WEAPONS OF MASS HYPOCRISY
Ross Clark on Israeli
nukes and US research into biological warfare
SO the waiting is over: the most eagerlyawaited publication since Harty Potter and the Goblet of Fire has hit the bookshelves. There was certainly no question that the launch party was a success. Reviews have been flowing in from as far away as Washington and Baghdad. It is just that like many a hyped volume the ordinary reader is left wondering whether Tony Blair's dossier on Saddam Hussein's quest for weapons of mass destruction is quite worth its billing.
Now we know that Saddam is on his way to obtaining missiles capable of creating a splosh in the Mediterranean and that some of his 'pharmaceutical' plants are surrounded by watchtowers and machine guns — a level of security not thought essential at such plants in the West, not even at Pfizer's Viagra factory. We know that Saddam's regime is remarkably keen on promoting the production of castor oil — which can be used to produce the poison ricin, once favoured by umbrella-wielding Bulgarian secret agents. We know that Saddam Hussein has sent his minions on shopping trips to Africa for some uranium, which can't be in order to keep Iraq's non-existent nuclear power stations well stoked (though the dossier omits to mention that the country did have a nuclear programme until its plants were destroyed in the Gulf war, and had had one ever since acquiring the technology from America's Atoms for Peace programme in 1956).
There is enough to be getting on with, then, to suggest that Iraq is tinkering with nuclear, chemical and biological warfare, and that it has broken UN resolutions in doing so. Yet it is difficult to read it without remembering that Saddam is hardly alone in possessing weapons of mass destruction.
Saddam, so the dossier claims, could have a nuclear weapon in one to two years' time. Yet if this is, in itself, a reason for invading, where does that leave the seven nations which already possess the atomic bomb? Though America stopped producing nuclear weapons in 1989, it still possesses 9,600 of them. According to Pentagon estimates in 2000, Russia possesses 5,870 nuclear weapons. Although the number is falling sharply, and is expected to fall to no more than a few hundred by 2005, this has more to do with the fact many are becoming lifeexpired than with strict adherence to the Start II treaty, which the Duma has yet to ratify. Britain possesses 192 nuclear warheads, France 449. China is thought to have up to 250 nuclear missiles, India about ten weapons and Pakistan has enough plutonium for between two and seven nuclear bombs. Like the USA, South Africa ceased its nuclear weapons programme in 1989, but not before it had produced four, and possibly five, bombs. Those, at least, are the declared nuclear states. Israel refuses to admit to having the bomb, but the Federation of American Scientists says that aerial photographs of the Dimona nuclear facility in the Negev desert indicate the existence of 200 warheads.
Like Saddam, Israel went shopping for its uranium in Africa, exchanging it for nuclear technological know-how with the South Africans. Few believe Iran to have nuclear missiles, though it is almost certainly on its way; it has signed a deal with Russia to build five nuclear reactors — a by-product of which is the plutonium needed for nuclear bombs.
It would be peculiar, given all this nuclear activity within a missile's flight of Baghdad, if Saddam Hussein was not concerned with developing his own deterrent — in fact it could well be argued he was being negligent of his people's security if he did not. And while Iraq did sign the nuclear non-proliferation treaty in 1968, the US has not allowed its signing of the anti-ballistic missile treaty to get in the way of its 'Star Wars' project.
Saddam is far from alone, either, in possessing biological and chemical warfare agents. Every country with an active medical research programme has a biological weapons capability. Russia claims to have ceased developing biological weapons with the end of the Cold War, though Dr Ken Alibeck, former deputy director of the USSR's biological warfare programme, claims that more recent experiments into smallpox and Venezuelan equine encephalomyelitis (VEE) at Russia's state research centre for virology and biotechnology in Koltsovo was being undertaken in order to develop offensive weapons. Russian authorities have countered the accusation, claiming that scientists are merely trying to develop a vaccine for VEE in case another country should launch a biological attack on it. But here is the rub: there is such a fine line between research useful for defending yourself against biological attack and that which could be used for launching an attack yourself, and it is extremely difficult even for trained weapons inspectors to tell the difference.
If Saddam were inclined to compile a dossier on the US, it might start by lifting a report which appeared in the New York Times a week before the World Trade Center attacks last year. The paper revealed a remarkable programme of research into biological warfare in American laboratories — an international treaty against which America refuses to sign. The CIA, which had already been fingered in 1975 for failing to destroy biological warfare agents in accordance with a presidential order of 1969, is working on a `bomblef designed for dispersing biological warfare agents. The US Defense Intelligence Agency has attempted to produce a genetically-modified strain of anthrax — carrying on where the Soviet Union's biological warfare programme had left off. And the Defense Department was revealed to be attempting to build a small biological warfare factory — to see whether it could pull it off without being spotted by the CIA or any other sleuths.
All three experiments were explained as 'threat analysis': it was argued the US had to develop biological weapons in order to help it devise a strategy for protecting its own citizens from attack. That may be so, but if Saddam Hussein was discovered conducting similar activities, would the West really buy his explanation that it was all in aid of 'threat analysis'?
None of this should necessarily be taken as an argument against invading Iraq or toppling Saddam Hussein by other means. But it is to say that a fixation on weapons inspections and what goes on in various shady laboratories in the deserts and mountains of Iraq is not the best way to make a case for war, because it also establishes a case for us to attack India, Pakistan, Israel and South Africa, and provides an excuse for any country to attack us. It isn't his possession of weapons which makes Saddam a bad man; it is his attitude towards his neighbours. Since he has already invaded Kuwait and fired Scud missiles at Israel, a country which had not entered into hostilities with him, we do not need to analyse his firepower to conclude that he is a rogue. To adapt a favourite phrase of the American Right, it isn't weapons of mass destruction that kill people; it's people who kill people.
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