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Rattling the Nuclear Cage: India,
Pakistan, Israel, Iran and the US
Posted
By Robert Fisk On August 12, 2019
Photograph Source:
Leslie Groves, Manhattan Project director, with a map of Japan – Public Domain
We like our
anniversaries in blocks of 50 or 100 – at a push we’ll tolerate
a 25. The 100th anniversary of the Somme (2016), the 75th anniversary of the
Battle of Britain (2015). Next year, we’ll remember the end of the Second World
War, the first – and so far the only – nuclear war in history.
This week marks only the 74th anniversary
of the US atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
It doesn’t fit in to our journalistic scorecards and “timelines”. Over the past few
days, I’ve had to look hard to find a headline about the two Japanese cities.
But, especially in
the Middle East and what we like to call southeast Asia, we should be
remembering these gruesome anniversaries every month. Hiroshima was
atomic-bombed 74 years ago on Tuesday, Nagasaki 74 years ago on Friday. Given
the extent of the casualty figures, you’d think they’d be unforgettable. But we
don’t quite know (nor ever will) what they were.
The bombing of the two cities, we are
told, left between 129,000 and 226,000 dead. The first US statistics
suggested only 66,000 dead in Hiroshima, 39,000 in Nagasaki.
But in later years, the Hiroshima authorities estimated their dead alone at
202,118 – taking account of those who later died of radiation sickness, rather
than just the incinerated corpses and human shadows left in the immediate
aftermath of the explosion.
In the Middle East, where Aleppo and Mosul
and Raqqa count the dead from conventional bombs – American, Russian, Syrian –
in the tens of thousands, you might think the 1945 statistics would leave the
folk who live there pretty cold. But the book of crises unfolding in the region
– by the chapter, almost every month – is of critical importance to every soul
who lives between the Mediterranean and India.
For India itself is a nuclear power. So
is Pakistan. And so, of course, is Israel.
None of them have signed the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons Treaty (NPT). All are
threatening war, over Kashmir, or over Iran,
the only nation under threat which has not (yet) got nuclear weapons.
Ayatollah Khomeini
originally seized on America’s refusal to express its remorse at the Hiroshima
and Nagasaki bombings: “They’ve killed hundreds of thousands of people … many
years have passed and they can’t even bring themselves to apologise,” he said,
and the current Iranian leadership has continued Khomeini’s theme. The “only
nuclear criminal in the world”, according to the “supreme leader’s” successor,
Ali Khamanei, “is falsely claiming to fight the proliferation of nuclear
weapons”.
Iran, it should be added, did sign the NPT,
but was later found in non-compliance of the safeguard agreement. And Iran, of
course, is the non-nuclear power now being constantly threatened with war by
two nuclear powers – America and Israel – the first of which, under Donald
Trump, tore up his country’s commitment to the only international
agreement that ever existed to limit Iran’s nuclear programme.
As the US applies
new sanctions to Iran – miserably supported by the ever-compliant banks and big
businesses of Europe – Iran marginally breaks its side of the nuclear control
agreement. And thus becomes the recipient of even more ferocious threats from
Washington and Israel.
The word “nuclear”
is not just a harmless adjective. Look at the old photographs of the blisters
on the dying Japanese of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Iran itself suffered the
horrors of gas warfare when Iraq – supported at the time by the US – used
chemicals on Iranian soldiers and civilians. I saw their gas-gangrene wounds
with my own eyes in the late 1980s and they reminded me of the Hiroshima
snapshots. The Iranians really do know the effects of “weapons of mass
destruction”.
Yet they, we are supposed to believe, are
the nuclear “threat” in the Middle East. The Islamic republic is no saints’
paradise. Its corruption (within the government), its cruelty towards its own
dissenters, its hangman’s noose justice against its own people and its prim
disgust at even the most innocent demand for freedom scarcely qualify the
immensely wealthy Revolutionary Guards Corps – “heroes” of a new “tanker war” and masters of Houthi
drone technology – to give lectures on morality. And if we thought that the
Iranians held in reserve – let us say – 200 nuclear warheads, we should be
trembling in our boots. But they don’t. It’s Israel that conceals – but will
not say so – perhaps 200 nuclear warheads.
Not only do we not
complain about this. We regard any suggestion of their existence as akin to
interference in the internal affairs of a sovereign state. Israel has never
confirmed that their nuclear weapons exist: therefore we must not say that they
do. Enquire about their exact number and you are treated by Israel’s supporters
with deep suspicion. It’s a private matter, we are led to understand. Anyway
the Israelis can be trusted with such vile weapons. Can’t they?
Which brings us to
Saudi Arabia. Every nation in the Middle East which seeks nuclear power – and
the list includes Egypt, by the way – insists, like Iran, that the technology
is needed to build power plants.
Yet when Reuters – whose investigations of
human rights and secret criminal activities in the region are
first-class in both courage and detail – reports on the accurate
leaks that US energy secretary Rick Perry approved six secret authorisations to
give nuclear assistance to Saudi Arabia, few outside congress issued a murmur
of concern. Not even Israel – which always rages when America’s arms
manufacturers hoover up billions of dollars from Arab arms buyers, especially
from Saudi Arabia.
South Koreans –
those endangered people always under nuclear threat from the Rocket Man turned
good guy further north – are also bidding for the Saudi nuclear deal. So are
the Russians. So how come, now that the Saudi regime has talked of “cutting off
the head of the snake” in Iran, we don’t regard Riyadh as a potential nuclear
threat?
How soon will it
be before we wonder if the Saudis aren’t going a bit too far down the nuclear
path and we suggest a nuclear control agreement along the lines of Obama’s Iran
deal? After all, Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman – and let’s not bring up the
little matter of the Saudi evisceration and chopping up of poor Jamal Khashoggi
at this point – told CBS last year that his kingdom would develop nuclear
weapons if Iran did.
And as we digest
all this – although we really are not talking about it at all, are we? – India
decides to tear up its own legal arrangements in Jammu and Kashmir. As the only
Muslim-majority state in India, it is now to be split into two union
territories, diminishing Muslim power and allowing non-Muslim Indians from
other regions to move into this dangerous remnant of the old Raj. The Hindu-led
government used a presidential order to revoke the special constitutional
status of Jammu and Kashmir. Pakistan, which holds the other bit of Kashmir –
both claim the whole area as their own – is understandably infuriated by this
change in the status quo.
And both India and
Pakistan are nuclear powers. Indeed, there was nothing more pathetic, after
Pakistan’s first nuclear tests in 1998, than to travel around this other
“Islamic republic” and, amid the abject poverty of its villages, gaze at the
awful commemorative papier-mache recreations of the granite mountains
in which the explosions took place. There is, I suppose, no point in adding
that there are more armed extremist Islamists on Islamabad’s payroll in both
Pakistan and Afghanistan – coddled by the Inter-Services Intelligence agency –
than there are in the whole of Iran.
So this is a very
good week, as we typically ignore the commemoration of Hiroshima and Nagasaki,
for us to remember the nuclear threat in the Middle East. At least one nation
in every potential conflict in the region is a nuclear power or a
prospective one. India against Pakistan and vice versa, the US with Iran, the
Israelis with Iran – or just about any other Levantine power – and the Saudis
versus Iran, and Iran against almost anyone else except Syria.
Oh yes, and Donald Trump has just pulled
out of the Cold War Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty with Russia –
blaming Russia for violating the ban on missiles ranging up to 3,400 miles. All
Russia’s fault, says Mike Pompeo. The treaty is now “dead”, the Russian foreign
ministry confirms. So it’s time, perhaps, to rewatch those old documentaries of
the B-29 Superfortress Enola Gay and the bomb codenamed “Little Boy” and the
brilliant mushroom cloud and all those scorched corpses at Hiroshima.
Article printed from CounterPunch.org: https://www.counterpunch.org
URL to article: https://www.counterpunch.org/2019/08/12/rattling-the-nuclear-cage-india-pakistan-israel-iran-and-the-us/
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