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2 Iran and the crisis of
disarmament By Kaveh L
Afrasiabi
The brewing Iran nuclear crisis
has simultaneously served notice to the global
community on a related crisis that is often
ignored or underestimated by the pundits in the US
media: the crisis of disarmament.
Ex-secretary of state Henry Kissinger,
former US senator Sam Nunn and the former chief of
the International Atomic Energy Agency, Hans Blix,
are among the rising chorus of voices expressing
concerns about the deleterious consequences of lack
of
disarmament with regard to "proliferation"
threats.
As a cornerstone of the
non-proliferation regime, disarmament is a
mandatory obligation of the five nuclear-weapons
states who wield veto power at the United Nations
Security Council. Yet other than paper
commitments, there is no disarmament in existence
today and no genuine reliance on its principles
and obligations. Instead, compromised by ad hoc
positions and flimsy rationalizations, disarmament
is in a state of total disarray.
A glance
at the United States' "new nuclear posture"
reflected in various national-security reports by
the administration of President George W Bush
makes clear why. Briefly, the US has been
stressing the essential role of nuclear weapons as
an effective tool for achieving security ends and
foreign-policy objectives, developing new
nuclear-weapon systems and constructing new
facilities for producing such weapons.
It
is also resuming efforts to develop and deploy
tactical nuclear weapons, despite the commitment
to reverse this process and effectively reduce
them; targeting non-nuclear-weapon state parties
to the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and planning
to attack those states.
Moreover, the US
has unilaterally withdrawn from the Anti-Ballistic
Missile Treaty, recognized by the international
community as the cornerstone of global strategic
stability, thus creating a strategic and security
gap within the overall global nuclear posture with
grave and long-term consequences for the whole
world.
Unfortunately, the United States'
nuclear policies and doctrines are emulated by
France and the United Kingdom, whose leaderships
have opted for nuclear-weapons "modernization"
instead of disarmament. Same with Russia, which,
like other nuclear haves of the Security Council,
regards its nuclear arsenal as a key barometer of
its global prestige and clout.
China is
the only permanent member of the UN Security
Council that does not subscribe to the dangerous
doctrine of nuclear first use and, on a doctrinal
level, has a purely defensive purpose for its
nuclear arsenal.
No wonder, then, that a
feeble attempts at the UN to put disarmament on
the agenda of reform failed in 2005-06 - a
"disgrace", as aptly put by the past secretary
general, Kofi Annan, who lamented the UN's failure
to implement the nuclear recommendations of a
high-level group on UN reform.
Yet in
light of the Security Council's recent initiatives
vis-a-vis North Korea and Iran, the stage is now
potentially set for a new, invigorated approach on
disarmament that would compel the big powers to
heed their NPT obligations and revise their
dangerous nuclear doctrines and policies. The fact
is that the two poles of disarmament and
non-proliferation have espoused opposing forces,
and each force by its own activity encourages the
other.
Blix had this precisely in mind
when, in the aftermath of British Prime Minister
Tony Blair's recent fateful decision to upgrade
his country's nuclear-armed submarines, he warned
that this could prompt would-be proliferators such
as Iran to set aside their misgivings and go
nuclear.
Not to be deterred by such
warnings, both Blair and French President Jacques
Chirac have bluntly linked their
nuclear-proliferation policies to threats from
"rogue states" and "international terrorism",
making thinly veiled allusions to Iran.
But this raises curious questions: Given
the stateless nature of international terrorism,
how is Western nuclear deterrence supposed to
operate against terrorists, and what possible
scenario for such deterrence can be fathomed?
Moreover, doesn't the deliberate policy of
demonizing certain countries as "rogue" and
potential targets of nuclear retaliation in fact
spur those
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