NUKES IN SEARCH OF A THREAT
US Gins Up a "Credible" Iranian Nuclear Menace Befitting Its Own Stockpile
With Western intelligence sources once again stoking the flames of a nuclear
Iran and the secret movement of America's nuclear warheads across Europe,
the war economy is up to its old tricks.
by Raul Diego
March 24th, 2021
Mint Press
By Raul Diego
WASHINGTON - According to The Telegraph, "new revelations" from an unnamed
senior Western intelligence source show "that Iran is trying to conceal
vital elements of its nuclear programme from the outside world [and] has no
intention of complying with its international obligations under the terms of
the nuclear deal."
Led by Israel and the United States, the narrative of a nuclear-armed Iran
wreaking havoc on the Middle East and the world has been unrelenting and
co-signed by the broader Western media establishment, which has been
complicit in a long-running campaign that goes back to the early 2000s.
Relegated to a secondary news item since the Covid crisis took over, the
story is now resurfacing as the Biden administration revisits the Joint
Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), a.k.a. the Iran Nuclear Deal, which
was famously shelved by Donald Trump in 2018. Despite promises made during
his campaign to restore the treaty, Biden has stopped short of doing so and
has conditioned the re-implementation of the agreement on vague "changes
from Tehran."
Manufacturing a "credible" nuclear menace is vital to the interests of the
most heavily nuclear-armed country in the world, after all, and the smoke
and mirrors used to place Iran in that role serves to justify the Pentagon's
ballooning nuclear budget and projects like the $100 billion nuclear bomb
currently in development.
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In addition, the political circus surrounding Trump's scrapping of the
nuclear deal and its aftermath has helped to conceal an ongoing redeployment
of the U.S.'s nuclear arsenal stationed in Europe since the Cold War, as
America and its NATO allies upgrade their nuclear warhead technology.
Moving pieces around
The Congressional Research Service, an independent policy advisory
organization known as "Congress' Think Tank," recently issued a report in
which it disclosed to lawmakers that a third of the United States' nuclear
warheads scattered throughout the old continent have been redeployed from
their warehouses in Europe and Turkey.
According to the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists published in January, the
redeployments were carried out because of a "reduction of operational
storage capacity" at several bases. The Bulletin also reported that, per
Sputnik, approximately 130 B61 thermonuclear bombs are now being "stored at
bases in the U.S. and kept ready for operations in Asia or other locations
outside Europe."
Nuclear Weapons
The Los Alamos Study Group takes aim at plans to ramp up the nation's
nuclear arsenal near Bernalillo, N.M., Feb. 17, 2021. Susan Montoya Bryan |
AP
Continued violations of the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear
Weapons by Atlanticist powers since its signing in 1968 have only garnered
skepticism over the stated motives of the redeployment. Russian government
officials believe the movement of the nuclear weapons probably has more to
do with their modernization, as opposed to any efforts to actually reduce
the number of atomic bombs in the region, a belief buttressed by the UK's
recent increase of its own nuclear stockpile.
The removal and redeployment is likely due to the development of smaller
nuclear weapon technology - such as the B61-12, tested last year in the
Nevada desert, which can carry in the bay of an F-35 jet a payload three
times larger than the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Russian Armed
Forces Lt. Gen. Evgeny Buzhinsky, interviewed by local Russian media, does
not believe a reduction in the American nuclear arsenal is actually taking
place and, moreover, U.S. officials have not announced any changes to their
nuclear arsenal in Europe.
Twisted logic
A topic that seemed to be lost in the dustbin of history is being revived by
the last remaining members of the generation that grew up in the midst of
Cold War hysteria and foisted upon a new generation, which is expected to
adopt the same fears and suspicions that fueled the exponential growth of
the military industrial complex and established America's war economy as the
world's preeminent economic paradigm.
Vinton Cerf and Martin Hellman, two individuals who've had a role in keeping
the specter of nuclear annihilation alive in the 21st century, recently
published a dual opinion piece detailing the reasons they believe that the
"risk of a nuclear war is unacceptably high" and why "risk reduction
measures are urgently needed" from a qualitative and quantitative approach
respectively.
Hellman, a cryptographer involved with nuclear deterrence in the waning
years of the Cold War with the Reagan administration, and Cerf - one of the
developers of a military communication protocol designed to withstand a
nuclear attack, the precursor to the internet called ARPAnet - both harbor
alarmist viewpoints that were so common during the post-war years.
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Banal comparisons between marriage and nuclear war, such as Hellman employs
as a thesis for his book "A New Map for Relationships," are coupled with
hyperbolic statements like "a child born today may well have less-than-even
odds of living out his or her natural life without experiencing the
destruction of civilization in a nuclear war," to propagate the idea that
the threat of a nuclear conflagration is as terrifying as it is a fact of
life.
Cerf and Hellman are among several scientists and deterrence policy experts
participating in a series of workshops organized by the National Academies
of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM), which began in February and
is scheduled to have its fourth meeting in April. The ad hoc committee
project, titled "Risk Analysis Methods for Nuclear War and Nuclear
Terrorism," will issue a report at the project's conclusion to deliver
assessments informing the development of a new nuclear security strategy for
the United States.
The real enemy
In Hellman's mathematical calculations, the probability of nuclear war is
extrapolated from what "we would expect on the order of ten major crises
comparable to Cuba 1962; 100 lesser crises comparable to the 1995-1996
Taiwan Straits Crisis, the 2008 Russo-Georgian War, or the ongoing conflict
in Ukraine that started in 2014." Cerf's quantitative analysis likewise
focuses on the Cuban missile crisis, but opts for the 1999 war in Kosovo and
a false incoming ballistic missile alert in Hawaii three years ago as
examples.
While taking different routes, both arrive at the same basic conclusion that
the only way to avoid a nuclear holocaust is to raise the level of perceived
risk so high that it, in turn, spurs a concerted effort to reduce said
risks.
Given the languishing Cold War narratives decades after that war's
denouement, the creation of a new nuclear threat in Iran and North Korea
becomes vital to the reestablishment of America's teetering war economy,
which has spent the last few decades since Gorbachev dissolved the Soviet
Union looking for ways to quash its real enemy - peace.