JOHN CHUCKMAN COMMENT: TURKEY'S ERDOGAN SPEAKS ABOUT DEVELOPING NUCLEAR WEAPONS - REAL INCENTIVES FOR NON-NUCLEAR COUNTRIES - NO ONE ATTACKS NUCLEAR STATES AND THEY CAN'T BE BLACKMAILED - MANY PARADOXES AND MUCH HYPOCRISY IN HISTORY OF NON-PROLIFERATION EFFORTS BY MAJOR POWERS - THE GLARING EXAMPLE OF ISRAEL'S PAST PARTNERSHIP WITH NATIONALIST SOUTH AFRICA

John Chuckman


COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE BY TYLER DURDEN IN RUSSIA INSIDER



“Oriental Perfidity: Erdogan Blasts Non-Proliferation, Promises Turkish Nukes

“Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan suggested Turkey should seek its own nuclear weapons”



Erdogan, of course, has some valid points.

The situation around nuclear weapons carries with it some of our era's greatest paradoxes and hypocrisies.

Those major powers with nuclear weapons busy themselves telling those without them that they cannot ever have them.

Despite all the high-blown language about non-proliferation and disarmament and peace, are those efforts anything other than preserving a monopoly or cartel?

And the effort by the nuclear powers has been quite inconsistent over the years.

We have the glaring and often bizarre case of Israel. We know to a certainty that it has an arsenal.

We even saw photos of the production facility from Israeli whistleblower Mordechai Vanunu in the 1980s.

Jimmy Carter - an expert as a nuclear engineer, former nuclear sub commander, and President - even told us a few years back just how many Israel has. He said they had about ninety warheads and enough additional fissile material to build another sixty or so.

Yet, we are ready to go to war over anyone else in that region who even seriously thinks of building them, leaving all those countries under permanent threat and blackmail from Israel. Is that really the American intention?

Israel, too, was the first great proliferator with its secret assistance to apartheid South Africa to build a small nuclear arsenal, and it never suffered the least censure or blame. Israel highly valued South Africa as a supplier of strategic materials and worked quite closely with them to secure supplies

In 1975, we know from a top-secret letter signed by Shimon Peres - who is called the father of Israel’s nuclear weapons program - released by South Africa in recent years, Israel actually offered to sell an entire “package” to the Nationalist government.

Instead, South Africa built its own uranium upgrading plant, undoubtedly with Israeli technical assistance. It eventually constructed a small arsenal, on the order of six warheads.

In 1977-78, South Africa is said to have supplied Israel with about six hundred tons of uranium. A portion of that was in exchange for 30 grams of tritium gas, something used to help fuel thermonuclear (H-bomb) warheads.

In 1979, a special purpose American spy satellite detected the characteristic flash of a nuclear explosion near some South African islands in the Indian Ocean. Surprisingly, the United States government denied that the event had been a nuclear explosion, a fact adding to speculation that the test was a joint South African-Israeli test.

There is no way the United States hadn’t known what was going on between Israel and South Africa.

But the United States never took any action. Washington was always interested quietly in preserving the Nationalists owing to the belief in their being a bulwark against communism. And, of course, they were helping Israel, a country always receiving special treatment from America.

In the early 1990s, South Africa, under what had grown to great international pressure and with a more open-minded president, F W de Klerk, effectively dissolved its former government, and in 1994, its nuclear weapons were dismantled by international experts.

There has always been a mystery around just where the South African fissile material went. It has been claimed that went covertly to Israel.

Then we have the strange history of Pakistan’s acquisition, and I’m pretty sure we’ve never heard the entire truth there. Pakistan tested its first bomb in 1984.

Scientist Abdul Khan, father of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons, also ran some kind of mysterious international proliferation program, giving or selling expert advice to a number of countries, including Libya and North Korea. North Korea already was involved with plutonium-based weapons. Khan advised them about using upgraded uranium instead, which has certain technical advantages.

And there is a bizarre set of tales around North Korea’s stockpile with many off-and-on efforts to be rid of it. All of them completely unsuccessful.

One thing is certain in all of that, those with nuclear weapons do not get invaded, a reality that very much remains an incentive for their development.