For more than two decades, arms control experts have argued that the most likely scenario for the hostile use of nuclear weapons was not between the former Cold War superpower rivals, an act of terrorism by an underground terrorist group, or the periodically threatened unilateral U.S. attack against a “rogue state,” but between India and Pakistan. These two South Asian rivals have fought each other in three major wars—in 1947, 1965, and 1971—and have engaged in frequent border clashes in recent years in the disputed Kashmir region, coming close to another all-out war as recently as 2002.

It is ironic, then, that President George W. Bush—who reiterated in the 2004 presidential campaign that his primary concern was the proliferation of nuclear materials—is actively pursuing policies which will likely increase the risk of a catastrophic nuclear confrontation on the Indian subcontinent.

The United States and India

On July 18, during the visit of Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, President Bush announced his intention to provide India access to sensitive nuclear technology and sophisticated nuclear-capable weapons systems. The agreement does not require India to eliminate its nuclear weapons program or its ballistic missile systems, as called upon by a 1998 UN Security Council resolution, or even to cease production of weapons-grade plutonium which enables India to further expand its arsenal of more than three dozen nuclear warheads

Nicholas Burns, the U.S. Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs, called the agreement on the transfer of the dangerous technology “the high-water mark of U.S.-India relations” since the country’s independence from Great Britain in 1947. It is demonstrative of the Bush administration’s view of foreign relations that the transfer of such dangerous technology is seen as of greater positive significance than the critical agricultural assistance and food aid the United States provided India in the 1960s, which not only prevented an incipient famine of mass proportions but significantly boosted India’s long-term agricultural production, thereby saving untold millions of lives.

Former U.S. Senator and 1972 Democratic presidential nominee George McGovern, who helped oversee such foreign aid programs to India when he served as director of the Food for Peace program in the Kennedy administration, called Burns’ statement “a dangerous misunderstanding of how America can best utilize foreign aid in support of economic development and international security.”

In order for the proposed U.S.-Indian agreement to be implemented, the Bush administration will need Congress to amend the U.S. Non-Proliferation Act of 2000, which bans the transfers of sensitive nuclear technology to any country which refuses to accept international monitoring of its nuclear facilities. It will also mean contravening the rules of the 40-nation Nuclear Suppliers Group, which controls the export of nuclear technology and to which the United States is a signatory. It would also be a violation of the 1968 Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty, which has been signed and ratified by the United States and calls upon existing nuclear powers to not transfer nuclear know-how to countries which have not signed the treaty.

This proposed agreement would actually endanger India’s security by encouraging a dangerous and destabilizing nuclear weapons program that award-winning Indian novelist Arundhati Roy has referred to as “the final act of betrayal by a ruling class that has failed its people.”

The best-case scenario, in which U.S. nuclear assistance was somehow limited solely to peaceful uses, would still be bad for India. Even advanced industrialized countries have found nuclear power to be an extremely dangerous and expensive means to generate electricity. As evidenced by the 1984 accident at a Union Carbide chemical facility in the Indian city of Bhopal, which killed more than 20,000 people, there are serious questions regarding the ability of Indian authorities to adequately safeguard the public from industrial accidents.

India’s interests in procuring additional nuclear technology is ironic, moreover, given that the man who led the country’s freedom struggle from British colonialism, Mohandas Gandhi, was not only a pacifist and an opponent of the partition of his country between India and Pakistan, but also opposed centralized control of basic necessities like energy—whether it be by the state or private corporations. Were he alive today, Gandhi would not only be leading the struggle against the proposed U.S.-Indian nuclear agreement, he would be an outspoken advocate of small-scale, locally-controlled renewable energy and other appropriate technologies, such as solar power.

India ranks 118 th out of 164 countries on the United Nations Development Program’s Human Development Index, ranking below even the impoverished nations of Central America. More than 400 million Indians are illiterate, more than 600 million lack even basic sanitation and more than 200 million have no safe drinking water. Surely, if promoting “sustainable development” in India is really the goal, as President Bush claims, there are certainly better ways to do that than by building nuclear power plants.

The United States and Pakistan

The Bush administration’s announcement in March that it intends to sell sophisticated F-16 fighter jets to Pakistan similarly raises serious questions regarding its stated commitment to promote democracy, support non-proliferation, and fight terrorism and Islamic extremism.

Unlike India, which—despite its enormous social and economic inequality and ethnic diversity—has nurtured a longstanding democratic political system, Pakistan has primarily been ruled by a series of military dictatorships.

General Pervaz Musharraf, who overthrew Pakistan’s democratically-elected government in 1999, continues to suppress the established secular political parties while allowing for the development of Islamic political groups that show little regard for individual freedom. Despite this, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice had little but kind words for the Musharraf dictatorship when she visited Pakistan in March during her “democracy promotion” world tour. While acknowledging that he has yet to restore constitutional governance, she praised his willingness to consider holding elections some time in 2007.

Under Musharraf’s rule, the Pakistani government’s funding for education has declined to become one of the lowest education budgets relative to GDP than any country on the globe, resulting in the collapse of what was once one of the developing world’s better public school systems. This lack of adequate public education has led to the rise of Saudi-funded Islamic schools, known as madrasahs, many of which have served as recruiting grounds for terrorists. The Congressional Research Service, in a report this past December, noted how—despite promises to the contrary—Musharraf has not cracked down on the more extremist madrasahs. Yet the Bush administration is only offering $67 million in foreign aid for Pakistani education—compared to $3 billion worth of weaponry.

An administration official has claimed that the U.S. fighter-bombers “are vital to Pakistan’s security as President Musharraf prosecutes the war on terror.” However, these jets were originally ordered fifteen years ago, long before the U.S.-led “war on terror” began. They were suspended by the administration of the current president’s father out of concerns about Pakistan’s nuclear program and the Pakistani military’s ties with Islamic terrorist groups. These concerns seem to bother the son not at all. Nor are such sophisticated aircraft particularly effective in attacking a decentralized network of underground terrorist cells located in remote tribal areas of that country, where small-unit counter-insurgency operations would be far more effective.

The other factor the administration and its supporters fail to mention is that, for more than a decade, Pakistan actively supported the Taliban regime in Afghanistan, which provided sanctuary for the al-Qaida network. Osama bin Laden and his senior aides are widely believed to have been living in Pakistan for the past three and a half years.

One of the most disturbing aspects of U.S. support for the Pakistani regime is that Pakistan has been sharing its nuclear materials and know-how with North Korea and other so-called “rogue states.” The Bush administration has chosen to essentially ignore what has been called “the most extravagantly irresponsible nuclear arms bazaar the world has ever seen” and to instead blame others.

For example, even though it was actually Pakistanis who passed on nuclear materials to Libya, the Bush administration instead told U.S. allies that North Korea was responsible, thereby sabotaging negotiations which many had hoped could end North Korea’s nuclear program and resolve that festering crisis. Though it was Pakistan which provided Iran with nuclear centrifuges, the Bush administration is now citing Iran’s possession of such materials as justification for a possible U.S. military attack against that country.

The Bush administration, despite evidence to the contrary, claims that the Pakistani government was not responsible for exporting such dangerous materials, but that these serious breaches of security were solely the responsibility of a single rogue nuclear scientist name Abdul Qadeer Khan. Unfortunately, the Pakistani military regime has not allowed U.S. intelligence access to Khan, the former head of Pakistan’s nuclear program, who lives under government protection in Islamabad.

Encouraging a Regional Arms Race

The Bush administration has tried to assuage India’s concerns over the transfer of such military aircraft to Pakistan by promising that India too would be able to receive the nuclear-capable warplanes. It is not unreasonable to expect that, out of a similar interest in “balance,” the Bush administration may support the transfer of nuclear technology to Pakistan as well. The result of such policies will almost certainly be a renewed and increasingly dangerous nuclear arms race.

Pakistan and India are among only a handful of states which have refused to sign the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty (NPT). Though U.S. law had formerly prohibited U.S. arms transfers to these governments, President Bush—with bipartisan Congressional support—successfully had such restrictions overturned in 2001.

In 1998, the UN Security Council—with U.S. support—passed resolution 1172, which called on Pakistan and India to eliminate their nuclear weapons and their ballistic missiles. Among policymakers, however, this resolution seems to have been forgotten.

The Bush administration tried to justify its 2003 decision to invade Iraq on the grounds that the Iraqi government was flouting UN Security Council resolutions requiring the elimination of weapons of mass destruction, WMD programs, and offensive delivery systems. Although the Iraqi government had in fact already done so, and had even allowed UN inspectors unfettered access to verify that it had disarmed as required, the United States proceeded with an invasion to deal with this supposed “threat.”

By contrast, Pakistan and India—unlike Iraq in 2003—not only have active nuclear weapons programs; they have built, tested, and amassed a stockpile of nuclear weapons and nuclear-capable missiles. Pakistan and India, unlike Iraq in 2003, are in open defiance of the UN Security Council’s insistence that they disarm these weapons and delivery systems.

The Bush administration and Congressional leaders, however, appear to believe that nuclear proliferation and violations of UN Security Council resolutions only matter for governments that the U.S. government does not like.

For more than a decade, the U.S. government has forcefully challenged Russia not to provide nuclear technology to Iran, even though the Russian-Iranian nuclear agreements have had more stringent safeguards than the proposed U.S.-Indian nuclear agreement. Indeed, unlike India, there is no solid evidence that Iran even has a nuclear weapons program, much less nuclear weapons themselves.

Rather than get serious about discouraging proliferation, the Bush administration—with the support of a bipartisan majority in Congress—appears instead to insist upon a kind of nuclear apartheid, where the United States alone gets to decide who can have these dangerous weapons and who cannot.

Any arms control regime based upon such double standards, unilaterally imposed from the outside, is bound to lead to increased efforts by the have-nots to join the ranks of the already-haves. The best hope for genuine peace and security in the region would be a nuclear weapons-free zone for all of South and Southwest Asia, similar to those which already exist in Southeast Asia, Latin America, Africa, and the South Pacific. Unfortunately, a proposed UN Security Council resolution in December 2003 calling for the establishment of such an additional nuclear-free zone was withdrawn after a threatened U.S. veto.

Maintaining such double standards regarding nuclear proliferation presents incalculable dangers to regional and global peace and security. They are also simply not worthy of a country which asserts the right to global leadership.

http://www.fpif.org/articles/bush_administration_stokes_dangerous_arms_race_on_indian_subcontinent

Most of the international community and arms control advocates here in the United States have correctly blamed the Bush administration for the failure of the recently completed review conference of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. In the course of the four-week meeting of representatives of the 188 countries which have signed and ratified the treaty, the United States refused to uphold its previous arms control pledges, blocked consideration of the establishment of a nuclear-free zone in the Middle East, refused to rule out U.S. nuclear attacks against non-nuclear states, and demanded that Iran and North Korea—but not U.S. allies like Israel, Pakistan, and India—be singled out for UN sanctions for their nuclear programs. Thomas Graham, who served as a U.S. envoy to disarmament talks in the Clinton administration noted that the Bush administration’s demands resulted in what appears to be “the most acute failure in the treaty’s history.”1

However, though the Bush administration may have brought U.S. non-proliferation policy to new lows, the seeds of this defeat were planted way back.

Non-proliferation: Some History

The 1954 Atomic Energy Act allowed the United States to engage in the widespread dissemination of nuclear reactors and fuel to other countries, with certain safeguards to supposedly prevent them from being used to make nuclear weapons. Largely a government subsidy for the nuclear power industry, the so-called Atoms for Peace program grossly overestimated the economic benefits of nuclear power and underestimated its environmental dangers as well as the risks of weapons proliferation. In subsequent decades, recipients of American nuclear technology included such nascent nuclear weapons states as Israel, Iran, India, and South Africa. By 1968, these risks were apparent enough that the international community attempted to create a nonproliferation regime through the Non-Proliferation Treaty.

While publicly endorsing the treaty, President Richard Nixon in fact undermined it with National Security Decision Memorandum No. 6, which stated that “there should be no efforts by the United States to pressure other nations … to follow suit. … The government, in its public posture, should reflect a tone of optimism that other countries will sign or ratify, while clearly disassociating itself [in private] from any plan to bring pressure on these countries to sign or ratify.”2

Though the Carter administration showed some initial signs of concern over the spread of nuclear weapons beyond the two Cold War arsenals, it took little concrete action. Under Carter, the U.S. increased its transfer of civilian nuclear technology to Third World countries, despite increased evidence of the lack of adequate safeguards. Carter’s National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski was not an enthusiastic supporter of non-proliferation efforts.3 The administration dramatically increased the development of new American nuclear weapons systems and refused to formally submit the SALT II treaty to the Senate for ratification, allowing Third World countries to correctly observe that the United States was not living up to its own commitment to the NPT as an existing nuclear power to engage in serious efforts to negotiate nuclear disarmament.

The Reagan administration discontinued Carter’s half-hearted non-proliferation efforts, lifting the ban on the export of plutonium, and adding dangerously destabilizing counterforce weapons systems.

The end of the Cold War allowed the senior Bush administration and the Clinton administration to reduce some of the United States’ own nuclear weapons arsenal. At the same time these post-Cold War administrations became focused on the prospects of radical Third World regimes developing their own nuclear weapons and contemplated possible unilateral military actions in response.

U.S. Policy toward Emerging Nuclear Powers

India successfully tested a nuclear device in 1974 and subsequently developed short- and long-range nuclear-capable missile systems. The United States delivered a mild rebuke. But, with the exception of a belated embargo against the Indian Space Research Organization, there was never much pressure until the Clinton administration supported tougher sanctions following a series of nuclear tests in 1998. Those sanctions were repealed by President George W. Bush with bipartisan Congressional support in 2001 when India—along with its historic rival Pakistan—was deemed to be an ally in the “War on Terrorism.” Throughout the 1980s, the Reagan and the senior Bush administrations formally denied that Pakistan was engaging in nuclear weapons development despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary. In addition, the United States was supplying Pakistan with F-16 aircraft even as nuclear analysts concluded that Pakistan would likely use these fighter planes as its primary delivery system for its nuclear arsenal.4 Publicly acknowledging what virtually every authority on nuclear proliferation knew about Pakistan’s nuclear capability would require the United States to cut off aid to Pakistan, as required by U.S. laws designed to enforce the non-proliferation regime. However, Pakistan was the vehicle through which the United States supplied radical Islamic opponents of the Soviet-backed regime in Afghanistan, and a cut-off of aid to the Zia al-Huq dictatorship could have jeopardized Reagan’s Afghan policy. The annual certification of Pakistan’s supposed non-nuclear status was halted only in 1990, when the Soviet-backed Afghan regime was finally collapsing. However, the senior Bush administration insisted that the cut-off of aid did not include military sales, so the transfer of spare parts for the nuclear-capable F-16s aircraft to Pakistan continued. President Clinton finally imposed sanctions when Pakistan engaged in a series of nuclear weapons tests in 1998. But that too was repealed by Congress and the Bush administration three years later.

With respect to apartheid South Africa, the Carter administration publicly accepted the regime’s denial that it was planning a nuclear test in the Kalahari Desert when both Soviet and American satellite reconnaissance revealed clear evidence that such a plan was in process in August 1977. The two superpowers did apply strong pressure against South Africa to get the test canceled. When the South Africans did explode a nuclear device over the Indian Ocean in September 1979, the Carter administration scrambled to hide the satellite evidence from the American public, particularly when Israeli involvement became apparent. U.S. law and Carter’s public commitment to non-proliferation would have forced him to impose sanctions against these two pro-Western states, had the evidence become public. Seymour Hersh has quoted a top Carter administration official as saying “There was a very immediate strategic imperative to make this thing go away. Our capturing it fortuitously was an embarrassment, a big political problem, and there were a lot of people who wanted to obscure the event.”5 As a result, when the initial cover-up failed, the Carter administration both denied that such a test had taken place and then formed a commission to complete the whitewash a few months later.

The most obvious case of American protection of nuclear weapons development by its allies is Israel. Israel has long stated that it would not be the first to introduce nuclear weapons into the Middle East, which is technically true, since U.S. planes and warships began bringing nuclear weapons into the region back in the 1950s. Israel is generally believed to have become a nuclear power by 1969. The Israeli nuclear program was privately endorsed by the newly-elected President Nixon and his chief foreign policy adviser, Kissinger. They immediately ended the regular, if inconsequential, U.S. inspections of Israeli’s Dimona nuclear center. (Indeed, President Lyndon Johnson demonstrated his lack of concern over the prospects of Israel becoming a nuclear power by rejecting calls that one of the early major weapons sales to Israel be conditioned on Israel signing the NPT.) The Nixon administration went to great lengths to keep nuclear issues out of any talks on the Middle East. Information on Israeli nuclear capabilities was routinely suppressed; the United States even supplied Israel with krytrons and supercomputers which were bound for the Israeli nuclear program.6

The Carter administration, which took the nuclear proliferation issue somewhat more seriously than the administrations that preceded and followed it, did not publicly raise the issue of Israel’s development of nuclear weaponry, either. Even when satellite footage of the aborted nuclear test in South Africa’s Kalahari desert gave evidence of the large-scale presence of Israeli personnel at the test site, the Carter administration kept it quiet,7 just as they did with the successful test in the Indian Ocean two years later. According to Joseph Nye, Deputy Under Secretary of State, the Carter administration considered the Israeli bomb a low priority.8

The Reagan administration made an effort to keep information on Israel’s nuclear capability from the State Department and other government agencies which might have concerns over nuclear proliferation issues.9 Meanwhile, Congress had made it clear to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and other responsible parties that they did not want to have anything revealed in an open hearing related to Israel’s nuclear capability. While most restrictions against foreign aid to new nuclear states had been written so as to exempt Israel, a public acknowledgment might still have jeopardized U.S. economic and military assistance. Outside of Washington, top Israeli nuclear scientists had open access to American institutions and many top American nuclear scientists had extended visits with their counterparts in Israel, in what has been called “informational promiscuity” in the seepage of nuclear intelligence.10 In addition, given the enormous costs of any nuclear program of the magnitude of Israel’s, it would have been very difficult to develop such a large and advanced arsenal (now estimated at up to 200 weapons11 with sophisticated medium-range missiles) without the tens of billions of dollars of direct and unrestricted American financial support to the Israeli government prior to the current administration; in effect, the United States has subsidized nuclear proliferation in the Middle East.

Support for Unilateral Military Action

The Bush administration has taken the unprecedented step of making the option of preventive war a centerpiece of its national security strategy. Yet the belief that it is legitimate for the United States or an ally to maintain its regional nuclear monopoly through force support pre-dates the current Bush administration. The Israeli attack on Iraq’s Osirak reactor in 1981 was made possible only by the U.S. decision to supply Israel with high-resolution photographs of Iraq from the KH-11 satellite, data to which no other nation was allowed access, as well as through U.S.-supplied F-16 fighter planes. Though the United States publicly condemned the bombing, in private, Seymour Hersh reports that in fact “Reagan was delighted … [and] very satisfied” by the bombing. Publicly, the United States suspended the delivery of four additional F-16s but quietly lifted the suspension two months later.12 By 1992, this support had become public, when a Democratic-majority Congress passed a resolution endorsing the Israeli attack. The irony is that the Osirak reactor was not the focal point of Iraq’s nuclear program and it likely encouraged the Iraqis to take greater efforts to evade detection of their primary nuclear development facilities.13

The 1981 attack by Israel against the Iraqi nuclear facility, however, paled in comparison with the much wider bombing attacks ten years later by the United States, which—like the Israeli bombing—violated both the spirit and the letter of the NPT. This action further undermined law-based approaches to nuclear non-proliferation and lent legitimacy to the notion that regional nuclear powers can launch pre-emptive attacks against potential rivals at will. Tragically, such lawlessness creates the very kind of insecurity which has motivated additional countries to develop their nuclear programs in the first place, and thus is more likely to advance proliferation than retard it.

Opposition to Nuclear-Free Zones

Both Republican and Democratic administrations have been skeptical of efforts to establish nuclear-free zones, since it would require the United States to remove its nuclear weapons from certain strategically important parts of the globe and require allies, such as Israel and Pakistan, to dismantle their nuclear arsenals. Indeed, even where nuclear-free zones have gone into effect, such as in Latin America through the Tlatelolco Treaty, the United States has developed contingency plans to violate the treaties’ provisions.14 The United States routinely has brought nuclear-armed ships and planes to Japan in violation of that country’s anti-nuclear constitution. When New Zealand announced its decision to become nuclear-free and bar the U.S. Navy from bringing nuclear weapons into its ports, the Reagan administration put enormous pressure on its government. The Clinton administration put even greater economic pressure on the Pacific Island nation of Palau to induce the repeal of its nuclear-free constitution. For years, the United States has strongly opposed proposals for nuclear-free zones in Nordic Europe or the Balkans.

In short, even prior to the current administration, U.S. nuclear policy in recent decades has been based on the following principles:

The United States and allied powers must maintain a nuclear monopoly in developing regions.
Any challenge to that monopoly will be vigorously opposed, possibly through military force.
The existing non-proliferation regime will be imposed only selectively to maintain US. dominance.
In other words, U.S. policy has long been, in effect, that it is fine for the United States and its allies to have nuclear weapons in a given region but wrong for any other countries to have nuclear weapons. Unfortunately, this simply will not work. Such double standards create widespread sympathy in the developing world for demagogues who can argue that their nuclear programs are simply a defensive reaction to the nuclear threat from the United States, Israel, or other pro-Western countries.

Both Iran and North Korea have endorsed calls for nuclear-free zones in their regions, as have U.S. allies like Japan, Jordan, South Korea, and Egypt. Even if such pronouncements proved less than sincere, U.S. support for the concept would provide the international community with the legitimacy it now lacks to help control the threat of nuclear proliferation. U.S. opposition to a nuclear free-zone in the Middle East is what prompted Iraq’s nuclear program in the first place. Located near Israel and Pakistan, the Iraqis saw their nuclear program as largely defensive, a program they had offered to end even prior to 1991 if they were no longer faced with a potential nuclear threat from hostile neighbors.

At the end of the Korean War, the United States moved nuclear weapons into South Korea in direct violation of the armistice agreement. These were not removed until 1991 when the high-yield precision-targeted conventional weapons used during the Gulf War were actually seen as more effective than the tactical nuclear weapons then stationed in Korea. Nuclear-capable aircraft and ships continue to move in and out of Korea. Clinton’s appointee to the U.S. Strategic Command, General Lee Cutler, announced in February 1993 that strategic nuclear weapons which had been targeted for the Soviet Union were being re-targeted to North Korea. By March, American forces in Korea were engaging in nuclear war games, with B1-B and B-52 bombers from Guam and naval vessels with cruise missiles taking part.15

One basic tenet of the nonproliferation regime is that nuclear nations not threaten nuclear attacks on non-nuclear nations. With the Soviet Union no longer the feared enemy in northeast Asia, and with China still on good—if somewhat cool—relations with the United States, the North Koreans could only assume that this was exactly what was going on. It was only at this point that North Korea first announced it was pulling out of the NPT and the crisis—initially defused in 1994 by former President Carter’s intervention, began in earnest. Following U.S. preparations for the invasion of Iraq and bellicose rhetoric toward North Korea, the regime again renounced its participation in the NPT in January 2003. The former nuclear aspirations of Iraq and the current ones of North Korea can both be interpreted as a defensive response to the U.S. refusal to denuclearize the region.

Spreading Nuclear Technology

Iraq’s nuclear program in the 1980s was made possible through imports from the West of so-called “dual-use” technology, capable of producing nuclear weapons or delivery systems while also having civilian applications. Clinton’s Secretary of Defense, William Perry, argued before Congress that it was a “hopeless task” to control such dual use technology, stating that “it only interferes with a company’s ability to succeed internationally.” This view directly contradicted the United Nations inspection regime in Iraq which called for “strict maintenance of export controls by the industrialized nations” to prevent the Iraqi regime from once again developing its nuclear program. Indeed, the Clinton administration was even more lax than its Republican predecessors on controlling the exports of nuclear-related technology.16

It is noteworthy that the Clinton administration’s Defense Department introduced the term “counter-proliferation” rather than “non-proliferation,” suggesting a new emphasis on high-tech military responses to nuclear proliferation after the fact, rather than export controls or diplomatic measures to control it. Clinton’s assistant Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter put forth proposals in violation of both the NPT and U.S. law regarding the transfers of American nuclear technology to India and Pakistan.17

Similarly, the current Bush administration did not invent the double standard of pushing for stricter inspection of nuclear facilities by the International Atomic Energy Agency while still denying the right of such inspection of any American facilities. This standard was alive and well during all three previous administrations, as was the withholding of the necessary financial contributions to the United Nations to make such increased and effective IAEA inspections possible anywhere.

Conclusion

The Bush administration has made contempt for international law, international organizations, international treaties, and other multilateral institutions for arms control into a signature of its foreign policy. Littered throughout the history of post-war efforts at arms control, however, are examples of U.S. neglect of comprehensive nuclear arms control, much less disarmament, and rejection of universal standards in favor of selective applications based upon a given government’s relations with the United States.

Since 1981, Israel has been in violation of UN Security Council resolution 487, which calls on Israel to place its nuclear facilities under the trusteeship of the International Atomic Energy Agency. Since 1998, Pakistan and India have been in violation of UN Security Council resolution 1172, which calls on those two South Asian nations to end their nuclear weapons programs and eliminate their long-range missiles. Yet only Iraq was targeted for strict sanctions and military action for its alleged violations of UN Security Council resolutions calling for the elimination of its nuclear programs, even though those programs no longer existed.

Fear of the charge of “weakness” in the post-911 world propelled nearly all members of the U.S. Congress in March 2003 to allow the administration to reject diplomacy and United Nations inspections of Iraq’s nuclear, chemical, and biological programs, and invade Iraq. The rationale was that such “diplomatic and other peaceful means alone” would not “adequately protect the national security of the United States against the continuing threat posed by Iraq.”18 Similarly, when a protracted British-led diplomatic effort to eliminate Libya’s nascent nuclear program reached a successful conclusion in December 2003, a Congressional majority supported a resolution which declared—in direct contradiction of American diplomats involved in the talks19—that the elimination of Libya’s nuclear program “would not have been possible if not for … the liberation of Iraq by United States and Coalition Forces.”20

More recently, during the final hours of the Nonproliferation Conference in New York at the end of May, Congressional leaders from both parties validated the Bush administration’s double standard of focusing upon Iran’s alleged nuclear weapons program while ignoring the already existing nuclear weapons arsenals of U.S. allies like Israel, Pakistan, and India.

Advocates of nuclear disarmament and arms control must recognize that while the successful American effort to derail the recent UN non-proliferation conference is indeed a serious setback in the struggle against the nuclear threat, the problem runs deeper than simply the policies of the current administration. To the extent that the United States attempts to use its nuclear arsenal to pursue its own strategic advantage, and seeks to place the United States and its allies above the law, it does so at the risk of our very survival.

End Notes

1. “UN Nuclear Treaty Review Ending in Failure, Japanese Envoy Says,” Bloomberg News, May 27, 2005.
2. Seymour Hersh, The Sampson Option, New York: Random House, 1991, p. 210.
3. Seymour Hersh, op. cit, p. 273.
4. Zachary Davis, “Nuclear Proliferation and Nonproliferation Policy in the 1990s,” in Michael Klare and Daniel Thomas, World Security: Challenges for a New Century, second edition, New York: St, Martin’s Press, 1994, p. 115.
5. Hersh, op. cit., p. 274.
6. Ibid., p. 209-14.
7. Ibid., p. 268.
8. Cited in Ibid., op. cit., p. 283.
9. Ibid., p. 291.
10. Helena Cobban, “Israel’s Nuclear Game: The U.S. Stake,” World Policy, Summer 1988, pp. 427-8.
11. Arms Control Association, “Nuclear Weapons: Who Has What at a Glance,” April 2005.
12. Hersch, op. cit., p. 9.
13. Davis, op. cit., p. 112.
14. New York Times, Feb. 13, 1985.
15. Bruce Cumings, “It’s Time to End the 40-Year War,” The Nation, August 23/30, 1993, p. 207.
16. Gary Milhollin, “The Business of Defense Is Defending Business,” Washington Post National, Weekly Edition, Feb. 14-20, p. 23.
17. Ibid.
18. H. Con. Res. 104, 108 th Congress, 1st session, March 21, 2003.
19. Flynt Leverett, “Why Libya Gave Up on the Bomb,” The New York Times, January 23, 2004, p. A23.
20. H. Amdt.601 (A003), 107 th Congress, 2 nd session, June 23, 2004.

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