LONDON: First the good news. Britain is unlikely to participate in the nuclear bombing of Iranian atomic weapons research facilities. Instead, our role in any forthcoming nuclear blitz will be to fill the blogosphere with sarcastic posts and make tut-tutting noises. The latter may or may not be heard above B61-11s slamming nukes into Iran’s Natanz centrifuge plant, which is challengingly located 75ft below ground.
Guessed the bad news? That’s right, the White House is considering nuking Iran. According to a forthcoming article by Seymour Hersh in the New Yorker, President Bush reckons that ‘saving Iran is going to be his legacy’. Not, then, the bang-up job he did next door. Nor the visionary way he mopped up New Orleans.
But is this really bad news? I have amazingly few Pentagon contacts, but one leading Stateside militarist rang on Sunday to explain the strategy. He said: “Shut your liberal cryhole, you ... aesthetically challenged denizen of a rain-soaked dime of a country, sir!” By which I took him to mean that a surgical strike on Natanz would be a feasible option and one that would have the defensible aim of stopping President Ahmadinejad using nuclear weapons to wipe Israel off the map.
Israel’s 1981 strike on Saddam’s Osirak nuclear reactor is a much-quoted precedent. That, though, was an attack using conventional weapons. US military strategists argue that what they jauntily call ‘nuclear penetrator munitions’ are necessary to get past anti-aircraft batteries, through six-foot walls and reinforced concrete roofs to destroy Natanz’s huge underground halls that may house 50,000 centrifuges that may be capable of providing enough enriched uranium for 20 nuclear warheads a year.
But even if this nuclear blitz were successful in destroying Natanz, it could still be futile relative to American aims. For all the Pentagon knows, Natanz may not be essential to Iran’s nuclear weapons programme. Retired US Air Force colonel Sam Gardiner told the Washington Post: “We could bomb it, take the political cost and still not set them back.” The only certain effects, then, would be increased Iranian radiation levels and an equally horrible non-nuclear fallout of more terrorism and anti-western feeling. The blitz might consolidate Ahmadinejad’s position in Iran and make him even less likely to invite Ehud Olmert over for tea than hitherto.
Here are more practical and ethical problems for such a US strike. One: an international coalition is necessary for such a venture if the US is to convince the Middle East that it did not invade Iraq to establish a base for military conquest of the region.
Two: American objectives are confused. At one moment it considers a surgical strike as sufficient to end Iran’s nuclear ambitions; at another it aims at regime change, fearing that the country’s president is even more of a risk to global stability than his US homologue. Shame for the latter aim that Iran’s president was democratically elected.
Three: using nuclear weapons is wrong and foolish because the consequences of doing so are liable to be disastrous. (I left that to third because I didn’t think Bush would be impressed by it.)
