Iran’s grievance, moral or legal, against Israel and the United States over the bombing of nuclear sites is not assisted by the fact that Israel itself is an outlaw with nuclear bombs produced outside the system.

Nor by the fact that Israel itself has not submitted itself to any international supervisory regime or subscribed to non-proliferation pacts. These may be bad things — worthy of condemnation — but they do not create a licence for counter-terror.

In Iran’s neighbourhood, Pakistan and India built nuclear weapons outside the system, and so, effectively, did China 60 years ago. No-one could stop them, before or after. Whether any of them, or Israel’s, Russia’s or America’s, make their nations safer is a matter for debate, if only because the actual use of weapons seems unthinkable. They haven’t been used for 80 years, despite very serious local conflicts.

Although there are international non-proliferation treaties, and inspection regimes, the world has little control over nuclear weapon development or use. The only external control is the raw power of very big nations, not exercised by any rulebook, or by agreement. Moral pressure has no effect at all.

That Israel’s holdings could be said to be illegal might one day provoke some bigger and stronger nation to attack it to disarm it. Good luck with that. The very existence of such weapons is a substantial disincentive. No nuclear nation has ever been involuntarily detached from its nuclear holdings, though Ukraine, Belarus and Kazakhstan, and separately South Africa, voluntarily gave up their holdings. The three former Soviet Union nations handed over their weapons to Russia, after inducements and security guarantees from Russia, the US and Britain; South Africa did so after dropping apartheid. Ukraine may now regret losing its arsenal.

According to Iran, of course, it was not building nuclear weapons at all but attempting to develop its own peaceful nuclear power systems. There was widespread doubt about the purity of its intentions, given the secrecy involved and the levels of radiation it was refining, and Israel has long insisted that it was attempting to build a weapon, possibly with help from Pakistan and China. Israel’s pre-emptive strike, with the claim that Iran’s development of a weapon was imminent, and America’s supporting strike, with bunker busters, were both illegal under international law, but neither nation acknowledges United Nations authority.

Australia’s lame and late, but ill-judged and unnecessary endorsement

After a bit of a pause, Australia intoned its standard grovelling phrases about Israel’s right to defend itself, and endorsed America’s follow-up attack on the basis that Iran should not be allowed to develop a nuclear weapon. It has yet to be established that Iran was actually doing this. Likewise, it has yet to be established that the airstrikes destroyed Iran’s capacity to continue on its merry way, wherever and whatever that is. There was clearly great damage done at the identified test sites, several deep underground, but some evidence that the nuclear fuel had been moved before the strikes.

Australian ministers said they had no advance notice of the airstrikes, but seemed to succumb to demands from the Murdoch newspapers, and their local subsidiary, the Liberal Party, that they hail the........

© Pearls and Irritations