Most of the world would be at greater ease if Iran had a nuclear bomb.
I know I wasn’t the only one listening to the clock tick all Tuesday afternoon, right up to Trump’s 8 pm deadline for putting Iran’s 7000-year-old civilization to death, “never to be brought back again.”
He stopped short of saying so, but only nuclear bombs could be so final, so we waited in dread of hearing that he and Israel had finally fired a few off. After all, during his 2016 campaign, Trump repeatedly asked why we weren’t using these nuclear weapons since we have them, as though he disapproved of them lying around, going to waste.
Then, just before the clock struck 8 Eastern, Trump released the statement illustrated here by Facebook Need to Know:
Nobody has ever seen anything like it? Nobody has seen the bombs still falling on Gaza ever since the so-called ceasefire was signed?
At least Iran’s 7000-year-old civilization was not put to death at the stroke of 8:00 Eastern time and it does seem there will be some sort of two-week ceasefire.
Why? The markets were tanking, the price of oil was soaring, farmers were gasping for lack of fertilizer, global depression was looming, and there were no doubt business interests pushing Trump to stop, although a few sectors, most particularly oil and weapons manufacturers, were no doubt doing well.
By all reports the war wasn’t going well for the US and Israel. Their NATO allies were refusing to join in and Iran was allowing its friends to pass through the Strait of Hormuz so long as they were purchasing their oil and petroleum products with yuan. Manned and unmanned US aircraft had crashed or been shot down, a US F-15E fighter jet, an A-10 Warthog, two C-130s and two Blackhawk helicopters and 16 unmanned Predator Drones. Israel had reportedly lost over 20 air force drones.
However, is there any reason to think the US and Israel won’t just regroup and return as they did last time? Netanyahu has been lusting for this war all his life and this is their second assault in less than a year’s time. Will they be back with yet another nuclear threat?
Bombs wouldn’t be pounding the Iranian people, and we wouldn’t be suffering all the side effects if Iran just had a bomb, so why don’t they?
On July 1, 1968 they signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). It had been opened for signature that year and it became international law in 1970. Since then 191 nations have signed, but India, Israel, Pakistan, and South Sudan have not. South Sudan became a nation in 2011 and doesn’t seem to have any interest in signing, while India, Israel, and Pakistan never signed and accordingly built nuclear weapons. Israel’s nukes are of course not acknowledged in UN chambers but are widely discussed outside. Many commentators have worried that Israel could go nuclear if it sees it can’t win this war otherwise.
Libya signed the NPT in 1968 but President Muammar Gaddafi gave up its nuclear weapons potential in 2003, in exchange for sanctions relief and better relations with the West. Eight years later NATO destroyed Libya with an aerial bombing campaign and assassinated Gaddafi by proxy.
North Korea signed the NPT in 1985, but withdrew in 2003 and first successfully tested a nuclear weapon in 2006.
What could Iran do with two weeks, while the US and Israel do whatever they’re going to do to regroup? Theodore Postol, M.I.T. Professor Emeritus of Science, Technology, and International Security, has had several podcast conversations about this with Glenn Diesen, Political Science Professor at the University of South-Eastern Norway. He believes that Iran has enough highly enriched uranium to build 10 nuclear bombs if it hasn’t already.
Iran would arguably be violating their obligations under the NPT, but are those obligations binding if those attacking Iran have not kept theirs? The US is in gross violation of the NPT’s Article 6, which obliges signatories to pursue negotiations in good faith to end the nuclear arms race and achieve nuclear disarmament. The US has instead built one new generation of nuclear weapons after another, with the 2025 to 2034 upgrade expected to cost nearly $1 trillion.
And could threatening to drop a nuclear bomb on Iran—as Trump tacitly has—be any further outside the spirit of the NPT? Like the US/Israeli war itself, it also violates Article I of the UN Charter, which establishes the equal rights and self-determination of peoples, and Article 2, which prohibits the threat or use of force in international relations.
Despite being a lifelong anti-nuclear activist, I have concluded that Iran needs a bomb and we’ll all be better off if they have one.
Ann Garrison is a Black Agenda Report Contributing Editor based in the San Francisco Bay Area. In 2014, she received the Victoire Ingabire Umuhoza Democracy and Peace Prize for her reporting on conflict in the African Great Lakes region. She can be reached at ann@anngarrison.com. You can help support her work on Patreon.
The fight for the ballot has always been tied to a wider war against Black political power, against workers, against the people paying for empire abroad and austerity at home.
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