YESTERDAY in London, the five permanent members of the UN Security Council, plus Germany, met to discuss hauling Iran in front of the Security Council so that it can impose sanctions on the country because its government will not give up its nuclear programme.
All of the permanent members of the UN Security Council, the US, UK, China, Russia and France have large scale nuclear programmes and large numbers of nuclear weapons deliverable from the air, land and the sea. They are now starting to produce modified nuclear weapons, down to small battlefield weapons and even smaller nuclear bunker busting bombs. As far as they are concerned, nuclear weaponry of all sorts is here to stay.
All of the permanent members of the UN Security Council, the US, UK, China, Russia and France have large scale nuclear programmes and large numbers of nuclear weapons deliverable from the air, land and the sea. They are now starting to produce modified nuclear weapons, down to small battlefield weapons and even smaller nuclear bunker busting bombs. As far as they are concerned, nuclear weaponry of all sorts is here to stay.
Only the US, with the support of the UK, has actually used nuclear weapons. This was against the Japanese empire in the closing stages of the Second World War. Two Japanese cities were A-bombed, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, with horrific casualties.
The two nuclear attacks were taken by the world as a US-UK warning to Russia that the imperialists had a weapon of mass destruction and that they would not hesitate to use it. In fact, there was a bourgeois faction in the US and the UK that thought, just after the end of the Second World war, that the US should attack Russia before it was able to acquire a nuclear bomb, but the political climate was not right for such an onslaught, so Russia was able to, correctly, acquire nuclear weapons to hold the imperialist powers at bay.
Now the US is determined to permanently bar the road to advanced nuclear technology to all but its closest allies, countries like Israel, Pakistan and India, with Israel being allowed to build up an arsenal of hundreds of nuclear bombs.
Yesterday, the US was seeking to win the support of the Russian and Chinese Stalinist leaders for a diktat, backed by the UN Security Council, barring Iran from even having a nuclear programme, and imposing economic sanctions onto it.
The reason for the action is obvious. The imperialist powers have begun a feverish struggle to grab the vital oil and gas producing areas of the world, in the Middle East, the Gulf and in Central Asia
The last thing that it wants to see is Iran being able, if it is under severe threat from the US, to produce nuclear weapons for its own defence if it is required to do so.
The US and the UK are like heavily armed muggers who insist that they don’t feel safe unless their next victim is completely disarmed.
The prospect is that they will be able to reach agreement with the Russian and Chinese Stalinists, who will seek to get some minor concessions in return, ignoring the fact that Russia and China are still seen by the imperialist powers as their number one enemy.
Then the US-UK will seek to impose sanctions on Iran, as they did to Iraq, to weaken it, economically and politically.
The representative of the heavily armed bandit states, Foreign Secretary Jack Straw, yesterday said: ‘The onus is on Iran to act to give the international community confidence that its nuclear programme has exclusively peaceful purposes – confidence I’m afraid that has been sorely undermined by its history of concealment and deception.’ What he really means is that Iran must prove that it is a slave by giving up its nuclear programme.
After the cowardly and treacherous assault on an Iraq, weakened and bloodied by 13 years of sanctions, there is no assurance that the US-UK can give Iran to convince it that it is not in the greatest danger. Even as we write, Israeli generals and US Republican and Democrat senators are demanding a pre-emptive strike to destroy Iran’s nuclear programme.
The Iranian answer must be supported by the whole world. It is that the nations have awakened and that they, not imperialism, will determine their future.