CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

Trump’s Illegal Iran War Makes Nuclear Proliferation and a Nuclear Iran More Likely

Amid all the verbiage, pixels and printers’ ink being expended over whether President Trump achieved anything by launching his illegal war (along with Israel) on Iran, misses the worst impact, and that is the lesson that it has taught, not just to Iran, but to all the nations of the world that find themselves being bullied by the US.

That lesson is that in a world of nuclear bullies, any country that does not have a nuclear weapon is at the mercy that of those countries that do have such weapons. In such a world, the only choice then is between abject subjugation or acquisition a nuclear weapon.

Does anyone think that if Iran possessed even a small number of nuclear weapons, the US, or even Israel with its 400 nukes, would have launched this latest war?

Look how warily North Korea, one of the world’s poorest countries, is handled, even by the US government when Pyongyang engages in such provocative actions as test-firing a nuclear capable ICBM rocket over Japan or in the direction of Hawaii!! Nothing,

Then look at China, with its large and growing stockpile of sophisticated nuclear bombs and equally sophisticated delivery systems.

Notice how confidently China’s paramount leader Xi Jinping warned his guest, the visiting PresIdent Trump, of “potential clashes and even conflicts” if the issue of Taiwan, which China considers to be a “renegade island province,” is not “handled properly” by the US. Announced plans to provideTaiwan with advanced weapons have been quietly dropped by the usually blustery American president.

Make no mistake: The lesson Iran’s leaders have learned from Trump’s war is that they must have an up-to-date credible nuclear force to prevent disaster. In other words, the Memorandum of Understanding Trump is touting as his “victory” does not, as he claims, mean Iran will “never have” a nuclear weapon. Iran has the technical knowledge and skill to make one, and, with the control they have demonstrated over passage of ships through the Hormuz Strait and their insistence that they will be charging fees for transit, even if their centrifuge arrays for producing bomb grade U-235 have been destroyed they will soon have little difficulty buying the U-235 or Plutonium they need to construct a stockpile of nukes even if they ultimately agree, in order to end the US war on their country, to reduce the enrichment of any stocks of that fissionable isotope they still have from 60% to 3.6% and promise not seek a nuke.

Meanwhile,, Trump and Netanyahu keep hammering home to Iran the imperative of getting the bomb. I’m sure the governments of other countries that have........

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