Here's George's latest article - and you'll KNOW I totally concur - and THEN a list of his nuclear articles - and THEN a great review he did of The Road Well Travelled. Enjoy or Don't, but try to read it.
Ban the Bomb - But Only in Iran
When will Bush and Brown acknowledge that there is already a nuclear power in the Middle East?
By George Monbiot. Published in the Guardian 20th November 2007
George Bush and Gordon Brown are right: there should be no nuclear weapons in the Middle East. The risk of a nuclear conflagration could be greater there than anywhere else. Any nation developing them should expect a firm diplomatic response. So when will they impose sanctions on Israel?
Like them, I believe that Iran is trying to acquire the bomb. I also believe it should be discouraged, by a combination of economic pressure and bribery, from doing so (a military response would of course be disastrous). I believe that Bush and Brown - who maintain their nuclear arsenals in defiance of the non-proliferation treaty - are in no position to lecture anyone else. But if, as Mr Bush claims, the proliferation of such weapons “would be a dangerous threat to world peace”(1), why does neither man mention the fact that Israel, according to a secret briefing by the US Defense Intelligence Agency, possesses between 60 and 80 of them?(2)
Officially, the Israeli government maintains a position of “nuclear ambiguity”: neither confirming nor denying its possession of nuclear weapons. But everyone who has studied the issue knows that this is a formula with a simple purpose: to give the United States an excuse to keep breaking its own laws, which forbid it to grant aid to a country with unauthorised weapons of mass destruction(3). The fiction of ambiguity is fiercely guarded. In 1986, when the nuclear technician Mordechai Vanunu handed photographs of Israel’s bomb factory to the Sunday Times, he was lured from Britain to Rome, drugged and kidnapped by Mossad agents, tried in secret and sentenced to 18 years. He served 12 of them in solitary confinement and was banged up again - for six months - soon after he was released.
But in December last year, the Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert accidentally let slip that Israel, like “America, France and Russia” had nuclear weapons(4). Opposition politicians were furious. They attacked him for “a lack of caution bordering on irresponsibility.”(5) But US aid continues to flow without impediment.
As the fascinating papers released last year by the National Security Archive show, the US government was aware in 1968 that Israel was developing a nuclear device (what it didn’t know is that the first one had already been built by then).(6) The contrast to the efforts now being made to prevent Iran from acquiring the bomb could scarcely be starker.
At first, US diplomats urged the government to make its sale of 50 F4 Phantom jets conditional on Israel’s abandonment of its nuclear programme. As a note sent from the Near East Bureau to the Secretary of State in October 1968 reveals, the order would make the US “the principal supplier of Israel’s military needs” for the first time. In return it should require “commitments that would make it more difficult for Israel to take the critical decision to go nuclear.”(7) Such pressure, the memo suggested, was urgently required: France had just delivered the first of a consignment of medium range missiles, and Israel intended to equip them with nuclear warheads.
Twenty days later, on November 4th 1968, when the assistant defense secretary met Yitzhak Rabin (then the Israeli ambassador to Washington), Rabin “did not dispute in any way our information on Israel’s nuclear or missile capability”(8). He simply refused to discuss it. Four days after that, Rabin announced that the proposal was “completely unacceptable to us”(9). On November 27th, Lyndon Johnson’s administration accepted Israel’s assurance that “it will not be the first power in the Middle East to introduce nuclear weapons”(10).
As the memos show, US officials knew that this assurance had been broken even before it was made. A record of a phone conversation between Henry Kissinger and another official in July 1969 reveals that Richard Nixon was “very leary of cutting off the Phantoms”(11), despite Israel’s blatant disregard of the agreement. The deal went ahead, and from then on the US administration sought to bamboozle its own officials in order to defend Israel’s lie. In August 1969, US officials were sent to “inspect” Israel’s Dimona nuclear plant. But a memo from the State Department reveals that “the US government is not prepared to support a “real” inspection effort in which the team members can feel authorised to ask directly pertinent questions and/or insist on being allowed to look at records, logs, materials and the like. The team has in many subtle ways been cautioned to avoid controversy, “be gentlemen” and not take issue with the obvious will of the hosts.”(12) Nixon refused to pass the minutes of the conversation he’d had with the Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir to the US Ambassador To Israel, Wally Barbour(13). Meir and Nixon appear to have agreed that the Israeli programme could go ahead, as long as it was kept secret.
The US government has continued to protect it. Every six months, the intelligence agencies provide Congress with a report on technology acquired by foreign states that’s “useful for the development or production of weapons of mass destruction.” These reports discuss the programmes in India, Pakistan, North Korea, Iran and other nations, but not in Israel(14). Whenever other states have tried to press Israel to join the nuclear non-proliferation treaty, the US and European governments have blocked them(15). Israel has also exempted itself from the biological and chemical weapons conventions(16).
By refusing to sign these treaties, it ensures that it needs never be inspected. While the IAEA’s inspectors crawl round Iran’s factories, put seals on its uranium tanks and blow the whistle when it fails to cooperate, they have no legal authority to inspect facilities in Israel(17). So when the Israeli government complains, as it did last week, that the head of the IAEA is “sticking his head in the sand over Iran’s nuclear programme”(18), you can only gape at its chutzpah. Israel is constantly racking up the pressure for action against Iran, aware that no powerful state will press for action against Israel.
Yes, Iran under Ahmadinejad is a dangerous and unpredictable state involved in acts of terror abroad. The president is a Holocaust denier opposed to the existence of Israel. During the Iran-Iraq war, Iran responded to Saddam Hussein’s toxic bombardments with chemical weapons of its own. But Israel under Ehud Olmert is also a dangerous and unpredictable state involved in acts of terror abroad. Two months ago it bombed a site in Syria (whose function is fiercely disputed). Last year it launched a war of aggression against Lebanon. It remains in occupation of Palestinian lands. In February 2001, according to the BBC, it used chemical weapons in Gaza: 180 people were admitted to hospital with severe convulsions(19). Nuclear weapons in Israel’s hands are surely just as dangerous as nuclear weapons in Iran’s.
So when will our governments speak up? When will they acknowledge that there is already a nuclear power in the Middle East, and that it presents an existential threat to its neighbours? When will they admit that Iran is not starting a nuclear arms race, but joining one? When will they demand that the rules they impose on Iran should also apply to Israel?
www.monbiot.com
References:
1. George Bush, 17th October 2007. Press Conference by the President. http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2007/10/20071017.html
2. US DIA, July 1999. The Decades Ahead, 1999-202. Extracted at: http://www.fas.org/nuke/guide/israel/nuke/index.html
3. Luke Harding and Duncan Campbell, 13th December 2006. The Guardian.
4. Greg Myre, 12th December 2006. In a Slip, Israel’s Leader Seems to Confirm Its Nuclear Arsenal. New York Times.
5. Yossi Beilin, quoted by Luke Harding and Duncan Campbell, ibid.
6. The archive can be viewed here: http://www.gwu.edu:80/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB189/index.htm
7. Parker T. Hart, NEA, 15th October 1968. Memo to the Secretary of State. http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB189/IN-02.pdf
8. Department of Defense, 4th November 1968. Memorandum of Conversation. http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB189/IN-03a.pdf
9. Department of Defense, 8th November 1968. Memorandum of Conversation. http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB189/IN-03b.pdf
10. Paul C Warnke, Assistant Secretary of Defense, 27th November 1968. Letter to Yitzhak Rabin. http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB189/IN-03d.pdf
11. Henry Kissinger and Elliot Richardson, 16th July 1969. Phone conversation. http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB189/IN-12.pdf
12. Department of State, 13th August 1969. Memorandum of Conversation. http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB189/IN-16b.pdf
13. Harold H. Saunders, the White House, 8th December 1969. Record of the President’s Talk with Golda Meir. http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB189/IN-26.pdf
14. Joseph Cirincione, 11th March 2005. Iran and Israel’s Nuclear Weapons.
http://www.theglobalist.com/StoryId.aspx?StoryId=3217
15. No author given, 20th September 2006. Arab states urge IAEA to slam Israel for atomic arsenal. Haaretz.
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/765538.html
16. It has signed but not ratified the CWC. It has not signed the BWC.
17. Mohamed ElBaradei, 27th July 2004. Interview with Al-Ahram News. http://www.iaea.org/NewsCenter/Transcripts/2004/alahram27072004.html
18. Shaul Mofaz, deputy prime minister, quoted by Tim Butcher,12th November 2007. Israel calls for sacking of IAEA’s ElBaradei. Daily Telegraph.
19. Correspondent, 17th March 2003. Israel’s Secret Weapon. BBC Two. http://news.bbc.co.uk/nol/shared/spl/hi/programmes/correspondent/transcripts/17_03_2003.txt
Thanks, But We Still Don’t Need It
Some of the arguments against nuclear power are no longer valid, but it remains the wrong technology.
How Much Energy Do We Have?
Are there enough renewables to keep the lights on? The answer will be comforting to no one.
The Treaty Wreckers
In just a few months, Bush and Blair have destroyed the global restraint on nuclear weapons
Proliferation Treaty
Of course Iran wants the bomb, and the international system has given it everything it needs to build one.
Dirty Bombs Waiting for a Detonator
The British ships about to pick up a consignment of plutonium present one of the gravest of all threats to global security.
Read more »
Secret Dumping
Britain’s hidden nuclear crisis is beginning to resemble Russia’s
Read more »
Are we already shutting our minds to the consequences of climate change?
By George Monbiot. Published in the Guardian 30th October 2007
A few weeks ago I read what I believe is the most important environmental book ever written. It is not Silent Spring, Small is Beautiful or even Walden. It contains no graphs, no tables, no facts, figures, warnings, predictions or even arguments. Nor does it carry a single dreary sentence, which, sadly, distinguishes it from most environmental literature. It is a novel, first published a year ago, and it will change the way you see the world.
Cormac McCarthy’s book The Road considers what would happen if the world lost its biosphere, and the only living creatures were humans, hunting for food among the dead wood and soot. Some years before the action begins, the protagonist hears the last birds passing over, “their half-muted crankings miles above where they circled the earth as senselessly as insects trooping the rim of a bowl.”(1) McCarthy makes no claim that this is likely to occur, but merely speculates about the consequences.
All pre-existing social codes soon collapse and are replaced with organised butchery, then chaotic, blundering horror. What else are the survivors to do?: the only remaining resource is human. It is hard to see how this could happen during humanity’s time on earth, even by means of the nuclear winter McCarthy proposes. But his thought experiment exposes the one terrible fact to which our technological hubris blinds us: our dependence on biological production remains absolute. Civilisation is just a russeting on the skin of the biosphere, never immune from being rubbed against the sleeve of environmental change. Six weeks after finishing The Road, I remain haunted by it.
So when I read the UN’s new report on the state of the planet over the weekend, my mind kept snagging on a handful of figures(2). There were some bright spots - lead has been removed from petrol almost everywhere, sulphur emissions have been reduced in most rich nations - and plenty of gloom. But the issue that stopped me was production.
Crop production has improved over the past 20 years (from 1.8 tonnes per hectare in the 1980s to 2.5 tonnes today), but it has not kept up with population. “World cereal production per person peaked in the 1980s, and has since slowly decreased “(3). There will be roughly 9 billion people by 2050: feeding them and meeting the millennium development goal on hunger (halving the proportion of hungry people) would require a doubling of world food production(4). Unless we cut waste, overeating, biofuels and the consumption of meat, total demand for cereal crops could rise to three times the current level(5).
There are two limiting factors. One, mentioned only in passing in the report, is phosphate: it is not clear where future reserves might lie. The more immediate problem is water. “Meeting the Millennium Development Goal on hunger will require doubling of water use by crops by 2050.”(6) Where will it come from? “Water scarcity is already acute in many regions, and farming already takes the lion’s share of water withdrawn from streams and groundwater.”(7) One-tenth of the world’s major rivers no longer reach the sea all round the year(8).
Buried on page 148, I found this statement. “If present trends continue, 1.8 billion people will be living in countries or regions with absolute water scarcity by 2025, and two thirds of the world population could be subject to water stress.” Wastage and deforestation are partly to blame, but the biggest cause of the coming droughts is climate change. Rainfall will decline most in the places in greatest need of water. So how, unless we engineer a sudden decline in carbon emissions, is the world to be fed? How, in many countries, will we prevent the social collapse that failure will cause?
The stone drops into the pond and a second later it is smooth again. You will turn the page and carry on with your life. Last week we learnt that climate change could eliminate half the world’s species(9); that 25 primate species are already slipping into extinction(10); that biological repositories of carbon are beginning to release it, decades ahead of schedule(11). But everyone is watching and waiting for everyone else to move. The unspoken universal thought is this: “if it were really so serious, surely someone would do something?”
On Saturday, for some light relief from the UN report (who says that environmentalists don’t know how to make whoopee?), I went to a meeting of roads protesters in Birmingham. They had come from all over the country, and between them they were contesting 18 new schemes: a fraction of the road projects the British government is now planning(12). The improvements to the climate change bill that Hilary Benn, the environment secretary, anounced yesterday were welcome. But in every major energy sector - aviation, transport, power generation, house building, coal mining, oil exploration - the government is promoting policies that will increase emissions. How will it make the 60% cut the bill enforces?
No one knows, but the probable answer is contained in the bill’s great get-out clause: carbon trading(13). If the government can’t achieve a 60% cut in the UK, it will pay other countries to do it on our behalf. But trading works only if the total global reduction we are trying to achieve is a small one. To prevent runaway climate change, we must cut the greater part - possibly almost all - of the world’s current emissions. Most of the nations with which the UK will trade will have to make major cuts of their own, on top of those they sell to us. Before long we will have to buy our credits from Mars and Jupiter. The only certain means of preventing runaway climate change is to cut emissions here and now.
Who will persuade us to act? However strong the opposition parties’ policies appear to be, they cannot be sustained unless the voters move behind them. We won’t be prompted by the media. The BBC drops Planet Relief for fear of breaching its impartiality guidelines: heaven forbid that it should come out against mass death. But it broadcasts a programme - Top Gear - that puts a match to its guidelines every week, and now looks about as pertinent as the Black and White Minstrel Show. The schedules are crammed with shows urging us to travel further, drive faster, build bigger, buy more, yet none of them are deemed to offend the rules, which really means that they don’t offend the interests of business or the pampered sensibilities of the Aga class. The media, driven by fear and advertising, is hopelessly biased towards the consumer economy and against the biosphere.
It seems to me that we are already pushing other people ahead of us down The Road. As the biosphere shrinks, McCarthy describes the collapse of the protagonist’s core beliefs(14). I sense that this might be happening already: that a hardening of interests, a shutting down of concern, is taking place among the people of the rich world. If this is true, we do not need to wait for the forests to burn or food supplies to shrivel before we decide that civilisation is in trouble.
www.monbiot.com
References:
1. Cormac McCarthy, 2007. The Road, p55. Picador, London.
2. United Nations Environment Programme, 2007. Global Environment Outlook: GEO4. http://www.unep.org/geo/geo4/report/GEO-4_Report_Full_en.pdf
3. ibid, p86.
4. ibid, p110.
5. ibid, p110.
6. ibid, p83.
7. ibid, p110.
8. ibid, p99.
9. Alok Jha, 24th October 2007. Warming could wipe out half of all species. The Guardian.
10. James Randerson, 26th October 2007. The edge of oblivion: conservationists name 25 primates about to disappear. The Guardian.
11. David Adam, 23rd October 2007. Carbon output rising faster than forecast, says study. The Guardian.
12. The organisation RoadBlock, which convened the conference, has lists of the government’s new trunk road schemes. http://www.roadblock.org.uk/
13. HM Government, March 2007. Draft Climate Change Bill. http://www.official-documents.gov.uk/document/cm70/7040/7040.pdf
14. p93.
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