America's Shocking Nuclear Hypocrisy

[babylonsister]

America's Shocking Nuclear Hypocrisy

By Tad Daley, AlterNet. Posted November 9, 2007.

America's standard for saying which countries can have nuclear weapons is simple: Countries we like can have them. Countries we dislike can't.


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.

more...

http://alternet.org/audits/67368/?page=entire