Iran should have a nuke

Like fighting in the war room, you can never bomb your way to peace

“A searing indictment of the brutality and atrocities inflicted on the Palestinians of Gaza and the collaboration of powerful nations in their murder.”

BLOWING UP EVERYTHING IS BEAUTIFUL:
ISRAEL’S EXTERMINATION OF GAZA
IS OUT NOW

IF THE IRANIAN REGIME has any sense at all, it should build a nuclear weapon as fast as possible. Salvage whatever damage was done by American and Israeli strikes on its atomic infrastructure. Abandon the false hope that an empire with its own nukes might indulge in honest diplomacy. Spirit their remaining scientists to the deepest stronghold available. Hasten in secret to assemble the most terrible munition we—humanity—have ever invented, or could ever invent. The Bomb is the only guarantee of immunity against American aggression, or the aggression of its clients.

Never mind that US intelligence reports as recently as March this year declared “Iran is not building a nuclear weapon and Supreme Leader Khamenei has not authorized the nuclear weapons programme he suspended in 2003.” Never mind, as David Sanger of the New York Times coyly points out, that “if Iran is truly pursuing a nuclear weapon—which it officially denies—it is taking more time than any nuclear-armed nation in history.” Four decades of stalling is probably enough, even if it did consistently prove Benjamin Netanyahu a liar whenever he popped up, jowls wobbling, to warn (as he did in 1992) that Tehran’s Bomb was only “three to five years” away. If the Ayatollah or his successors want to survive another four decades, they’d better crack on.

Building any new Bomb is an atrocity, just as the invention of the first Bomb was an atrocity. But such is the strategic logic—and the blunt lessons of history—Iran’s regime is obliged to follow to its darkest conclusion. Saddam Hussein failed to heed those lessons. A savage authoritarian always has a keen sense of his own self-interest and the many ways his bacon can be saved. He tried to give Iraq the Bomb. But he trusted too often in American promises when they were his friends, and was too paranoid when they were his enemies. The dictator understood what deterrence really meant: in Steve Coll’s recent The Achilles Trap, Saddam is quoted aspiring to follow the same “logic that the USSR uses to deal with the US and the US uses to deal with the USSR.” But then he buried Iraq’s nuclear secrets in the garden of his top physicist Mahdi Obeidi. Then the Americans invaded. Then Saddam was hanged. Muammar Gaddafi can tell you the same sorry story.

Kim Jong Un can tell you a different story. He pursued the Bomb, tested several of them, and now North Korea can never be touched again—not by the United States or even the South Koreans. He is free now to send artillery shells and manpower (equally disposable) to Russia for its assaults on Ukraine. And why, in turn, can the Western powers never intervene directly with their own troops or airstrikes on Ukraine’s side? Because Russia has the Bomb. We are fast heading into territory where sovereignty will become a relic. Much like the moral and legal order of the world which only reigned for eighty years after the Nuremberg verdicts were handed down, which is daily being burned in Gaza. Only those nations holding the ultimate arsenal will be considered sovereign and inviolable. The rest will be open for the pickings of vultures.

There is a name for all this. That great sage Garry Wills called it “Bomb Power”, in his 2010 book of the same name. The ulcerous strategic logic of deterrence began not when the Soviets put together their first atomic weapon, but when the order was given by FDR in 1941 to commence the Manhattan Project. An iron wall of secrecy was thrown up within the deepest sanctums of the state, and Bomb Power turned the American presidency, as Wills puts it, into “a lone eminence above constitutional scrutiny…If the President has the sole authority to launch nation-destroying weapons, he has license to use every other power at his disposal that might safeguard that supreme necessity…To challenge his authority anywhere is to threaten the one great authority.”

Bomb Power issued from its guts the National Security State and its perpetual emergency powers. It transformed the Commander-in-Chief into an almost tyrannical figure unrestrained in his domestic authority—what the neoconservatives of the Bush II-era called “unitary executive theory.” This authority, subject to no parliament, was not a weapon built to fight the War on Terror. It wasn’t even the wet dream of those yearning for an American Caesar. It was a direct outgrowth of the Bomb—not even an illicit growth, but a natural consequence. It shouldn’t need to be said, but let’s say it anyway: democracy and Bomb Power are incompatible. They are sworn enemies, irreconcilable.

Bomb Power in turn gave America its empire. A different kind of empire, mind you. Rather than an empire of trade, tribute, and extraction like the Spaniards or Belgians, it would be (and is) an empire of bases: safe harbours, island airstrips, proving grounds. Britain is now all of these combined. Riding on the back of this expansion to the far corners of the earth was a rapacious commerce, and from those bases built to unfurl the black umbrella of nuclear annihilation, the United States established its order of trade and extraction. “It was a duty,” Garry Wills writes, “in our role as protector of world freedom against all the tentacles of Soviet expansion, to eliminate any regimes that denied us access to what we needed to ensure our activities.”

To counter American Bomb Power, which is the ability to inflict pain anywhere it sees fit, Iran must foster its own Bomb Power. This is the horrible dialectic, and there is only one solution for it: Total Disarmament. The banishing of all nuclear weapons technology into a deep cavern—deeper even than the caves where the Iranians keep their uranium centrifuges—and heavy lead poured over the entrance. It sounds utopian. But why should we be denied our utopian thoughts? There are a large number of very powerful people who think of nothing other than hellfire, radiation burns, and endless winter. They are granted the power, with the push of a button, to indulge those fantasies. It makes them perverts, not us who would rather end our miserable position as involuntary conscripts on the frontline, while those who pull the trigger—the last trigger—stay cosy in their bunkers.