The US and Israel repeatedly use the threat of nuclear weapons being developed by other countries as the basis for going to war. They used that fear of an ‘imminent’ nuclear threat in the case of Iraq even though that was known to be false. And now they are using that same argument against Iran. So you would think that they would welcome a move towards nuclear non-proliferation in that region, right?
But you would be wrong. While the warmongers in the US, urged on by Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the Israel lobby in the US, are trying to whip up war fervor against Iran by arguing that they are secretly planning to obtain a nuclear weapon and then use it, a news story slipped by with very little comment.
Israel’s prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, thanked the US secretary of state, John Kerry, for blocking an Egyptian-led drive on a possible Middle East nuclear arms ban at a United Nations conference, an Israeli official said on Saturday.
…A month-long review conference on the 1970 nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) ended in failure on Friday, over disagreements on the issue of a Middle East atomic weapons ban. Washington blamed the failure on Egypt, which in turn blamed the US, British and Canadian delegations.
…Israel also thanked Britain and Canada for joining the US in blocking consensus at the conference, the official said.
So who was trying to do what at these failed negotiations?
Last month, Egypt, backed by other Arab and non-aligned states, proposed that the UN secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, convene within 180 days a regional conference on banning weapons of mass destruction (WMD) as called for at the 2010 NPT review meeting.
John La Forge, co-director of Nukewatch, a peace and environmental justice group in Wisconsin, says that the US is the biggest source of proliferation of nuclear weapons in the world.
The United States is perhaps the principle [sic] nuclear weapons proliferator in the world today, openly flouting binding provisions of the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT). Article I of the treaty forbids signers from transferring nuclear weapons to other states, and Article II prohibits signers from receiving nuclear weapons from other states.
As the UN Review Conference of the NPT was finishing its month-long deliberations in New York last week, the US delegation distracted attention from its own violations using its standard Red Herring warnings about Iran and North Korea — the former without a single nuclear weapon, and the latter with 8-to-10 (according to those reliable weapons spotters at the CIA) but with no means of delivering them.
The NPT’s prohibitions and obligations were re-affirmed and clarified by the world’s highest judicial body in its July 1996 Advisory Opinion on the legal status of the threat or use of nuclear weapons. The International Court of Justice said in this famous decision that the NPT’s binding promises not to transfer or receive nuclear weapons are unqualified, unequivocal, unambiguous and absolute. For these reasons, US violations are easy to illustrate.
So the US and Israel, the very nations who are creating fear about a nuclear Iran, are the ones who deliberately block negotiations to create a nuclear-free zone in one of the most volatile regions of the world.
Surprise!
no, not really.
Gods damn, we need Harper out of power in Canada.
Tabby Lavalamp
A-fucking-men.
There is a glimmer of hope.
Look what just happened in Alberta.
Meanwhile, US WMD labs are losing some of the live anthrax samples they were sending around via FEDEX. You can’t make this shit up.
The NPT is an odious document if you look at what it actually says. It says, basically, “if you sign our NPT we promise not to first-use nuclear weapons against you.” No shit; it’s pure nuclear blackmail. But that’s why you don’t get countries that withdraw from the NPT in droves. The US, during both the Korean War and Vietnam War often loudly threatened to use nukes. Also threatened to use nukes on China during the Matsu/Quemoy incident. At that time the Chinese had only a handful of nukes compared the US’ thousands. Meanwhile, the US’ SIOP (single integrated operations plan) which was the nuclear strike doctrine in place from the 1960s to mid 1980s called for the US to wipe out China in the event of a nuclear war with the USSR, because, after all, China would be the last superpower standing in that situation and game theory said the only rational thing to do was wipe out worldwide civilization rather than lose. Now we know that Curtis LeMay had consistently pushed for a first strike and that the “missile gap” between the US and USSR was fictional. And known to be be fictional. In other words, LeMay was arguing that the US should genocide the USSR and PRC -- a war policy that dwarfed anything Hitler ever conjured in terms of sheer awfulness.
One of the other clauses of the NPT is that the powers pledged to disarm. That … hasn’t happened. Meanwhile, the US is quietly preparing to spend about a trillion dollars to upgrade and improve its nuclear arsenal (far from standing it down) with a new design of warhead that will not go bad over time. Worse yet, techno-hawks in the nuclear weapons community will almost certainly talk a president into resuming nuclear testing in order to validate that the “safer” warhead works. In other words, in the name of making things “safer” the US may well trigger a new cold war arms race.
After all, we survived the last one, so -- whatever. Right?
BTW, the US is quietly allowing Saudi Arabia to develop uranium enrichment capabilities “for peace” that will be much superior to what Iran had.
The Saudis rightly believe that the US will be deterred by nuclear weapons, as will Israel, and want nukes for the same reason that any other tinpot dictatorship want them: it makes the US very reluctant to consider “regime change” After Ghaddafi’s disastrous betrayal by the US — the US guaranteed they would stop sponsoring regime change if Libya stood down its nuclear program, then flipped the Libyan regime anyway no dictator in the world is going to believe US pledges of noninterference; instead they want to be able to threaten to disintegrate any US troops that land boots on the ground. Because of the throw-weights involved, the idea that any country would consider a first strike on the US is absurd; these nukes would be purely defensive (for the same reason that Pakistan had to develop nukes to cut back India’s unrestricted nuclear blackmail that they had been engaging in)
Because of the deeply immoral and politically untrustworthy nature of US leaders, nuclear weapons are not safe at all under the control of the world’s most powerful rogue state. The US used them once (when it didn’t need to) and will eventually use them again.