America's Shocking Nuclear Hypocrisy

Some call it "America's nuclear hypocrisy." Others call it the "nuclear double standard," others still our "nuclear narcissism." Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, echoing the phrase used by Indian Foreign Minister Jaswant Singh at the time of his own country's nuclear tests in 1998, often calls it "nuclear apartheid." But it has rarely been expressed as baldly as it was during the last days of October 2007.

It started with two passings. Paul Tibbets, commander of the U.S. Army Air Forces B-29, which dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima on Aug. 6, 1945, that killed at least 80,000 people, and Randall Forsberg, the genius behind the 1982 Central Park nuclear freeze rally, which the New York Times, in her obituary, called the largest political demonstration in American history, both died -- with exquisite irony -- within just a few days of each other.

As if that didn't illustrate enough the tensions of the nuclear age, two separate Bush administration officials -- U.N. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad and deputy State Department spokesman Tom Casey -- made simultaneous remarks the day before Tibbets died that illuminated the nuclear double standard more starkly than ever.

This time it was not, as it usually is, the divergence between the rules of the game for countries like Iran (nuclear weapons permitted: zero) and for countries like ourselves (nuclear weapons presently possessed: 10,000-plus ... with concrete plans already unrolling to design, develop and deploy new and improved nuclear weapon models fully a third of a century down the road).

No, this time it was the double standard between our expectations for countries we like and those for countries we don't like.

First, on Oct. 29, Khalilzad repeated the formulation about Iran that has been expressed many times by many Bush administration voices. "Given the record of this regime, the rhetoric of this regime, the policies of this regime, the connections of this regime, it cannot be acceptable for it to develop the capability to produce nuclear weapons." It was a wearyingly familiar argument. Our assessment of the character of the Iranian regime determines whether we will permit them to pursue a nuclear "capability."

But on the same day that Khalilzad made his statement, America's good friend Egypt announced that it intended to build several new nuclear power plants over the next several decades. Washington was quick to indicate that it did not disapprove. "Any country that fulfills its obligations under the NPT and follows proper IAEA safeguards will have a program that is perfectly acceptable to us," said Casey (emphasis added). "They're fully within their rights to go that way."

The two remarks are well worth parsing. It is true that Iran, illegally, kept many nuclear activities secret from the IAEA for many years. It is a matter of some debate whether Tehran is fully cooperating with the IAEA now.

But the Bush administration's standard for Iran has never been simply that it must fully cooperate with the IAEA. It demands, instead, that Tehran cease all uranium enrichment -- the crucial element for the development of both nuclear power and nuclear weapons. The essential administration position, in fact, which (military action or not) it will unlikely abandon before the end of its term, is that it will not even negotiate directly with Iran until Iran first concedes the central issue of any negotiation.

Had Khalilzad said "develop nuclear weapons" instead of "develop the capability to produce nuclear weapons," he would perhaps not have found himself standing on such very thin ice. But the NPT forbids non-nuclear signatories like Iran and Egypt from acquiring nuclear weapons, not from acquiring the enrichment capabilities that can be used for both nuclear power and nuclear weapons. On the contrary, Article IV explicitly acknowledges that all parties possess an "inalienable right" to pursue nuclear energy "without discrimination."