How a Nuclear First Strike Would Change the World

Billmon nails it: 

One can assume (or at least hope) that first use of nuclear weapons would turn America into an international pariah, at least in the eyes of global public opinion. It would certainly mark the definitive end of the system of collective security – and the laws and institutions supporting that system – established in the wake of World War II. The UN Security Council would be rendered as pointless as the old League of Nations. The Nuremberg Principles would be as moot as the Geneva Conventions. (To the neocons, of course, these are all pluses.)...

The current hegemony of American influence and ideas (backed by overwhelming military force) would be replaced by an overt dictatorship based – more or less explicitly – on fear of nuclear annihilation. U.S. foreign policy would become nothing more than a variation on the ancient Roman warning: For every one of our dead; 100 of yours. Never again would American rulers (or their foreign counterparts) be able to hide behind the comfortable fiction that the United States is just primus inter pares – first among equals. A country that nukes other countries merely on the suspicion that they may pose a future security threat isn't the equal of anybody. America would stand completely alone: hated by many, feared by all, admired only by the world’s other tyrants. To call that a watershed event seems a ridiculous understatement.

So how serious are the Busheviks about using nuclear weapons against Iran? Very serious, according to Seymour Hersh, who went into significant depth on the topic with Amy Goodman, starting with the Science Defense Board:

The board is headed by a guy named Dr. Bill Schneider, William Schneider, a former -- very conservative guy, very outspoken. Schneider is among a small group of very influential members of the Bush government, who in 2001 produced a paper, just as Bush was coming into office for the first term, they produced a paper advocating or saying, ‘Let's not rule out the use of nuclear weapons. There is a need for tactical nuclear weapons, and they should be in the arsenal and accepted as a rational part of the arsenal, particularly when you're going after hard targets like the underground nuclear facilities in North Korea and Iran, if you were to target them.’

And the people that signed that report include Schneider, as I say, but also Stephen Hadley, who is now the National Security Adviser, Stephen Cambone, who’s the head of the intelligence for the Pentagon and one of Rumsfeld's closest advisers, and also Robert Joseph, who’s the Under Secretary of State for Nonproliferation Affairs, the man who replaced John Bolton in that job and who's been very much a hawk and very tough on Iran in public and even tougher in private. And so, you have these very influential people advocating that tactical nukes have some sense and some bearing in the policy.

And I've been told that in the last few months a debate has been sort of ongoing inside the highest levels of the military, and the debate is simply between those senior generals and admirals -- who think using and even planning or talking about using a nuclear weapon in Iran is wacko -- and the White House, because the White House wants it kept in the plan. There's a lot of tension there. But in any case, the science board has been sending papers in saying, ‘Hey, you know, we can tool this weapon up and down.’ The B61, apparently, the yield can be adjusted. You can get more bang for the buck, a larger yield with less radioactive fallout. And so, these kind of papers go on.

What's interesting, Amy, is in all of the conversations we've had about bombing and not bombing and whether to use weapons, what weapon or how much bombing, as, not surprisingly, I don't think there's been any serious discussion of possible civilian casualties. That never seems to be discussed in any of these papers, but that's the way it is.

Hersh also described the way the U.S. is pressuring the IAEA and its director, Mohamed ElBaradei:

it's been taken away from the I.A.E.A., I must say to the disappointment and probably anger, definitely anger, of the leadership there, because at least the I.A.E.A. has inspectors in some legal right to be inside Iran right now. And they've taken it to the U.N., where there’s, you know -- are there going to be sanctions or not? I mean, I don't know what kind of economic sanctions you can put on a country that puts out four million barrels of oil a day, and they're swimming in U.S. dollars. And, of course, everybody knows inside, all of the people involved know, that Russia and China will never go along. It's almost inconceivable they will go along with sanctions. China is one of the recipients of oil. Russia does a lot of business there. So, basically you’ve put yourself in a situation where you've got a dead end. And you know it's going to be a dead end, at least you can anticipate. It could change. Something could happen, but at this point, it's a dead end. And so, the parallel is obvious.

Everybody I talk to, the hawks I talk to, the neoconservatives, the people who are very tough absolutely say there's no way the U.N. is going to work, and we're just going to have to assume it doesn’t in any way. Iran, by going along with the U.N., what they're really doing is rushing their nuclear program. And so, the skepticism -- there's no belief, faith here, ultimately, in this White House, in the extent of the talk, so you've got a parallel situation. The President could then say, ‘We've explored all options. We've done it.’ I could add, if you want to get even more scared, some of our closest allies in this process -- we deal with the Germans, the French and the Brits -- they're secretly very worried, not only what Bush wants to do, but they're also worried that -- for example, the British Foreign Officer, Jack Straw, is vehemently against any military action, of course also nuclear action, and so is the Foreign Office, as I said, but nobody knows what will happen if Bush calls Blair. Blair's the wild card in this. He and Bush both have this sense, this messianic sense, I believe, about what they've done and what's needed to be done in the Middle East. I think Bush is every bit as committed into this world of rapture, as is the president.

AMY GOODMAN: Sy Hersh, you write about a meeting in Vienna between Mohamed El Baradei, the Nobel Peace Prize winner and head of the I.A.E.A., and Robert Joseph, the Under Secretary of State for Arms Control, and the relationship between El Baradei and the United States.

SEYMOUR HERSH: Well, Joseph basically was, you know, essentially just -- I heard a lot about it, because it was pretty blustery. And he just went in and basically told off the head of the -- the Nobel Prize winner and said, you know, ‘You will stop--’ The European and American complaint against El Baradei is this: they say, ‘My God, he's treating this issue as if both sides have some justification, that Iran's aspirations equal the American and European's desire not for them to go nuclear. He's treating them both as parodies. And they're not. We're right, and they're wrong, and he doesn't reflect that.’ So they think he's unfair. They think he's being too balanced, too nuanced, and that was the message that Joseph gave, basically, with a significant loss of temper, or let's put it, “intemperate” behavior, basically saying, ‘You will desist from saying anything that interferes with us. We view this as our gravest national security threat.’

I can also tell you Joseph has said the same thing in Turkey to the Turkish officials. He went there, and they also reported a very boisterous meeting. And the American ambassador to the International Atomic Energy Agency is a guy named Greg Schulte, who was until last summer, August of 2005, was in charge of the Situation Room in the White House, and who from 1988 to 1992 worked for -- he's a career diplomat, but worked -- a career bureaucrat. He’s not in the diplomatic service. He worked for Dick Cheney, when he was Secretary of Defense, now the Vice President, and did nuclear stuff for him. So he's very connected to the vice President. He's also quite direct and not very diplomatic in what he believes, and it’s, you know, it’s ‘They're bad guys, we're good guys,’ that sort of approach. There's no instinct.