Nuking Iran II: The Geopolitics of American Suicide

In an interview with CNN, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said that Iran is months away from developing a nuclear weapon, not the five to ten years that most experts estimate. He said that while Israel is not comtemplating unilateral military action, he “expressed confidence” that President Bush “will lead other nations in taking the necessary measures to stop Iran from becoming a nuclear power.”

We don’t know if Olmert urged military action when he met with Bush Tuesday, or even if this is a message already coordinated with the White House, but the spectre of U.S. bombing of Iran in the near future must again be faced.

Presumably, planners are anticipating possible military and geopolitical responses to bombing targets in Iraq. But is anyone thinking about the geopolitical consequences of one possible aspect of such an attack: the use of nuclear weapons?

Because this act is in itself highly consequential. If it were to happen, it could well mark the beginning of the end of the U.S. as a world power, and certainly change how this country is viewed in the world, forever. The reasons are found in history, and in the intensity of the response to nuclear weapons.

In a previous essay, I wrote about the realities of radiation, and the policy of secrecy and lies that masked these realities. Today the subject just isn’t talked about. Nor is the subject of this essay: the moral and geopolitical dimensions of the specific act of using nukes, even the so-called bunker-busters of relatively small yield (though they may be far larger than the Hiroshima bomb.)

The atomic bomb was “invented” by the same person who invented the armored tank, trench warfare, the bombing of cities from the air, suburban sprawl, the Blitz, television news and the Time Machine. Though the first such Bomb would not be built and exploded until 1945, H.G. Wells foresaw-—and named—the atomic bomb in 1913, in a novel called “The World Set Free.”

This novel, written before World War I, was not just remarkably prescient. It actually affected the real development of the atomic bomb.

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