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US Nuclear Hypocrisy

By Doug Lorimer

23 March, 2006
Green Left Weekly

While pushing for international sanctions against Iran for pursuing its legal right under the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty to research the production of nuclear fuel (low-enriched uranium), US President George Bush has agreed to provide India with access to US civilian nuclear technology, even though India has nuclear weapons and is not a signatory to the NPT.

The US-India deal, which was finalised by Bush and Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh on March 2, demonstrates Washington’s nuclear double standard. Under the deal, India will put only 14 of its 22 nuclear reactors under inspection by the UN’s International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to ensure that no nuclear material from them is used for military purposes. The other eight reactors will continue to provide highly enriched uranium and plutonium for the construction of nuclear weapons. India, regarded by the Pentagon as a “strategic partner”, is estimated to have about 100 nuclear bombs.

Since 2001, India and the US have carried out 35 joint military exercises. While New Delhi was willing, a massive public outcry in 2004 stopped India sending troops to Iraq to help out the US occupation forces. Last June, India and the US signed a 10-year military cooperation pact.

Under Article 1 of the NPT, nuclear weapons states that are signatories to the treaty are forbidden to transfer nuclear weapons technology to non-signatory countries. The US-India deal means that the US will be in breach of the NPT. But, of course, there will be no moves to have the IAEA governing board refer the US to the UN Security Council for being in non-compliance with the NPT.

After IAEA director-general Mohammed ElBaradei sent his latest report on Iran’s nuclear program to the UN Security Council on March 8, as directed by a US-backed resolution adopted by the February 4 meeting of the IAEA’s governing board, Washington and its allies have stepped up their campaign to have international sanctions imposed on Iran.

ElBaradei’s report notes that after a three-year intensive investigation by the IAEA — including two years of “go-anywhere, see anything” inspections of Iran’s nuclear facilities — the IAEA “has not seen any diversion of nuclear material to nuclear weapons or other nuclear explosive devices”.

This means that Iran has not violated its nuclear safeguards agreement with the IAEA and there are therefore no legal grounds upon which the Security Council can take punitive “action”, including sanctions, against Iran. But this has not deterred US officials.

The March 9 London Financial Times reported that Nicholas Burns, the US undersecretary of state for political affairs, told a congressional committee that the Bush administration wanted the Security Council to issue a statement — which would not have the force of law — to “condemn” Iran for refusing to abandon its legal right under the NPT to research and develop the production of nuclear fuel.

Next, he said, the US would move to have the Security Council adopt a binding resolution designed to “isolate” Iran. Noting that the US already had unilateral sanctions against Iran, Burns added: “But it’s going to be incumbent upon our allies around the world, and interested countries, to show that they are willing to act, should the words and resolutions of the United Nations not suffice.”

The Financial Times reported that “analysts in Washington” said Burns’s remarks “reflected a broad expectation in the Bush administration that it would not be able to persuade Russia and China on the Security Council to back meaningful sanctions, and that the US would look to forming an ad hoc alliance, as with the 'coalition of the willing’ for Iraq.

“France might be persuaded to join that coalition, along with east European allies and Japan and Australia, but Germany was in doubt, the analysts said.”

As with Washington’s drive to create a “coalition of the willing” to carry out “regime change” in Iraq, so as to open the way for US corporations to take over Iraq’s vast oil resources, Washington’s eventual aim is to militarily topple Iran’s present rulers and install a pro-US regime that will privatise Iran’s nationalised oil industry. Iran is the world’s fourth biggest oil exporter.

As with its allegations that Iraq had an arsenal of “weapons of mass destruction” and was seeking to build a nuclear bomb, Washington is using the claim that Iran has a secret nuclear weapons program to put together another “coalition of the willing”.

Iran “is a country that is determined, it seems, to develop a nuclear weapon in defiance of the international community that is determined that they should not get one”, US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice told a Senate committee on March 10.

As with the US drive to war against Iraq, the British Labour government of PM Tony Blair, while publicly claiming it is opposed to military action against Iran, has become Washington’s key ally in its anti-Iran WMD propaganda campaign.

The March 10 London Times reported that an unnamed British official warned the Security Council the previous day that it should move quickly against Iran as it was “reasonable” to think that Iran could acquire the technology to make nuclear weapons “within a year”. Such a claim is wildly at odds with the most recent assessment made by US intelligence agencies.

Last August, the Washington Post reported that a combined US intelligence assessment had concluded that Iran would be unlikely to produce a sufficient quantity of highly enriched uranium, the key ingredient for a nuclear weapon, before “early to mid-next decade”.

This is because the process of producing weapons-grade uranium — with a 90% concentration of the fissionable uranium-235 isotope — requires putting large amounts of uranium hexafluoride (UF6) gas through at thousands of centrifuges spinning at 50,000 to 70,000 revolutions per minute linked by a complicated plumbing network that must operate flawlessly for months at a time. To date, Iran only has a research facility with a 20-centrifuge enrichment device.

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