Dissimulation, Prevarication, and the Iranian Nuclear Question

Science is a Pandora’s box. Once a scientific discovery is made, regardless of how difficult the path to its discovery was, replicating it is easy. Scientists are not secret-keepers. They publish, actively communicate with other scientists with similar interests world-wide, and attend conferences to share ideas. Although a scientific discovery may be made by one scientist or only one team of scientists in a specific place, where the various ideas that led to the discovery came from can never really be identified. Scientists build, not only on their own ideas but the ideas of uncounted others. So the political dream of keeping any scientific discovery inside a specific nation’s box is merely a pipe-dream. Scientific discoveries belong to the world; not to any one nation or any one group of nations.

The Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty was a misguided attempt to institutionalize that pipe-dream that was doomed to failure. Joining it is voluntary and withdrawal is permitted. Its requirements cannot be imposed on anyone. It is a mere political statement that already has been ignored by many nations.

So why are the Western powers up in arms over Iran’s enrichment of uranium? Excluding Israel, there is no hue and cry from the Middle East, Africa, Latin America, or Asia. So why are the nations of Europe and America, all of which access to nuclear weapons, so hot under the collar? Is it because Iran is a threat to world peace or a threat to Western hegemony in the Middle East?

The Western nations do not have a credible track record in their dealings with Middle Easterners. After the First World War, the British and the French carved up the region for their own economic benefit, caring nothing for the sovereign rights of the people living there. After the Second World War, these same Western nations along with the United States again carved up Palestine without ever even asking the Palestinians if that action were okay with them.  With all of the nations in the world that already possess nuclear weapons, how can adding one more to the list be such a frightful threat to world peace? The United States of America, Russia, the United Kingdom, France, the People's Republic of China, India, Pakistan and Israel are nuclear powers. It can hardly be claimed that each one of these is a peace-loving state. Furthermore, Iran and North Korea are not the first non-nuclear nations to engage in nuclear development programs. Argentina, Brazil, South Africa, South Korea, Sweden, Switzerland, Taiwan, Algeria, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Belarus, and Iraq all have had such programs at one time or another. Although all of them are now regarded as currently no longer actively developing, or possessing, nuclear arms, had they continued their pursuits, they very well might be in possession of them now. But were there great hues and cries, including threats of armed intervention, from the Western powers? Well not in most cases, although I recall some noise about Algeria.

Divide these nations into geo-political groups and what do you see? Fuss has been raised against Algeria, Iraq, Iran, and North Korea, but not about Israel, South Korea, Taiwan, and South Africa. Why not? Well, because these nations are already pretty much under the influence of Western hegemony, whereas the nations in the Middle East are in the process of extracting themselves from it after decades of subjugation.

And what about the so called threat to world peace? When the United States developed nuclear weapons, the former Soviet Union had to develop them in response; otherwise, it would have been subject to nuclear blackmail. So the doctrine of Assured Mutual Destruction came into play. The peace was kept by each nation’s knowledge that it too would be destroyed if it attacked the other. So why isn’t the same thing true in the Middle East? Israel is the only nuclear power in the region. Every Arab state, not just Iran, is subject to the same kind of blackmail. So, why doesn’t it follows that if the doctrine of MAD assured the peace during all the years of the Cold War, Iran’s acquisition of nuclear capability would assure the peace in the Middle East, not be a threat to it? If MAD worked for us, why won’t it work for them?

©2006 John Kozy, Jr.