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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