense One.<\/p>\n

And as Greg Mallo of the Los Alamos Study Group has noted, three privatized nuclear laboratories \u2014 Los Alamos, Sandia and Livermore \u2014 are behind the immense investment in upgraded, more destructive nuclear warheads. This aggressive pressure from the American business sector is a lot more frightening than any aggression emanating from Iran, and may indicate where the real push for war comes from. War is profitable to too many people. We need a peace treaty with the military-industrial complex.<\/p>\n

_______________________________<\/p>\n

Robert Koehler is an award-winning, Chicago-based peace journalist and nationally syndicated writer. His book, <\/em>Courage Grows Strong at the Wound (Xenos Press) is still available. Contact him at koehlercw@gmail.com.<\/em><\/p>\n

\u00a9 2015 Tribune Content Agency, Inc.<\/em><\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 commonwonders.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Three privatized nuclear laboratories \u2014 Los Alamos, Sandia and Livermore \u2014 are behind the immense investment (as much as $1 trillion over 30 years) in upgraded, more destructive nuclear warheads. This aggressive pressure from the American business sector is a lot more frightening than any aggression emanating from Iran, and may indicate where the real push for war comes from.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[41],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-56420","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-tms-peace-journalism"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56420","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=56420"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56420\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=56420"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=56420"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=56420"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}