WhatFinger


Iran, Enriched Uranium, Nuclear Weapons

Iran - Anvil of Crisis



Every now and then the world kicks us all in our lethargic posteriors and we have to wake up. We are in such a time now. The revelations last week that Iran may be some sixty days away from having the enriched uranium capacity to have nuclear weapons capability, led Presidents Obama and Sarkozy and Prime Minister Brown to raise the alarm at the Pittsburgh G-20. Fen Hampson, director of Ottawa’s Norman Patterson School of International Affairs and a man not given to hyperbole, stated on Sunday that the current confrontation can be paralleled with the thirteen days of the Cuban Missile Crisis. Sadly, the world had plenty of warning, and did nothing.

Support Canada Free Press


In 2005 the Nobel Committee awarded its Peace Prize to the United Nations’ International Atomic Energy Agency and its director-general Mohammed El-Baradei. To paraphrase Churchill, rarely has so much been given to so few for so little. The IAEA was set up in 1956 to control the proliferation of nuclear weapons. The Nobel Foundation praised the IAEA and Dr. El-Baradei “for their efforts to prevent nuclear energy from being used for military purposes.” The Nobel citation went on to add that the selection committee had become preoccupied by "the struggle to diminish the significance of nuclear arms in international politics," a goal toward which it admits, "the world has achieved little." The sheer hypocrisy of this addition to the international community’s bodyguard of lies about the United Nations left one breathless. As a department of a world body two-thirds controlled by despotic regimes, the IAEA is perhaps singularly responsible for the spread of weapons of mass destruction and “dirty” bombs into the hands of rogue and failed states under the legitimization of the UN itself. On Iran, the IAEA did nothing when its inspectors were barred from weapons-development sites even in the face of Iranian admissions that it had weapons-grade plutonium. In violation of international agreements, Iran possesses hundreds of uranium-enriching centrifuges that can only be used in the manufacture of offensive armaments. The IAEA’s reaction had been an agreement to submit this issue to the Security Council at “some future date”. That date never came. And El-Baradei won his Nobel despite a close relationship with Iranian Imam Hasan Rowhani of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council that administers Tehran’s nuclear development program. The record of the international community is one of abject failure. Only American action prevented several other nuclear crises. On Iraq, the IAEA did nothing from the time Saddam first announced he would be building a nuclear power plant in 1974. Even after Israel took out the Osirak reactor, Iraq continued to operate a nuclear weapons program that continued until the American invasion. And in the midst of the WMD debate, El-Baradei admitted that up to the time of the invasion, and despite all the words of praise by the IAEA for Iraq’s “co-operation”, Iraq had failed to account for 6,500 bombs which could carry up to 1,000 tonnes of chemical agent, or for 8,500 litres of biological warfare agent and a large amount of growth media which could be used to produce about 5,000 litres of concentrated anthrax. But for some reason all this testimony never made the front page of The New York Times. On Libya, the IAEA did less than nothing when Khaddafi revealed in 2003, years after El-Baradei’s ascension as director-general, that he had been running a nuclear weapons program for some 20 years. The IAEA was caught completely with its pants down since it had not once even looked into that outlaw nation nor mentioned the butcher of Lockerbie in its reports. Libya ceased its program only several years ago in the face of American threats and sanctions. The Wisconsin Project on Nuclear Arms Control once declared that the IAEA "had an unsurpassed record of failure" on nuclear arms control. That is the most eloquent epitaph for that body. El-Baradei himself has personally played a critical role for years in undermining any censure of Iran saying that as long as Israel has nuclear capabilities, it would be “hypocritical to condemn others. He was actually quoted as saying that “the jury is still out on whether the Mullahs want the bomb.” This was at the same time that Mohammed Ghannadi, second in charge of the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran, told the Tehran Times in October of 2005 that the Isfahan uranium conversion facility “… is 70 percent operational right now.” In light of the newly revealed Iranian nuclear plant at Qum, some 90% operational, and Iran’s two days of testing short and long range missiles this week, one wonders what El-Baradei and the other apologists would have to say. For too long, too many nations have subscribed to the bankrupt notions of moral relativism and political equivalency and defended, to all our deaths, the right of every rogue country and culture’s “right to be wrong.” In light of all this, the title of Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s 1978 Harvard commencement address resonates hauntingly today. “What is the joy about?” he challenged. He admonished us that, “…the most striking feature in the West today is the decline in courage. The Western world has lost its civic courage, both as a whole and separately, in each country, in each government, in each political party and of course in the United Nations. Political and intellectual functionaries proudly exhibit self-serving rationales as to how realistic, reasonable and even morally justifiable it is to base policies on weakness and cowardice…” The truth of the matter is that he was frighteningly correct. The United Nations, the Nobel Foundation and all the other keystones of civilization are failing as testing agents of human decency. The crucibles in which enduring human values must be generationally re-forged are growing cold. The flames flicker out. The anvils on which we hammered out justice, are slowly being cast aside.


View Comments

Beryl Wajsman -- Bio and Archives

Beryl Wajsman is President of the Institute for Public Affairs of Montreal editor-in-chief of The Suburban newspapers, and publisher of The Métropolitain.

Older articles by Beryl Wajsman


Sponsored