Amid all the verbiage, pixels and printers’ ink being expended over whether President Trump achieved anything by launching his illegal war (along with Israel) on Iran, misses the worst impact, and that is the lesson that it has taught, not just to Iran, but to all the nations of the world that find themselves being bullied by the US.
That lesson is that in a world of nuclear bullies, any country that does not have a nuclear weapon is at the mercy that of those countries that do have such weapons. In such a world, the only choice then is between abject subjugation or acquisition a nuclear weapon.
Does anyone think that if Iran possessed even a small number of nuclear weapons, the US, or even Israel with its 400 nukes, would have launched this latest war?
Look how warily North Korea, one of the world’s poorest countries, is handled, even by the US government when Pyongyang engages in such provocative actions as test-firing a nuclear capable ICBM rocket over Japan or in the direction of Hawaii!! Nothing,
Then look at China, with its large and growing stockpile of sophisticated nuclear bombs and equally sophisticated delivery systems.
Notice how confidently China’s paramount leader Xi Jinping warned his guest, the visiting PresIdent Trump, of “potential clashes and even conflicts” if the issue of Taiwan, which China considers to be a “renegade island province,” is not “handled properly” by the US. Announced plans to provideTaiwan with advanced weapons have been quietly dropped by the usually blustery American president.
Make no mistake: The lesson Iran’s leaders have learned from Trump’s war is that they must have an up-to-date credible nuclear force to prevent disaster. In other words, the Memorandum of Understanding Trump is touting as his “victory” does not, as he claims, mean Iran will “never have” a nuclear weapon. Iran has the technical knowledge and skill to make one, and, with the control they have demonstrated over passage of ships through the Hormuz Strait and their insistence that they will be charging fees for transit, even if their centrifuge arrays for producing bomb grade U-235 have been destroyed they will soon have little difficulty buying the U-235 or Plutonium they need to construct a stockpile of nukes even if they ultimately agree, in order to end the US war on their country, to reduce the enrichment of any stocks of that fissionable isotope they still have from 60% to 3.6% and promise not seek a nuke.
Meanwhile,, Trump and Netanyahu keep hammering home to Iran the imperative of getting the bomb. I’m sure the governments of other countries that have been bullied by the US have also been watching the way Trump has been bullying Venezuela, Brazil and Cuba (and even Mexico), so don’t be surprised if countries like Japan, Brazil, Indonesia, or for that matter perhaps even Canada (which for a time during the World War II era’s joint US/British race to develop an atomic bomb before Nazi Germany, was itself an integral part of the project), decide to go nuclear.
If people in the.US my age who lived through the 1950s and ‘60s Cold War with only two rival countries having nuclear weapons was nerve-wracking (and it was!), things are going to become a whole lot more fraught when the number of nations with nuclear weapons could easily double.
Nuclear weapons were first developed by the US during a global war. The cost of developing them was staggering, with the Manhattan Project alone running to $2 billion (the equivalent of $30 billion in today’s dollars— and remember the budgeting of all that money, and the hiring of 130,000 people all in secret, happened while the US was fighting a two-front war in Europe and Asia. It was the kind of crash program that at the time only the US, with its vast industrial base undated by war, could manage. Even the Soviet Union, which did successfully test its own plutonium bomb four years after the US (a carbon copy of the US bomb used on Nagasaki), only managed that feat thanks to the work of spies in the Manhattan Project like Ted Hall and Klaus Fuchs. With its industry and finances shattered by the German invasion, the USSR could not have developed a nuclear bomb in that short a time without the benefit of all the information they got from those two was well as other spies working in the US, Britain (and even in Canada).
Today however, nuclear weapons, relatively speaking, are mass-produced and are not anywhere near that costly.
In fact, in 2024 The Harvard International Review published an article saying there are enough nuclear warheads and bombs sitting around in countries like Turkey (on a US foreign air base), Pakistan, North Korea and and Urenco Global in the Netherlands, a private company that makes the components and the fission material for both nuclear and thermonuclear bombs—all potential targets for black market purchases or thefts. All it would take would be disgruntled or hard-up employe looking to make a killing, or some rogue national entity with the resources and trained personnel, to buy or purloin a nuke.
With the US no longer trusted in much of the world, some countries may well start thinking that joining the club of nuclear nations might be a smart move.
Even in the US the theft of just a small nuke arsenal could succeed. I wrote an article in the October 2007 issue of The American Conservative magazine about how earlier that year a B-52 based at Barksdale AFB in Minot, North Dakota had somehow picked up six heavily-guarded long-range cruise missiles, all armed with nucler warheads, loaded them onto an under-wing mount, and flew them illegally across the US to Shreveport AFB in Louisiana, parking the SAC bomber at a remote part of the base. The illegal and allegedly unauthorized transport of those weapons. They were discovered by a stunned ground crew that went out to service the plane, when one of the team dutifully peeked in the little window on the warhead of one missile and saw a red color, meaning that the mounted missile was armed with a large nuclear bomb along with the other five wing-mounted missiles. He alerted the base commander, which clearly aborted whatever scheme may have been in play.
How and why those six armed missiles were allowed to be removed successfully from a guarded bunker and were permitted to be mounted on A B-52 and then flown off from the Minot SAC base has never been explained, though several top Air Force Generals were sacked over the incident, accused of dereliction of duty. As I wrote, there were however also at least two allegedly “accidental” motorcycle deaths involving a member of that B-52 crew and of the Shreveport ground crew and also an alleged handgun “suicide” of the Marine who was guarding the bunker from which the six armed cruise missiles were removed.
Three suspiciously timed deaths of three men, each of whom was a witness at a key point in the removal of the six cruise missiles and their warheads from the supposedly secure bunker should certainly have triggered an urgent national security alert and criminal investigation, but no such alert or investigation was apparently ever ordered, much less conducted. (I contacted the West Virginia medical examiner who certified the Marine guard’s death during a visit home shortly after the incident as a suicide. He told me no one from the federal government had contacted him. He also volunteered, without my asking, upon hearing from me that there had been two other deaths of persons involved in the unauthorized removal of the nuclear-tipped missiles from an Air Force storage bunker, that “If I’d had that information, I would have conducted my inquest quite differently and might have come to a different conclusion from suicide by handgun.”)
Even if this was not a botched and then covered-up attempt to steal some nukes, perhaps as part of a CIA attempt to stage a black flag operation, this incident shows how easy such a heist could be to pull off.
Clearly there urgently needs to be public pressure on the governments of the nuclear nations — and especially the US, the nation possessing the most advanced arsenal of bombs and delivery systems — to negotiate treaties designed to shrink the number of and eventually eliminate all nuclear weapons, and to comply with all existing international laws outlawing threats of war or of military attacks of any kind except in cases of genuine imminent threat or with UN Security Council approval.
President Trump has impulsively pulled the US out of a few such treaties and has brazenly ignored crucial international laws, making wars of choice like his Iran war, his invasion of Venezuela, and his threat to invade Cuba—all war crimes of the highest order.
President Obama too, skated close to or went over the line with his 10-year trillion-dollar program to “check out and replace or upgrade” the nation’s nuclear bomb and warhead stockpile. It was a project continued by Trump which was and remains intended to make the weapons in that huge stockpile “more useable” by rendering therm adjustable in their explosive force. In some cases this can mean a detonation can be as small as few kilotons to as large as 300 kilotons (in other words as small as one twentieth the size of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima to 15 times as powerful as that first atomic bomb to be used in war).
Obviously, at the lower end such weapon could serve as a battlefield weapon, a bunker buster, ax government “decapitator,” or perhaps, if detonated in an air burst with its resulting electromagnetic pulse, as a localized communications disabler. Once a nuclear nation starts down that road in a military conflict, especially against another nuclear nation, the probability of escalation is enormous. Even if such low-power atomic bombs were used against a non-nuclear nation, the unwritten 8-decade taboo on nuclear weapons use will have been broken. Further use, including of vastly more destructive weapons, would be the predictable result.
The American public must put an end to such recklessness and madness by our out-of-control government before that can happen.
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This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Dave Lindorff.