Iran: The disarmament option
Amid all the tub-thumping and posturing and occasional sweet-talking over Iran’s near-certain but not yet proved definitively project to build nuclear weapons, there is one response that, most oddly, hasn’t yet been discussed.
This would be for everyone to give up, entirely and completely, their own nuclear weapons in a universal pact that encompassed Iran.
“Impractical,” “idiotic,” “naively idealistic,” would be the overwhelming response to such a proposition.
Except that’s what Ronald Reagan attempted at his summit meeting with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev in Iceland in 1987.
And the Non-proliferation Treaty (NPT), which provides the legal justification for the sanctions imposed on Iran to try to force it to give up its nuclear program, requires all its many signatory states (from the U.S. on down) to work toward comprehensive nuclear disarmament.
And Barack Obama, in an earlier and more hopeful stage of his presidency, used the phrase “a world without nuclear weapons” to justify a treaty he had just negotiated for the United States and Russia to drastically reduce their stockpiles of nuclear warheads.
Universal nuclear disarmament does have one huge and obvious flaw. It invites rogue states and/or stateless terrorists to cheat. In a world without nuclear weapons, even a credible claim by some group to possess a single weapon would make it a master of our universe.
But the present system of sanctions and UN resolutions hasn’t stopped successful cheating by India, Pakistan, North Korea and Israel, or just about all states that have set out to become nuclear powers.
All the experts take it for granted that if Iran does get the bomb, so will — not long after — Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Turkey.
The widespread presumption that these states could likewise cheat their way to nuclear capability amounts to an admission that the very process of trying to halt illegal nuclear programs is impossible.
Indeed, this is the case with Iran itself. Even a successful attack on its nuclear facilities, initially by Israel, and perhaps later by the U.S., would only delay its program for a few years.
The truth is that while bombers and missiles can destroy buildings and machinery, they cannot destroy knowledge. And Iran already possesses the know-how for making bombs. Assassinating the occasional scientist will change nothing.
The cheating problem in a nuclear naked world remains deeply troubling. It needs to be remembered, though, that nuclear weapons have only one useful purpose — to prevent an enemy from using its own weapons, a point made long ago by then U.S. defence secretary Robert Mcnamara.
Otherwise, nuclear weapons are unusable. Even an extremist regime like Iran’s could never actually use any weapons it developed because even an Israel reduced to ashes by a surprise attack (itself highly improbable) could still reduce Iran to the same state because it has weapons stored on invulnerable submarines.
Universal abolition of nuclear weapons is indeed a utopian ideal. As has been pointed out, it could not work in today’s international system of “a world divided into nations maintaining their full sovereignty.”
The authors of that comment were not utopians, though. They were the U.S. joint chiefs of staff. This was their judgment back in 1946, at the very dawn of the nuclear era.
Instead, we’ve gone the route of trying, by pressure and bribery, to limit nuclear weapons to respectable nations — or to weak ones (like Pakistan and North Korea). The consequence is an Iran within touching distance of gaining nuclear capability, and after it, almost anybody.
The alternative to that route would be, in essence, some form of global nuclear governance. Excruciatingly hard to accomplish, of course. But isn’t it time long overdue to have a serious discussion of that option?
And wasn’t that kind of initiative exactly the sort of thing that Canada, long ago it now seems, used to do and indeed was quite good at? Why not regain our voice? Richard Gwyn’s column appears every other Tuesday. gwynr@sympatico.ca