U.S. Department of Defense/Department of Energy
U.S. technicians work on a W80 thermonuclear warhead.
Mordechai Vanunu was imprisoned for eighteen years for blowing the whistle on Israel’s secret nuclear weapons program. It was said that he “felt an obligation to tell the people of Israel what was going on behind their backs” at a nuclear research facility, which was actually producing plutonium for nuclear weapons. Of those eighteen years, eleven were spent in solitary confinement.
President Donald Trump’s strategy on Iran, announced on Friday, brings Vanunu’s long isolation and sacrificial commitment to truth-telling to mind.
Trump promised to “deny the Iranian regime all paths to a nuclear weapon.” But it is Israel, which possesses an estimated eighty nuclear warheads, with fissile material for up to 200, which poses the major nuclear threat in the region. And Israel is allied to the nation with the world's largest nuclear arsenal: the United States.
Israel doesn’t publicly acknowledge its nuclear arsenal, nor does it allow weapons inspectors into its nuclear weapons facilities. Along with India and Pakistan, Israel refuses to sign the nuclear non-proliferation treaty. And it has used conventional weapons in numerous destabilizing wars, including the aerial bombing of Gaza, Lebanon, and the West Bank.
Vanunu, designated by anti-nuclear activist Daniel Ellsberg as the “the pre-eminent hero of the nuclear era,” helped many people envision a nuclear weapons-free Middle East.
In 2015, Iran’s Minister of Foreign Affairs, Jawad Zarif, wrote eloquently about that possibility, in an op-ed calling on the Middle East to rid itself of nuclear weapons. He said Iran “is prepared to work with the international community to achieve these goals, knowing full well that, along the way, it will probably run into many hurdles raised by the skeptics of peace and diplomacy.”
Since the “Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action” pact with Iran concluded in 2015, the International Atomic Energy Association (IAEA) has steadily verified Iran’s compliance with inspections. Iran has accepted around-the-clock supervision by IAEA officials. What’s more, “Iran has gotten rid of all of its highly enriched uranium,” according to Jessica Matthews, writing for the New York Review of Books. Matthews continues:
"It has also eliminated 98 percent of its stockpile of low-enriched uranium, leaving only three hundred kilograms, less than the amount needed to fuel one weapon if taken to high enrichment. The number of centrifuges maintained for uranium enrichment is down from 19,000 to 6,000. The rest have been dismantled and put into storage under tight international monitoring. Continuing enrichment is limited to 3.67 percent, the accepted level for reactor fuel … It has provided adequate answers to the IAEA’s long-standing list of questions regarding past weapons-related activities."
Whatever discontent they have with their own government, ordinary Iranians might well think the United States is their most implacable and immediate enemy. Many Iranians remember the U.S.-backed coup that ended their democracy in 1953, and they remember the fierce U.S. support given to Saddam Hussein in the brutal eight years of the Iran-Iraq war.
Can the threat of U.S. invasion be lifted long enough to allow the people of Iran a window for once again considering democratic reforms?
Noam Chomsky rightly names the U.S. “Shock and Awe” attack against Iraq as the greatest destabilizing force at work in the Middle East. “Thanks to that invasion,” writes Chomsky, “hundreds of thousands were killed and millions of refugees generated, barbarous acts of torture were committed.” He notes that this destruction, which some Iraqis have likened to the Mongol invasion of the thirteenth century, has left Iraq “the unhappiest country in the world,” according to polls.
“Meanwhile,” Chomsky continues, “sectarian conflict was ignited, tearing the region to shreds and laying the basis for the creation of the monstrosity that is ISIS. And all of that is called ‘stabilization.’ ”
Can decades of bipartisan U.S. government lying about Iran be overcome by saner, more humane narratives? Can the threat of U.S. invasion be lifted long enough to allow the people of Iran a window for once again considering democratic reforms?
Trump’s statements and Cabinet appointments suggest that regime change in Iran is a long-term goal. Ignoring the Saudi role in funding and fomenting terrorism, Trump strangely emphasizes Iranian impacts on the region, particularly regarding the conflict in Yemen.
In fact, it is Saudi Arabia and its UAE ally, with crucial U.S. backing, that have been intensely bombing Yemen since 2015 and maintaining a punishing Red Sea blockade against shipments often vital to famine relief.
Mordechai Vanunu took extraordinary risks and endured incredible suffering to oppose the foolhardiness of building and maintaining nuclear arsenals. Can people worldwide muster the courage to respond to this threat?
Kathy Kelly (kathy@vcnv.org) co-coordinates Voices for Creative Nonviolence, (www.vcnv.org), a campaign to end U.S. military and economic wars.