A prominent international affairs expert says it is time for the United States to remove its tactical nuclear arsenal in Europe as the dangerous stockpiles “serve no legitimate strategic purpose.”
“[T]here is no good reason to keep them (the US tactical nuclear arsenal) there (Europe) and plenty of good reasons to remove them,” Stephen M. Walt wrote on the Foreign Policy website.
“It’s hard to imagine that these weapons are helping Dutch, German, or Turkish elites sleep soundly at night, or helping reassure their respective populations. If anything, local populations should worry about having these devices on their soil,” he added.
The senior international relations author described the situation as “rather ludicrous,” saying the theories that justified these weapons during the Cold War “never made sense” to him in the first place either.
“There is no threat of a conventional invasion of Western Europe, and thus no need to ‘link’ the US strategic deterrent to Europe’s defense via tactical weapons physically deployed on the continent,” he wrote.
Walt suggested that the US failure to discard the weapons will undermine the basic logic of nuclear disarmament, and threaten global efforts to “de-legitimize” nuclear weapons as status symbols, thereby dealing a blow to broader nuclear security objectives.
The persistence of the weapons, he added, will also question the pledges that the United States made when it signed the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT).
Though there is no single agreed-upon definition of a tactical nuclear weapon, it is generally characterized by a lower yield and shorter range than a long-range (strategic) nuclear weapon. Tactical nuclear weapons are also sometimes referred to as battlefield nuclear weapons.
The US has not made public the number of its tactical nuclear weapons, but according to the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation, the US is believed to deploy approximately 500 tactical nuclear warheads, including about 200 B61 gravity bombs deployed in five NATO states (Belgium, Italy, Turkey, Germany, and the Netherlands).
The US also maintains approximately 700-800 additional tactical warheads in storage.
The original pretext offered by the US for deploying the tactical nuclear weapons in Europe was to deter a Soviet conventional attack on Western Europe.
US military leaders increasingly suggest that the European deployment serves no military purpose, and a growing group of NATO members, including host nations such as Germany and Belgium, have called for the removal of tactical nuclear weapons from Europe.
Given their small size and mobility, tactical nuclear weapons are also particularly vulnerable to loss or theft.
April 19, 2012
Posted by aletho |
Militarism, Timeless or most popular | Arms Control, NATO, Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, Nuclear weapon, Tactical nuclear weapon, United States, Western Europe |
3 Comments
How the US and Israel are Shredding the NPT
By CARL BOGGS | April 4, 2012
While United States and Israeli leaders, duly assisted by a warmongering media, ramp up war talk against Iran, two troublesome pieces of information are ritually ignored. First, even American intelligence reports conclude that Iran is not close to building a nuclear-weapons program. Second, it is the U.S. and Israel – not Iran – that stand in flagrant violation of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). The real nuclear outlaws are located in Washington and Tel Aviv rather than in Tehran.
The consensus of 17 U.S. agencies, as reported by National Intelligence Estimates of 2007 and 2011, finds that Iran has not enriched uranium above 20 percent purity, far short of the nearly 90 percent essential to weapons development. Further, no viable nuclear delivery system or command structure has been uncovered. High-powered U.S. surveillance and espionage operations, many inside Iran, have revealed nothing beyond (an entirely legal) civilian energy program. Recent International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) investigations, the latest in November 2011 and February 2012, cite “continuing enrichment processes” but nothing beyond the 20 percent level. The IAEA merely states what should be obvious – that some Iranian sites “could be” used for a weapons program at some point in the future.
Some Western “experts” of the neocon variety say Iran is just 18 months away from producing a Bomb, but they have echoed the same refrain for many years with no weapons in sight. In fact there is nothing yet to suggest that Iranian leaders have made the crucial decision to even embark on such a program.
Meanwhile, in the face of crippling economic sanctions, heightened political pressure, cyber sabotage, assassinations of nuclear scientists, and threats of military attack, the Iranians remain steady in their drive toward what from all credible evidence is a peaceful civilian project. In fact, Iran, a member in good standing of the NPT, is just one of at least 30 nations currently possessing high-level nuclear capacity.
The Iranians have every right within existing international rules to carry out their program – a fact conveniently obscured by the Western media and politicians. Their Israeli antagonists, on the other hand, not only possess a nuclear arsenal of up to 400 warheads – possibly fifth largest in the world – but breezily dismiss the NPT as a worthless nuisance. Its nuclear outlawry, along with that of non-NPT state India, has for decades received material aid and diplomatic cover from Washington. As President Obama and the Republican White House hopefuls boorishly repeat that “all options are on the table” in facing off against Iran, the NPT and kindred global conventions end up as so much camouflage for naked geopolitical ambitions.
Drafted in the late 1960s, the NPT was inspired by efforts to control the spread of doomsday weapons on the world scene. It came into force in March 1970, signed by 189 states including the U.S. and the four other atomic powers. While U.S. leaders endorsed the treaty, beneath the surface they approached it with considerable ambivalence, even hostility, since the NPT was created to limit production and deployment of nuclear weapons for all nations. One inescapable problem was that the U.S. was the only nation to have dropped by Bomb and its nuclear strategy (including first-use doctrine) remained, and still remains, central to its general military outlook. Nuclearism became an indelible feature of postwar American political and popular culture. That Washington had also resorted to other WMD – biological in Korea, chemical in Vietnam – would make the Pentagon even more wary of dismantling its mass-destruction arsenals, much less embrace moves toward disarmament, as the NPT stipulated. Put simply, U.S. rhetorical opposition to WMD never extended to its own policies or its view of the NPT.
The NPT called on all parties to fight proliferation while allowing for peaceful atomic development under international monitoring. Article I stated that nuclear powers agree not to assist non-nuclear countries in their nuclear programs, while Article IV affirmed the right of all NPT members to develop nuclear energy and Article VI obliged nuclear states to begin dismantling nukes in “good faith”. At present nine countries have nuclear arsenals with the strong likelihood others will follow, as an increasing number of states have adequate research, facilities, materials, and reactors for processing uranium at high levels. Several countries, aside from Iran, now have the technology and resources to achieve nuclear-weapons status within the next decades, including Japan, Brazil, Australia, Argentina, Turkey, and South Africa. All of these states, as NPT members, are fully entitled to nuclear sources of energy – though so far only Iran has been singled out for international scrutiny and targeted with economic sanctions and military threats.
As for Article I, the U.S. (along with France) offered substantial aid and protection to the hyper-secret Israeli nuclear-weapons program going back to the 1950s. Israel has never wanted anything to do with the NPT, fearful of any meddling into its accumulation of between 200 and 400 warheads, thinly concealed behind a façade of “ambiguity”. Aside from nukes, Tel Aviv reportedly owns an abundant stockpile of chemical and biological weapons while again refusing to join the relevant global conventions.
Make no mistake: despite the media fiction of a small, weak, relatively defenseless country isolated and surrounded by aggressive foes, Israel currently rivals Britain, France, and China as a world nuclear power, central to its shared goal (with the U.S.) of military supremacy in the Middle East. Credible sources indicate that Israel possesses not only neutron bombs but an array of tactical nukes, ballistic missiles, atomic land mines, cruise missiles, nuclear-armed subs, and high-explosive artillery shells. The subs alone are armed with four cruise missiles each, replete with multiple warheads. The general Israeli military arsenal dwarfs the actual or potential armed forces of all other Middle Eastern nations combined. Several U.N. resolutions calling for Israel to join the NPT, open up its nuclear facilities to inspection, and agree to a regional nuclear-free zone have been stonewalled by the U.S. and Israel. After the CIA reported that Israel had the Bomb in 1968 (fully 18 years before Mordecai Vanunu’s insider revelations), no outside visits to Israeli military sites have been allowed.
Meanwhile, India – still a non-NPT state – has long benefited from a massive transfer of atomic resources and technology from the U.S., dating to years before the Indian weapons breakthrough of 1974. As an imagined counterweight to Chinese military power, India was empowered to build as many as 65 warheads, manufactured and deployed in the absence of external monitoring and made possible by the work of 1100 U.S.-trained scientists. Like Israel and also Pakistan, India maintains a hostile attitude toward IAEA monitoring. In July 2005 the U.S. signed an historic deal with New Delhi for nuclear cooperation, just when India was busy modernizing its illegal atomic stockpile and delivery systems. (The deal was approved by Congress in October 2008.) Those profiting, of course, included dozens of U.S. technical and military corporations.
Non-NPT states naturally fight international pressure to limit their weapons systems, so that reducing nuclear arsenals in the midst of such outlawry, consistent with Article VI, is unthinkable. Nor has U.S. membership as such meant compliance with Article VI: while lecturing and threatening others about proliferation, Washington unapologetically modernizes its own nuclear research agendas, facilities, weapons, and delivery systems, fueled by the decades-old aim of world atomic supremacy. Alone among nations, the U.S. retains a first-use doctrine embellished by its unparalleled global nuclear presence across land, sea, and air, bolstered by a fleet-based missile defense system. The U.S. deploys several dozen tactical nukes in such NATO countries as Germany, Belgium, Italy, Holland, and Turkey, in another violation of the NPT.
As it preaches against the horrors of proliferation, the U.S. spends hundreds of billions to upgrade its own state-of-the-art weapons systems. Obama’s 2009 plea for a “world without nukes” is best understood as a preposterous deceit. According to a 2011 Carnegie Endowment for International Peace report, Washington now devotes more resources to nuclear weapons than the rest of the world combined – that is, roughly equivalent to the general military picture. The U.S. earmarked $61.3 billion for nukes in 2012, compared to $14.8 billion allocated by Russia, $7.6 billion by China, $6.0 billion by France, and $4.9 billion by India. The most recent (2010) Nuclear Posture Review restates the long-term U.S. priority of a nuclearized military, a linchpin of Pentagon strategy. The NPR calls for designing, testing, construction, and deployment of a new class of atomic subs to replace the aging Ohio-class fleet, which, armed with eight multiple-warhead missiles apiece, already has enough firepower to incinerate most of the planet. The Review calls for a “robust SSBN [missile] Security Program” to upgrade Pentagon nuclear capacity. Among nine distinct U.S. nuclear modernizing schemes, the Air Force has on the drawing boards a new long-range penetrating bomber with enhanced nuclear capacity. The 2012 Procurement Plan calls for 80 to 100 of these aircraft at an outlandish $550 each – a total of some $50 billion.
The U.S. nuclear establishment has recently fixated on a plutonium bomb-core production facility at Los Alamos, referred to as the Chemical and Metallurgy Research Replacement (CMRR), with costs already running into several billions. The bomb-core project has emerged as the centerpiece of a new generation of modernized warheads even as Washington feigns interest in atomic demobilization and negotiates with Russia to reduce its general stockpile. The Obama administration favors a “surge” in nuclear development, with CMRR one of the vital programs. Started in 2006, this project – to be completed in three stages – may not be finished until 2022, with a price tag likely in the tens of billions. It is expected to triple the plutonium-storage capacity of the Los Alamos lab, expanding infrastructure needed for new weapons systems – surely a violation of the spirit if not letter of the NPT.
While the much-celebrated START agreement with Russia (only with Russia) anticipates a reduction to 1550 American warheads by 2017, the present count is more than 5000 warheads, but even the lower number will carry far more explosive potential than the larger, older arsenals. It should also be remembered that START places no restrictions on research, testing, production, or deployment of nuclear weapons.
The NPR is hardly timid about its strategic objectives: “The U.S. will modernize the nuclear weapons infrastructure, sustain the science, technology, and engineering base, invest in human capital, and ensure senior leadership focus.” Pentagon atomic capability remains as much of an obsession today as it was during the height of the Cold War, with its modernizing agenda, first-use doctrine, and multiple “contingency” plans for unleashing nukes against nations deemed in violation of the NPT. So much for Article VI of the (now thoroughly-bankrupt) NPT.
In 2006 Hans Blix, former chief U.N. weapons inspector, authored a report titled “Weapons of Terror”, sponsored by the Commission on Weapons of Mass Destruction, addressing the proliferation of nuclear, chemical, and biological stockpiles. It called on major powers to take international laws and treaties more seriously, pointedly urging the U.S. and its closest allies to refrain from blocking arms control, disarmament, and moves to curtail nuclear proliferation. It states: “All parties to the [NPT] should implement the decision on principles and objectives for nonproliferation and disarmament [embraced in] the resolution of the Middle East as a zone free of nuclear and all other weapons of mass destruction.” The latter idea had been proposed by Egypt, Iran, and a few other states but was quickly dashed by the U.S. and Israel – two nations deploying a combined several hundred warheads in the region. The report also recommended that the strongest nuclear states offer security guarantees to weaker non-nuclear states, but neither the U.S. nor its clients were ready to comply.
In his book laying out the WMD Commission recommendations, Why Disarmament Matters (2008), Blix predicted imminent catastrophe in a global setting where the leading nuclear states randomly and brazenly violate the NPT. A question recurs: how can proliferation be reversed when the nuclear outlaws routinely privilege their own military ambitions over international rules and norms? By 2008 efforts to induce Israel, India, and Pakistan to submit to NPT protocols had been effectively abandoned, Blix adding: “Convincing states that do not need weapons of mass destruction would be significantly easier if all U.N. members practiced genuine respect for existing [U.N.] restraints on the threat and use of force.” Aside from NPT considerations, threats like those made by the U.S. and Israel constitute a flagrant violation of the U.N. Charter.
Back to Iran: it turns out the mortal challenge posed by what Israeli prime minister Benyamin Netanyahu calls a “nuclearized mullocracy” does nothing so much as threaten Israeli hopes for regional domination. Iranian “defiance” and “belligerence” is ultimately less a matter of Iran rejecting NPT statutes or IAEA inspections than of resisting (illegitimate) demands for total nuclear shutdown. The famous Israeli “red line”, or threshold of tolerance, refers not to an actual Iranian military threat but to the “technical capability” of some day reaching weapons status – a “capability” already held, as mentioned, by more than 30 nations. Further, while Iran is completely encircled by U.S. and Israeli military forces, possessing advanced nuclear arsenals, an Iranian attack on Israel (for which no motive is evident) would be suicidal, as large parts of the country would be quickly reduced to rubble.
Current U.S./Israeli threats against Iran are based much less in fear of a military attack than in prospects for a challenge to regional supremacy it raises. The “red line” barrier pertains to an eventual Iranian surrender to U.S./Israeli geopolitical interests that, sooner or later, lead to “regime change”. For the moment, however, it appears that a campaign of atomic sabotage has emerged as the key method for subverting Iranian nuclear objectives. A military attack, now or later, remains fraught with enormous risk and uncertainty.
In the end, the Iranian “crisis” is symptomatic of a deeper predicament: nothing will be resolved until every state – not just the targeted villains – is held accountable to the same universal norms. This means, above all, the U.S., Israel, and other nuclear outlaws. Blix noted that the NPT “is not a treaty that appoints the nuclear-weapons states individually or jointly to police non-nuclear weapons states and threaten them with punishment. It is a contract in which all parties commit themselves to the goal of a nuclear weapons-free world.” There can be no meaningful “contract” without an internationalization of security arrangements that, in the end, will require a dismantling of the American warfare state that underpins its nuclear outlawry and that of its clients.
CARL BOGGS is the author of Ecology and Revolution, Phantom Democracy, and The Crimes of Empire among other recent books.
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April 4, 2012
Posted by aletho |
Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Militarism, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes, Wars for Israel | International Atomic Energy Agency, Iran, Israel, Middle East, NPT, Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, United States |
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Introduction
Two days after the high-ranking delegation of International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) returned from their second trip to Tehran within the past month, Yukiya Amano, the agency’s director general, released his official 11-page report. In this report, which unlike the previous one is more brief and practical, the latest developments in Iran’s peaceful activities to produce nuclear energy have been examined. While admitting to Iran’s great breakthroughs and achievements in building nuclear fuel rods – which are to be used in the Tehran Research Reactor for producing medical drugs – the report discusses some details about activities carried out in 15 Iranian nuclear power centres and emphasizes the futility of Iran-IAEA negotiations primarily because of Tehran’s refusal to allow the agency’s officials to inspect the Parchin centre. The present piece will explore and analyze the most important parts of the latest IAEA report on Iran’s nuclear program.
Analyzing Amano’s Report
1) The IAEA Secretariat’s Repeated Breaches of Its Reports’ Confidentiality
On Friday, 24 February 2012, the International Atomic Energy Agency circulated the report written by its director general, Amano, among the agency’s members. Once again, in violation of the IAEA charter, which underscores the confidentiality of the agency’s reports on member states, the full text of Amano’s report about Iran was released to the Western media outlets, so that they use it as material to wage negative propaganda against Iran. Interestingly enough and in spite of the repetition of this patent contravention, no member of the IAEA secretariat or the secretary general himself is willing to provide an explanation why such a confidential and specialist text is published on news websites even before reaching the agency’s members.
2) Parchin Site and the Media Fault-Finding
Amano’s report emphasizes the peaceful nature of those nuclear activities by Iran of which the UN nuclear watchdog has been informed and which are monitored by the agency’s experts. The IAEA, however, expects Iran to go beyond fulfilling its commitments regarding the implementation of the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and the related safeguards agreement and thus allow the IAEA inspectors to visit other sites and centers which are not connected with the country’s nuclear activities. The Islamic Republic is opposed to this request for two simple reasons.
Firstly, based upon the NPT safeguards agreement, the International Atomic Energy Agency is only supposed to oversee the declared nuclear sites and in fact is not entitled to request the inspection of a given country’s non-nuclear centers. Secondly, in 2005 the Islamic Republic of Iran allowed the IAEA experts to inspect the Parchin military center to prove its goodwill as well as its willingness to cooperate voluntarily with the agency. At the time, Mohamed ElBaradei, the then secretary general of IAEA, stressed in his report issued a while later that no trace of nuclear work has been found in Parchin. Given this explanation, what motive other than fault-finding can there be behind an attempt to visit the site once again after seven years? Of course, the IAEA officials argue that according to the NPT Additional Protocol, which Iran signed provisionally but voluntarily in 2003, they are entitled to visit any place they wish without limitation and should only inform the Iranian authorities of their plan at most 48 hours before the inspection. Accordingly, they would like Iran to give permission for a revisit to the Parchin site in order to relieve some other members of their doubts about the country’s nuclear activities.
In response to this argument, one should say that the Additional Protocol has not yet received final ratification in the Iranian parliament and the government cannot cooperate with the UN nuclear agency within its framework. Moreover, as Iran’s Ambassador to the International Atomic Energy Agency Ali Asghar Soltanieh says, Tehran has provided the agency’s delegation with the relevant evidence, informing it of the reasons why the allegations raised about Parchin are baseless. According to him,
“Regular inspections of Iran’s nuclear facilities according to the Non-Proliferation Treaty have always been carried out and continue to date. The agency’s request to visit Parchin site is different from, and the calls by the agency for the clarification of some questions and ambiguities require an agreement on a framework within which the considerations of both sides should be taken into account.” (1)
Obviously, Iran has a set of conditions for the IAEA inspection of its military centers, which should be met within the framework of a mutual agreement. In other words, the Islamic Republic and 100 other members of the agency that have not yet ratified the Additional Protocol cannot open all their military centers – which have no connection with nuclear activities – to inspectors, who indeed refuse to make any commitment to keep the results of the visits confidential.
In recent years, Iran has invariably raised the significant point that if countries take on international commitments and honour them, then in return they are given advantages and concessions to promote the level of their cooperation. If countries such as Iran should comply with international obligations enforced by global centres of power on them, but in return are not rewarded with concessions but are also subjected to increasing pressure caused by sanctions, then how could Amano and his colleagues expect these countries to find and give a logical answer to their publics about their unilateral collaborations; collaborations that have nothing for them other than increasing commitments?
Therefore, the issue of visiting the Parchin site has simply been raised to make a case for Western media to spread propaganda against the Islamic Republic and influence their audience into believing that since Iran denies permission for the inspection of requested sites, it conducts illegal activities. Such an attempt is made in spite of the fact that the atomic agency’s reports on Iran since 2003 have invariably stressed that all of Tehran’s nuclear work has been under IAEA scrutiny and no deviation from the NPT safeguards has been traced during the period. This means that one cannot question Iran’s peaceful nuclear activities simply by relying upon allegations devised by Tel Aviv or policies adopted by Washington.
3) Implementing the UN Security Council Resolutions
In his latest report, Amano has underlined Iran’s failure to implement the UN Security Council resolutions about its uranium enrichment activities, while the Islamic Republic considers these resolutions illegal and unjust, referring to numerous articles in the UN Charter, according to which sovereign states have the right to determine their own fates. Iran’s peaceful activities regarding the enrichment of uranium have all been fully under the supervision of the UN nuclear watchdog, as testified by its 30 reports, and thus in no sense threaten international peace and security. The US force and the Israeli lobbying have, however, caused seven resolutions to be passed totally unilaterally against Iran in the UN Security Council so far, of which four have imposed extensive sanctions on Iranians. Meanwhile, the United States, Canada, and the European Union have, in concert with Japan, South Korea, and Australia, slapped broader sanctions outside the framework of Security Council resolutions against the Iranian people; sanctions which have no relevance to Tehran’s efforts concerning nuclear energy production and uranium enrichment. The latest round of sanctions included an embargo on the purchase of Iranian oil and financial transactions with Iran’s Central Bank, which have caused so much trouble for international markets while they are not yet fully in force. In such unfair circumstances, how can Amano expect Iran to halt its uranium enrichment work?
Conclusion
The part of Amano’s report which highlights Iranian nuclear advancements demonstrates that in spite of wide and severe sanctions, Iran has managed to build nuclear fuel rods successfully and use them in Tehran Research Reactor to produce anti-cancer drugs. This is a very promising development, which should please all those who understand the meaning of dominance and know how delightful scientific confrontation with that monopolistic system is. Amano’s report should equally embarrass and sadden all those who contended, until recently, that Iran would never succeed in building nuclear fuel rods.
In another part of the report where Amano talks about Iran’s failure to implement the UN Security Council resolutions and its continuation of uranium enrichment, he is making a repetition of what has been repeated before. The insistence that Iran should allow the inspection of non-authorized centers according to the Additional Protocol of the Non-Proliferation Treaty will not deliver any results other than supplying the material for propaganda against the Islamic Republic. Such a behaviour is in contradiction with the charter of the International Atomic Energy Agency, whose main goals are to control and oversee the nuclear activities of member states as well as to promote the peaceful use of nuclear energy in the world.
It seems that if the IAEA manages to free itself of the pressure put upon it by domineering powers, which seek to preserve a monopoly on the production and use of high-level technology including nuclear energy know-how, it can easily reach an agreement with Iran according to a model similar to the previous modality, so that a practical solution is achieved for removing all the existing doubts and ambiguities about Tehran’s nuclear program.
Notes:
(1) Iranian Students’ News Agency (ISNA), 06/12/1390 (Persian Calendar) [25/02/2012].
More By Hassan Beheshtipour:
*Necessity of Playing with China-Russia Ball in Iran’s Court: http://www.iranreview.org/content/Documents/Necessity_of_Playing_with_China_Russia_Ball_in_Iran_s_Court.htm
*Iran-Russia-China Relations: Challenges & Interests?: http://www.iranreview.org/content/Documents/Iran_Russia_China_Relations_Challenges_Interests_.htm
*Iran Sanctions Will Backfire on EU: http://www.iranreview.org/content/Documents/Iran_Sanctions_Will_Backfire_on_EU.htm
March 2, 2012
Posted by aletho |
Deception, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Timeless or most popular, Wars for Israel | IAEA, International Atomic Energy Agency, Iran, Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, Parchin, Yukiya Amano |
2 Comments
Britain’s former representative to the International Atomic Energy Agency Peter Jenkins has said that Iran has honestly and sincerely been cooperating with the UN nuclear watchdog.
Jenkins made the remarks in a recent interview with the BBC Persian service in reply to a question about claims that Iran has not provided answers about the alleged weapons studies.
Jenkins, according to a translation of his comments, said that he does not think that is the case and that he believes Iran has been honestly and sincerely cooperating with the IAEA and its inspectors.
On the main bone of contention between Iran and the West, he said that the West maintains that Tehran should halt the uranium enrichment component of its nuclear program, but Iran is opposed to such a view.
And Iran is right according to the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty because every country has the right to develop nuclear energy for peaceful purposes under the NPT, Jenkins stated.
Britain’s former representative to the IAEA also commented on the pressure exerted and the sanctions imposed by the West on Iran, saying that experiences of the past few years have shown that the continuation of this trend cannot help resolve the dispute over Iran’s nuclear program.
It would be better if the Western countries learn a lesson from their past mistakes and engage in open negotiations with Iran, he stated, adding that a peaceful solution can be worked out to Iran’s nuclear issue based on the NPT.
Asked about the fact that he used to believe that Iran’s nuclear activities have a military dimension, Jenkins said that he used to think that Tehran is pursuing nuclear weapons, but the reports prepared by U.S. intelligence institutions and the IAEA on Iran’s nuclear activities made him change his mind.
February 6, 2012
Posted by aletho |
Timeless or most popular | IAEA, Iran, Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, Peter Jenkins |
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