The U.S. nuclear hypocrisy

Although the White House says that diplomacy is its preferred option to solve the Iranian nuclear dispute, President Bush doesn't rule out a military option, as part of the administration's plans to force Iran to end its pursuit of nuclear technology.

According to an article on the Union of Concerned Scientists, by Dr. Kurt Gottfried, Emeritus Professor of Physics, Cornell University, the Bush administration is considering using the B61-11 nuclear “bunker buster” against Iran’s underground nuclear sites. One target is Iran’s main centrifuge plant, at Natanz, 200 miles south of Teheran. Although the funding for this weapon was cut in 2005 defense appropriations, the U.S. still has a B61-11 nuclear “bunker buster” in its arsenal which could still cause hundreds of thousands of deaths and spread radiation to other countries, the article states.

“The use of such a weapon would create massive clouds of radioactive fallout that could spread far from the site of the attack, including to other nations. Even if used in remote, lightly populated areas, the number of casualties could range up to more than a hundred thousand, depending on the weapon yield and weather conditions,” Dr Gottfried says. (Imagine such "intense local radioactive fallout" in Tehran, population approximately 12 million.) 

According to Retired Air Force Lt. Gen. Tom McInerney, who helped plan the first air war against Saddam Hussein in 1991, the U.S. aircraft, armed with bunker-buster bombs, would be more than enough to wipe out Iran’s nuclear and missile facilities, and cripple its ability to command and control its military forces.

Reports of advanced military planning on Iran surfaced earlier this month in The New Yorker magazine, in an article written by veteran investigative journalist Seymour Hersh. The report comes as the U.S. is preparing to test a 700-tonne bomb, dubbed Divine Strake, in June at its test site near Las Vegas. “One of the largest explosive tests since the end of the Cold War is planned for June, when the Pentagon will detonate a gigantic bomb in the Nevada desert as part of its research into developing weapons that can destroy deeply buried military targets,” The Sydney Morning Herald reported.

The Defense Department says that the bomb would be a conventional alternative to the Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator - the official name of the bunker buster - which has run into opposition on Capitol Hill. But the size of the bomb is regarded by some to be a simulation of a nuclear bunker-buster. "I don't want to sound glib here, but it is the first time in Nevada that you'll see a mushroom cloud over Las Vegas since we stopped testing nuclear weapons," Defense Threat Reduction Agency chief James Tegnelia said earlier this month.

Tegnelia's message, along with the bomb test itself, is seen as part of Bush's “muscular diplomacy” with Tehran. Critics are scoffing at the Pentagon’s claims that the test blast is unrelated to the effort to build a nuclear bunker-buster. “It is abundantly clear, at least to me, that the military has not given up the idea of a nuclear penetrator," said Christopher Hellman, a policy analyst with the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation in Washington. 

It is interesting to note that the very development of the B61-11 is a violation of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, and international law dating back to the Clinton administration. "A central and expressed purpose of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) has always been to arrest the further evolution of the world’s nuclear arsenals," noted the Los Alamos Study Group on February 10, 1997, during the Clinton administration. "This modified weapon—certified without nuclear testing and deployed after signing the CTBT—undercuts that treaty and could provide political cover to countries which have their own unsatisfied nuclear ambitions."

What nobody doubts is that the U.S. is determined to stop Iran from become nuclear-armed. Iran, on the other hand, insists that it doesn’t want to build a nuclear bomb, and that its wants the technology only to make fuel for civil nuclear power. It is allowed to make its own fuel under the NPT. If attacked, Iran might simply leave the NPT, as it has the right to do, and go ahead with nuclear development anyway. It might also retaliate against U.S. interests across the globe.

Dr. Kurt Gottfried of the Union of Concerned Scientists says: “The very fact that nuclear weapon use is being discussed as an option—against a state that does not have nuclear weapons and does not represent a direct or imminent threat to the United States—illustrates the extent to which the Bush administration has changed U.S. nuclear weapons policy… Threatening to use nuclear weapons against Iran provides the strongest of incentives for nuclear proliferation, since it would send the message that the only way for a country to deter nuclear attack is to acquire its own nuclear arsenal. The administration cannot have its cake and eat it, too—it cannot have a viable nuclear non-proliferation policy while continually expanding the roles for its own nuclear weapons.”