Rattling the Nuclear Cage: India, Pakistan, Israel, Iran and the US
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 the B-29 Superfortress Enola Gay and the bomb
codenamed “Little Boy” and the brilliant mushroom cloud and all those
scorched corpses at Hiroshima.
No comments:
Post a Comment