Other articles in the Prospect online symposium on the Iranian nuclear crisis: Philip Gordon explains why the US is unlikely to bomb Iran |
The struggle with Iran over nuclear issues is usually portrayed in the west as a reasonable effort to force Iran to comply with its international agreements. But the agreement at stake here, the non-proliferation treaty (NPT), is not as straightforward as it seems. What we are also witnessing is the playing out of a US controversy dating back to 1967, when the father of US nuclear doctrine, Albert Wohlstetter, made a speech in which he argued darkly that: “An essential trouble with nuclear ploughshares… is that they can be beaten into nuclear swords.”
When the NPT came into force in 1970, the central bargain was between the five nuclear-weapon powers on one hand, and the non-nuclear states on the other. The have-nots agreed to renounce their right to weapons, but only in return for the right to develop the peaceful use of nuclear energy. At the core of the NPT is Article IV, which gives all signatories the “inalienable right… to develop, research, produce and use nuclear energy for peaceful purposes” and to acquire technology to this effect from fellow signatories. Equally important, in return for the have-nots’ renunciation of weapons, the “haves” agreed not to use their stocks of weapons to blackmail the have-nots, and ultimately to get rid of their weapons (Article VI). These are the two pillars of the non-proliferation system.
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