Iran:
Nuclear Weapons, Monopoly of the Great Powers

Jan 30, 2006

When the Iranian government announced it would restart nuclear research activities, a spokesman for the U.S. government declared that the U.S. was keeping its options open: while it might not immediately use military force against Iran, it wasn’t ruling it out either.

For months, France, Germany, Great Britain and the U.S. have been indignant because the Iranian government wants to restart research on uranium enrichment. Now they envisage bringing it before the United Nations Security Council. French President Chirac said, “the international community must respect engagements agreed to for the security of everyone.” But this famous “international community” is nothing but a coalition of the biggest powers, which are themselves armed to the teeth.

In the first place, Iran has gone out of its way to prove to the U.S. and the other big powers that it wants this research in order to establish nuclear power plants. It signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, and agreed to all its conditions. It allowed the International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors into the country, and allowed them to inspect what they wanted. The inspectors found nothing. The Iranian government even stopped enriching uranium for more than two years in order to demonstrate more good will and negotiate an agreement.

Not surprisingly, the U.S. and European powers ignored all this. They just continued to churn out ever more outrageous lies about Iran–at the same time they prevented Iran from getting fuel for its nuclear power plants.

The five permanent members of the United Nations–the U.S., Great Britain, Russia, France and China–along with Israel, India and Pakistan make up the atomic club. That is, they are the countries that have nuclear weapons. The so-called great powers want to keep the door to the atomic club locked. They preach a morality they don’t respect themselves. By themselves alone, they are responsible for 85% of all the arms sales in the world! The pretended “security for everyone” they talk about results each year in the deaths of 500,000 people killed by conventional arms.

Bush declared that an Iran endowed with nuclear weapons poses a grave threat to world security, hiding the threat that comes from the U.S. itself. The U.S. government remains the only one that has ever dropped atomic bombs–laying waste to two cities in Japan, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, in 1945.

The current Iranian government is hardly a guarantor of peace, nor a defender of freedom in Iran itself or in the Middle East, nor a protector of the rights of other people. But the big powers, which set themselves up as arbiters of the world, don’t worry about peace and “human rights” when their interests are at stake. What right do they have to enact rules and impose prohibitions which they ignore themselves? They simply took that right by force.

Today, under cover of preaching to Iran, they are acting to preserve their monopoly of “nuclear force.” It continues to be a threat against people who contest their control of the whole world.