Nuclear
Lies and Broken Promises
Conn Hallinan
November 22, 2019
Foreign Policy In Focus
When Turkish President Recep Tayyip
Erdogan told an economic meeting in the city of Sivas this September
that Turkey was considering building nuclear weapons, he was responding to a broken
promise.
When Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin
Netanyahu accused the government of Iran of lying about its nuclear
program, he was concealing one of the greatest subterfuges in the history of
nuclear weapons.
And the vast majority of Americans
haven’t a clue about either.
U.S.
Cover for Israel
Early in the morning of September 22,
1979, a U.S. satellite recorded a double flash near the Prince Edward
islands in the South Atlantic. The satellite, a Vela 5B, carries a device
called a “bhangmeter” whose purpose is to detect nuclear explosions. Sent into
orbit following the signing of the Partial Test Ban Treaty in 1963, its job was
to monitor any violations of the agreement. The treaty banned nuclear
explosions in the atmosphere, underwater, and in space.
Nuclear explosions have a unique
footprint. When the weapon detonates, it sends out an initial pulse of light.
But as the fireball expands, it cools down for a few milliseconds, then spikes
again.
“Nothing in nature produces such a
double-humped light flash,” says Victor Gilinsky. “The spacing of the hump
gives an indication of the amount of energy, or yield, released by the
explosion.” Gilinsky was a member of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission and
a former Rand Corporation physicist.
There was little question who had
conducted the test. The Prince Edward islands were owned by South Africa, and
U.S. intelligence knew the apartheid government was conducting research into
nuclear weapons. But while South Africa had yet to produce a nuclear weapon,
Israel had nukes — and the two countries had close military ties. In short, it
was almost certainly an Israeli weapon, though Israel denied it.
In the weeks that followed, clear
evidence for a nuclear test emerged from hydrophones near Ascension Island and
a jump in radioactive iodine-131 in Australian sheep. Only nuclear explosions
produce iodine-131.
But the test came at a bad time for
U.S. president Jimmy Carter, who was gearing up his re-election campaign, a
cornerstone of which was a peace agreement between Israel and Egypt. If the
Israelis were seen to have violated the Partial Test Ban, as well as the 1977
Glenn Amendment to the Arms Export Control Act, the U.S. would have been
required to cut off all arms sales to Israel and apply heavy sanctions. Carter
was nervous about what such a finding would have on the election, since a major
part of Carter’s platform was arms control and non-proliferation.
So Carter threw together a panel of
experts whose job was not to examine the incident but to cover it up. The Ruina
Panel cooked up a tortured explanation involving mini-meteors that the media
accepted and, as a result, so did the American public.
But nuclear physicists knew the panel
was blowing smoke and that the evidence was unarguable. The device was set off
on a barge between Prince Edward Island (South Africa’s, not Canada’s) and
Marion Island with a yield of between 3 and 4 kilotons. A secret CIA panel
concurred but put the yield at 1.5 to 2 kilotons. For comparison, the Hiroshima
bomb was 15 kilotons.
It was also clear why the Israelis
took the risk. Israel had a number of Hiroshima-style fission bombs but was
working on producing a thermonuclear weapon — a hydrogen bomb. Fission bombs
are easy to use, but fusion weapons are tricky and require a test. That the
Vela picked it up was pure chance, since the satellite had been retired. But
its bhangmeters were still working.
From Carter on, every U.S. president
has covered up the Israeli violation of the 1963 Partial Test Ban Treaty, as
well as the 1968 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). So when Netanyahu says
Iran is lying about its nuclear program, much of the rest of the world —
including the U.S. nuclear establishment — rolls their eyes.
Nuclear
Apartheid
As for Turkish president Erdogan, he
is perfectly correct that the nuclear powers have broken the promise they made
back in 1968 when the signed the NPT.
Article VI of that agreement calls for
an end to the nuclear arms race and the abolition of nuclear weapons. Indeed,
in many ways Article VI is the heart of the NPT. Non-nuclear armed countries
signed the agreement, only to find themselves locked into a system of “nuclear
apartheid” — where they agreed not to acquire such weapons of mass destruction,
while China, Russia, the United Kingdom, France, and the U.S. get to keep
theirs.
The “Big Five” not only kept their
weapons, they are all in the process of upgrading and expanding them. The U.S.
is meanwhile shedding other agreements, like the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty
and the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Force Agreement. Washington is also getting
ready to abandon the START treaty that limits the U.S. and Russia to
a set number of warheads and long-range strategic launchers.
What is amazing is that only four
other countries have abandoned the NPT: Israel, North Korea, Pakistan, and
India (only the latter three have been sanctioned by the U.S.). But that
situation cannot hold forever, especially since part of Article VI calls for
general disarmament, a pledge that has been honored in the breach. The U.S.
currently has nearly the largest defense budget in its history and
spends as much on its military as 144 other countries combined.
While the U.S. doesn’t seem able to
win wars with that huge military — Afghanistan and Iraq remain disasters — it
can inflict a stunning amount of damage that few countries are willing to
absorb. Even when Washington doesn’t resort to its military, its sanctions can
decimate a country’s economy and impoverish its citizens. North Korea and Iran
are cases in point.
If the U.S. were willing to cover up
the 1979 Israeli test while sanctioning other countries that acquire nuclear
weapons, why would anyone think that this is nothing more than hypocrisy on the
subject of proliferation? And if the NPT is simply a device to ensure that
other countries cannot defend themselves from other nations’ conventional
and/or nuclear forces, why would anyone sign on or stay in the treaty?
Turkish President Erdogan may be
bluffing. He loves bombast and uses it effectively to keep his foes off
balance. The threat may be a strategy for getting the U.S. to back off on its
support for Israel and Greece in their joint efforts to develop energy sources
in the eastern Mediterranean Sea.
But Turkey also has security concerns.
In his speech, Erdogan pointed out “There is Israel just beside us. Do
they have [nuclear weapons]? They do.” He went on to say that if Turkey did not
response to Israeli “bullying,” in the region, “we will face the prospect of
losing our strategic superiority in the region.”
Iran may be lying about the scope of
its nuclear ambitions — although there is no evidence that Tehran is making a
serious run at producing a nuclear weapon — but if they are, they in good
company with the Americans and the Israelis.
The
Path to Sanity
Sooner or later, someone is going to
set off one of those nukes. The likeliest candidates are India and Pakistan,
although use by the U.S. and China in the South China Sea is not out of the
question. Neither is a dustup between NATO and Russia in the Baltic.
It is easy to blame the current
resident of the White House for world tensions, except that the major nuclear
powers have been ignoring their commitments on nuclear weapons and disarmament
for over 50 years.
The path back to sanity is thorny but
not impossible:
One: The U.S. should rejoin the
Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, thus making Russia’s medium range missiles
unnecessary, and reduce tensions between the U.S. and China by withdrawing ABM
systems from Japan and South Korea.
Two: The U.S. should reinstate the
Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Agreement and find a way to bring China,
India, and Pakistan into it. That will require a general reduction of U.S.
military forces in Asia coupled with an agreement with China to back off on its
claims over most of the South China Sea. Tensions between India and Pakistan
would be greatly reduced by simply fulfilling the UN pledge to hold a
referendum in Kashmir. The latter would almost certainly vote for
independence.
Three: The U.S. must continue its
adherence to the START agreement, while the Big Five countries need to halt the
modernization of their existing arsenals — and begin, at long last, to
implement Article VI of the NPT in regards to both nuclear and conventional
forces.
Pie in the sky? Well, it beats a
mushroom cloud.
Foreign Policy In Focus columnist Conn
Hallinan can be read
at dispatchesfromtheedgeblog.wordpress.com and middleempireseries.wordpress.com.
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