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Almost a fortnight ago, President George W. Bush told a
press conference that if you're interested in avoiding
World War III, it seems like you ought to be interested in
preventing them [the Iranis] from having the knowledge
necessary to make a nuclear weapon.
Many pundits criticized the President for being
unnecessarily provocative with his World War III
phrase. Some argue that WW III was the Cold War, so the
current conflict is actually WW IV. Actually, the first
world war -- that is, nations fighting on and across oceans
away from their home continents -- happened from 1756 to
1763, and is generally known as the Seven Years' War
or the French and Indian War.
But recognizing that truth would require considerable re-writing of our history books. Besides, the real issue is that for nearly three decades, the Iranis have demonstrated gross ingratitude for our noble assistance in 1953, when the Central Intelligence Agency replaced their elected prime minister with the corrupt and despotic Shah, who fled in 1979 when his regime collapsed.
Now our president is telling us that Iran must be
prevented from having the knowledge to make a nuclear
weapon.
Let's get real here. If the Iranis don't already have
the knowledge to make a nuclear weapon,
it's only
because they don't want it. Such knowledge has been
available for years.
The United States tried to keep the knowledge secret; the Manhattan Project, with its scientists and engineers isolated at Los Alamos, N.M., had the tightest of security -- and it was still penetrated by Soviet spies. In 1949, just four years after the first American atomic bombs, the Soviet Union detonated one.
The next step was the much more powerful hydrogen bomb; the United States vaporized a Pacific island with a hydrogen bomb on Nov. 1, 1952,. and the Soviets detonated one on Aug. 12, 1953.
So for half a century, there haven't been any real
secrets, and many other nations have constructed
thermonuclear weapons. Some have been advanced industrial
nations, like Great Britain and France. But it's difficult
to say Pakistan
and advanced industrial
nation
in the same sentence with a straight face, and
Pakistan exploded a bomb in 1998.
In 1979, the Progressive Magazine published Howard
Morland's article The H-bomb secret -- how we got it,
why we're telling it.
The federal government sought an
injunction against publication, but dropped the case, in
part because the information was already available. That
article is available on the Internet.
Novelist Tom Clancy started to destroy Denver in his
1991 high-tech thriller, The Sum of All Fears.
But
as the plot developed, only a fictional Skydome Stadium,
hosting the Superbowl, was demolished by a terrorist
thermonuclear bomb (and in the movie, the bomb went off in
Baltimore instead of Denver).
In his afterword, Clancy wrote that All of the
material in this novel relating to weapons technology and
fabrication is readily available in any one of dozens of
books.... certain technical details have been altered,
sacrificing plausibility in the interests of obscurity.
This was done to salve my conscience, not in any reasonable
expectation that it matters a damn.... Science is all in
the public domain, and allows few secrets.
That was more than 16 years ago. Does anyone seriously
believe that this knowledge has become less available since
then? That any reasonably smart teen-ager couldn't acquire
the knowledge necessary to make a nuclear weapon
?
That Iran hasn't had such knowledge for years?
It is traditional for a U.S. president whose poll numbers are low to raise alarms some new foreign threat. But keeping any country from knowing how to build nuclear bombs is akin to putting toothpaste back in the tube. Thwarting an Irani nuclear bomb is one thing; stopping the knowledge is quite another, and totally impossible. If our President feels compelled to fabricate excuses for a war with Iran, he needs to improve his scare tactics.
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