Trump’s Iran Attack Was a Dangerous Showcase of Why Nuclear Apartheid Must End

Over many years, I have had the extraordinary privilege of working with Japanese and other atomic and hydrogen bomb survivors. These are people who have endured and transformed the worst imaginable physical and emotional traumas into the most influential force for nuclear weapons abolition. Their fundamental call is that “human beings and nuclear weapons cannot coexist.”

Their courage, their call, and their steadfast advocacy of nuclear weapons abolition earned them the Nobel Peace Prize last December. In awarding the Hibakusha the Nobel Prize, the Nobel Committee sent the world a powerful message. With the possible exception of the Cuban Missile Crisis, the world is closer to the danger of catastrophic nuclear war than it has ever been, and we must act for nuclear weapons abolition.

There are just over 12,000 nuclear weapons in the nine nuclear weapons state’s stockpiles, 93% in the U.S. and Russian arsenals. The average strategic, or hydrogen, bomb is 20 times more powerful than he Hiroshima A-bomb, and some have been 1,000 times the power of the two comparatively small A-bombs that destroyed those two cities, killing 200,000 people almost immediately, and hundreds of thousands more as a result of radiation diseases.

As with the 1953 CIA led coup that overthrew Iran’s democratic Mosaddeq government, the attack’s negative impacts will be long lasting.

As Daniel Ellsberg, who was the principal author of Presidents John F. Kennedy’s and Lyndon Johnson’s nuclear warfighting doctrines, testified, the U.S. has repeatedly threatened to initiate nuclear war during wars and international crises. Presidents have used them in the same way that an armed robber uses a gun when it points it at his victim’s head. Whether or not the trigger is pulled, the gun has been used. In my book Empire and the Bomb, I documented about 30 times that U.S. presidents have done this, most frequently to reinforce U.S. hegemony in the Middle East and Asia.

Each of the other nine nuclear weapons states has prepared and threatened to initiate nuclear war at least once. Russian President Vladimir Putin has used the U.S. nuclear playbook in his war in Ukraine.

I’ve been asked to say a little about the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, one of the seminal treaties of the 20th century. Iran signed it, but following U.S. President Donald Trump’s attack on Iran’s nuclear infrastructure, the Iranian parliament has voted to stop cooperating with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and there is talk of leaving the treaty altogether. Israel refused to sign the treaty and lives outside its obligations.

In the 1960s, the U.S. and the Soviet Union recognized that the science creating nuclear weapons was no longer beyond the reach of many countries. They feared that as many as 40 countries could develop nuclear weapons by the end of the 20th century. The treaty they negotiated with the vast majority of the world’s nations rests on three pillars: Nonnuclear weapons states forswear becoming nuclear powers and have the right to develop and use nuclear power for peaceful purposes—a flaw in the treaty. Article VI of the treaty obligated the initial five nuclear powers to engage in good-faith negotiations for the complete elimination of nuclear weapons: creating a nuclear weapons-free world.

I have had the privilege of working with several Nobel Peace Prize recipients. Joseph Rotblat, the only senior scientist who resigned from the Manhattan Project because of his moral objections, was clear that because no nation will long tolerate an unequal balance of power—in this case terror—unless nuclear weapons are abolished, proliferation and the nuclear war that would followed are inevitable. Mohamed ElBaradei, who led the IAEA, decried the double standard of nuclear apartheid. Like Rotblat, he insisted that the only way forward was nuclear weapons abolition.

And on the question of double standards, our government and media have long and consciously turned blind eyes to the one nuclear weapons state in the Middle East: Israel. Few know that during the 1973 war, Golda Meir threatened to use Israel’s “Temple Weapons” to extort Henry Kissinger to open the floodgates of weapons and spare parts to turn the tide of the war.

Do not forget that the bombings were grossly unconstitutional and should be grounds for an impeachment. Only Congress has the legal right to declare war.

Counterproductively, Trump’s and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s war on Iran may hasten Iran becoming a nuclear weapons state. This in turn would trigger nuclear weapons proliferation across the Middle East. We need to remember the fatwa stating that possession of nuclear weapons is contrary to Islam. But we should also acknowledge the Shiite tradition of continuing revelation—not unlike the Mormons here in the U.S. Enriching uranium to 60%, almost to weapons grade, was certainly not necessary for nuclear power generation.

But diplomacy, not war, was and remains the way.

As some initially feared, the Iranian government apparently moved some of its fissile materials from Natanz and Fordow before the attacks. And contrary to President Trump’s claims that he obliterated Iran’s nuclear project, and pathetically that the bombing was equivalent to the Hiroshima A-bombing, the Pentagon reports that they do not know how much or where enriched uranium is now stored, if the fissile materials remain accessible should Iran now opt to develop a nuclear arsenal, or what if any radioactive fallout has occurred. And with Iran’s foreign minister traveling to Moscow, the multi-dimensional Iranian-Russian-Chinese-North Korean alignment may have been strengthened by the U.S. attack and lead to future nuclear collaboration between Teheran and Moscow.

The attacks will spur nuclear weapons proliferation. Knowledge about how to build a nuclear weapon has not been eliminated, and the attacks will likely redouble Iranian will to build a nuclear weapon, at the very least to defend its independence. Other nations will take the lesson that their sovereignty and independence require having a retaliatory nuclear arsenal, as was the case in North Korea.

As with the 1953 CIA led coup that overthrew Iran’s democratic Mosaddeq government, the attack’s negative impacts will be long lasting. Coming in the tradition of that coup, of U.S. support for Iraq in its calamitous 1980s war to overthrow the Iranian government, and Trump’s withdrawal from the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action nuclear agreement, the U.S. attack on Iran’s nuclear infrastructure came a day before scheduled negotiations. This reinforces the lesson that the U.S. cannot be trusted, and the loss of trust in the U.S. word and commitments will not be limited to Iran. It is being learned or relearned by the nations and people of the world, with negative consequences for the U.S. people for decades to come.

Do not forget that the bombings were grossly unconstitutional and should be grounds for an impeachment. Only Congress has the legal right to declare war.

The bombings were gross violations of international law. They undermine the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and the increasingly fragile post WWII United Nations charter order. A world in which there is no respect for law and diplomacy opens the way to international chaos, autocracies, wars, and devastating human suffering.

Even as we must rally to prevent renewed and widening war and press for nuclear disarmament and abolition, we must not be diverted from the urgent work of stopping Israel’s brutal genocide in Gaza, its attacks across the West Bank, for an Israeli-Iranian cease-fire, and for a just and sustainable Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement. Common security is the only path and foundation for Israeli, Palestinian, and Middle East peace and security.

No War with Iran!

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