Some historical perspective on Iran’s nuclear program is in order.

How the US Supplied Iran with Nuclear Know-How
by Saul Landau
Sept. 9, 2005
Excerpts: [I recommend reading the whole article]

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"The US and her allies were in fact the driving force behind the birth of Iran's nuclear program in the late 1960s and early 1970s" (Mohammad Sahimi, Iran's Nuclear Program. Part I: Its History October 2003). By 1974, the Shah, after consulting with Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, boasted that nuclear power plants in Iran would soon produce more than 20,000 megawatts of energy.

In the mid-1970s, led by Kissinger who saw in Iran a "platform state" to fight communism in the region, Washington proposed that The Shah expand his nuclear capacity by acquiring as many as twenty three nuclear reactors. According to Mohammad Sahimi, the work on the reactors began in 1974 with the help of MIT engineers who contracted to train Iranian nuclear technicians.

Sahimi cites a speech by Sydney Sober, a State Department official who in October 1977, "declared that the Shah's government was going to purchase eight nuclear reactors from the US for generating electricity. On July 10, 1978, only seven months before the victory of the Islamic Revolution in Iran, the final draft of the US-Iran Nuclear Energy Agreement was signed. The agreement was supposed to facilitate cooperation in the field of nuclear energy and to govern the export and transfer of equipment and material to Iran's nuclear energy program. Iran was also to receive American technology and help in searching for uranium deposits."

Why, asked critics, should a nation with huge oil and gas reserves invest in nuclear technology? Why not? Both General Electric and Westinghouse sold Iran reactors. These manufacturers of nuclear energy plants for the third world and their media acolytes regaled The Shah for his "westernizing policies," his far-sightedness in seeing beyond the age of oil.

Although his own people had a less flattering view of him, who could Washington trust more? The prestigious Stanford Research Institute "experts" had projected that Iran's nuclear initiation would serve both world peace and US interests. Not only would US companies build nuclear reactors, but the Pentagon would continue to sell weapons and torture equipment to the Shah's army and police and the United States could even recoup some of what it spent buying oil from Iran.

[snip]

The United States, England, France, Russia and China all signed onto the Nuclear Non Proliferation Treaty and agreed to work towards nuclear disarmament. The contract called for non-nuclear states to forego nuclear weapons and open their facilities to UN inspection. In return, they could receive nuclear energy technology. But the nuclear giants, while making some strategic reductions, have not taken serious steps toward ridding themselves of their massive stockpiles. They have, however, insisted that the non-nuclear nations abstain. Instead, "the US and Britain are upgrading: the Bush administration is developing nuclear "bunker busters" that can strike deep underground, while Britain has ordered a new generation of Trident missiles" (Anne Penketh, Independent August 5, 2005).

Iran now claims implicitly the right to pursue its nuclear power ambitions. After all, neighboring India and Pakistan barged into the elite nuclear club in 1998. In addition, Israel, a formidable Iranian enemy, has a considerable nuclear arsenal. And, in 1981, Israel bombed Iraq's nuclear reactor with impunity.

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[ 12 January 2006: Message edited by: M. Spector ]

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A referral of Iran to the United Nations Security Council over its nuclear programme is likely to push oil prices to record high points above $70 per barrel, analysts in London said yesterday.

The Iran crisis represents "a major source of upside risk for oil prices", Barclays Capital analyst Kevin Norrish said.

He added: "It is not too difficult to construct a scenario in which prices will get back past $70 in relatively short order."

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Originally posted by Sven:
I guess I would ask this: Is it or is it not a good idea for Iran to have nuclear weapons? If not, what would you do to prevent it?

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From my own perspective, I think there has already been too much western intervention in Iran beginning in 1953, a CIA plot to subvert democracy in that counrtry. The U.S.-installed Shah was as corrupt as the day was long.

So, when does Iran begin to determine its own future ?. The Iranian's desires for cleaner electrical power production are valid and in-line with world concerns for greenhouse gas reduction. Iran's economy is growing at a healthy rate, and so are its needs for electrical power.

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...the Shah's government was going to purchase eight nuclear reactors from the US for generating electricity. ...

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The fact is that the Germans beat the Yankees to it as I noted on this thread:

http://www.rabble.ca/babble/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic&f=2&t=008570&p=#000126

Here are the links again I posted there:

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...Two power reactors in Bushehr, on the coast of the Persian Gulf, were started but remained unfinished when they were bombed and damaged by the Iraqis during the Iran-Iraq war....

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http://www.globalsecurity.org/wmd/world/iran/nuke.htm

Here's what Sahimi himself wrote. Please note the French connection and the role of China (discussed on the other thread). What a bunch of hypocrites!

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... the Shah ...started an ambitious program for building many (presumably as many as TWENTY THREE) nuclear reactors. Hence, his government awarded a contract to Kraftwerk Union (a subsidiary of Siemens) of (West) Germany to construct two Siemens 1,200-megawatt nuclear reactors at Bushehr. The work for doing so began in 1974. In 1975, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology signed a contract with the AEOI for providing training for the first cadre of Iranian nuclear engineers, and the Iranian-Indian nuclear cooperation treaty was also signed (India is now a nuclear power). In addition, the Nuclear Technology Center at Esfahan (Isfahan) was founded in the mid-1970s with the French assistance in order to provide training for the personnel that would be working with the Bushehr reactors. The Esfahan Center currently operates four small nuclear research reactors, all supplied by China.

According to the same declassified document mentioned above, in an address to the symposium, "The US and Iran, An Increasing Partnership," held in October 1977, Mr. Sydney Sober, a representative of the US State Department, declared that the Shah's government was going to purchase EIGHT nuclear reactors from the US for generating electricity. On July 10, 1978, only seven months before the victory of the Islamic Revolution in Iran, the final draft of the US-Iran Nuclear Energy Agreement was signed. The agreement was supposed to facilitate cooperation in the field of nuclear energy and to govern the export and transfer of equipment and material to Iran's nuclear energy program. Iran was also to receive American technology and help in searching for uranium deposits.

The Shah's government had also envisioned building two nuclear reactors and a power plant in Darkhovin, on the Karoon River, south of the city of Ahvaz. Iran signed, in 1974, a contract with the French company Framatome to build two 950 megawatt pressurized reactors at that site. Framatome did survey the area and began site preparation. However, construction had not yet started when the government of Prime Minister Mehdi Bazargan cancelled the contract after the Islamic revolution in 1979. In 1992, Iran signed an agreement with China for building the reactors in Darkhovin, but the terms of the agreement have not yet been carried out by China. Given the proximity of the site to the border with Iraq, it is probably not prudent to proceed with that project at that particular site. ...

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http://www.payvand.com/news/03/oct/1015.html

There's really nothing very surprising about all this as anybody involved in the anti-nuclear movement will tell you. The technology has a tendency to proliferate because the profits are too rich and the projects are huge.

Check out the Wisconin Project how much of it happened.

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Originally posted by Fidel:
The Russian's have proposed that uranium enrichment be carried out in Russia and keeping Iran away from possible weapons grade plutonium production.

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Originally posted by Fidel:
The Russian's have proposed that uranium enrichment be carried out in Russia and keeping Iran away from possible weapons grade plutonium production. I think the Iranian's see it as compromising their freedom to control their own power production and have rejected the Russian wording on the offer.

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Originally posted by Fidel:
[QB]But after reading M.Spector's link to info, I gather that the Iranian's might likely be able to do it themselves at some point anyway.

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Sure at some point, but has it already arrived?

When you have some time have a look at the info under the heading "countries" at the Wisconsin Project site linked above.

Argentina and IIRC Egypt are so-called second-tier suppliers, i.e. those countries which can't really built whole nuclear power plants - yet - but supply certain components.

This reminds me of an article I tried to sell to the Montreal Gazette "On The Logic Of Nuclear Proliferation: Argentina Joins The Nuclear Club
[written in June 1978]" where I pointed out Canada's contribution towards potentially making them a nuclear power. (Siemens had already built one). They had already built a research reactor themselves at that point, which they "lent" to Peru.

Now they are now among those "second-tier" suppliers and some time in the future they might very well build whole power plant reactors.

Needless to say the Gazette wasn't interested and returned my piece with one sentence, 'can't use your piece on nuclear proliferation', or something like that.

I had thought Canadians would be interested to know what our technology helps others to do. (Fuel safeguards were a lot less stringent then and CANDUs are particularly suitable for the path towards nuclear weapons)

But what to expect of Southam?

/off topic
Fidel,

Since you liked Blowback you should also read The Splendid Blond Beast by the same author. It's related.

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The prospect of higher energy prices should not stop the world from imposing sanctions against oil-rich Iran, U.S. senators said Sunday.

Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., said sanctions will be tough but that Iran poses a greater danger to the United States than Iraq at this point and must be contained.

"If the price of oil has to go up, then that's a consequence we would have to suffer," McCain said on "Face the Nation" on CBS.

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It is, of course, a lie that Iran poses a danger to the U.S. If anything, it’s the other way around. Isn’t this how the Iraq war started?

[ 15 January 2006: Message edited by: M. Spector ]

Don't forget that the US claims the Straits of Hormuz basically as its own waters, for all practical purposes.

As I've written before, these problems are of the US own making, many decades prior, so I am not absolving them of culpability in this issue. But I do see that when viewed from their eyes, they see any power there of significance, that is not their own, as a threat.

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Mullahs Up the Ante in Nuclear Poker

By Charles Hawley and Michael Scott Moore in Berlin

European negotiations with Iran have reached a dead-end and the country's apparent pursuit of nuclear weapons may soon come before the UN Security Council. But what options does the West really have? Oil sanctions? Military strikes? Neither is very likely. ...

Iran has the absolute right to enrich," Larijani said. ...

"If you took Iranian oil off the market, oil prices would skyrocket, which wouldn't benefit anyone. And quite frankly European officials have made it clear that sanctioning Iranian oil would likely hurt the Europeans as much as it would hurt the Iranians."...

Beyond sanctions, the West has few viable options. British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw said Friday that military options were not being considered and -- despite America's insistence that it won't exclude the possibility of a military strike -- it is not clear what bombs would accomplish. ...

Given the weak options available to deal with Iran, however, the mullahs may continue on their collision course with the rest of the world. At the very least, as atomic bomb historian Richard Rhodes pointed out in an August interview with SPIEGEL ONLINE, a nuclear warhead remains a major prestige item in any country's arsenal. "This attitude follows very directly from the continuing insistence on the part of the United States to this day that other nations shouldn't have nuclear weapons but the US should because it's important to American national security," Rhodes said. ...

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Originally posted by Michael Watkins:
... they see any power there of significance, that is not their own, as a threat.

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Originally posted by maestro:
Why is Iran's building of nuclear power more important than Israel's nuclear weapons? Oh yes, and Israel's transfer of nuclear weapons technology to South Africa in the days of apartheid.

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Seriously, Iran has every and an equal right to persue it's nuclear ambitions, no less than any other country. Mind you, I wouldn't hand them over to them myself, but if they want to make, so be it!

Time to start thinking of the positives of Iran having nuclear power, instead of all the negatives. Britain and the U.S. have violated the treaty.

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Originally posted by Blind_Patriot:
Mind you, I wouldn't hand them over to them myself, but if they want to make, so be it!

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Originally posted by Sven:

So, I take it that you think it is a good thing (or, at the very worst, simply a neutral factor) that Iran may get nuclear arms?

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I've mentioned in threads before, that some good could come out of it. I know, I know... well what about Israel? The Iranians have been talking not so highly. The only way the Iranians would use them against Israel, is if their ready to wipe out their own complete existence along with it. So, a just peace may prevail because they now will have an equal fist at the negotiating table.

I don't believe that one country should have and right to dictate the destiny of another. You cannot accuse a nation of committing a crime that has not been committed. Iran has committed no crime related to the assumptions of what could happen.

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Originally posted by Blind_Patriot:
We cannot morally advocate against Iranian nukes, while the U.S. and Britain are building up their arsenal.

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Even if you don’t want to “morally advocate” against Iranian nukes, is a nuclear armed Iran, as a practical matter, a good or bad thing?

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Originally posted by Blind_Patriot:
So until Iran become a member of the A.U.N.W.C. "Actually Used A Nuclear Weapon Club" like the U.S.A. who currently holds the Executive chair, we cannot morally argue their ambitions.

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Originally posted by Sven:
Even if you don’t want to “morally advocate” against Iranian nukes, is a nuclear armed Iran, as a practical matter, a good or bad thing?

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Originally posted by Sven:
I suppose that before Hitler attacked Poland (or occupied the Sudetenland), you wouldn’t have objected to the Germans having developed nuclear weapons, had you lived at that time and had they had the restraint to take the time to develop such weapons before attacking their neighbors? The French could have (and should have) destroyed Hitler’s little army of a hundred thousand soldiers when they crossed into the Rheinland in 1936. It would have been preemptive but it likely would have saved 50 million dead.

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Originally posted by Blind_Patriot:
Neither good or bad.

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Originally posted by Sven:

I suppose that before Hitler attacked Poland (or occupied the Sudetenland), you wouldn’t have objected to the Germans having developed nuclear weapons, had you lived at that time and had they had the restraint to take the time to develop such weapons before attacking their neighbors?.

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That was a different time. Industrialists and banking elite across Europe and North America were afraid of losing everything to communism. Some of them had already profited from the war to end all wars only 20 years prior. Why put a stop to a good thing ?. As far as western capital and industries were concerned, why shouldn't they abandon workers and economies in their own countries?. Western capitalism was flat on its ass in the 1930's as factories sat in silence and workers rode the rails in search of work in N. America. And so what to do besides prop-up a war monger in Germany for another go at putting down the revolution in Russia?.

I just got back from the library and the research I was doing necessitated reading an article in the Globe and Mail of Dec 15, 1991, i.e. during the Gulf War no. 1.

I came across this article entitled:

"US Backs Away From Nuclear Promise" saying among other things:

Gallup found 45 percent of Americans would support the use of nuclear weapons against Iraq.

"US refuses usual assurances that they won't be used against Iraq."

Israel also made some (non-specific but quite obvious) threatening noises.

So my dear Sven lets pretend you have not lost the argument (as you would under Godwin's Law) and forget about Hitler as that was over 60 years ago.

Tell us do you like nuclear weapons in the hands of the only country that has used them twice against the enemy and many times against their own people in the continental USA (i.e. mainly Caucasians) and Alaska (i.e. mainly against natives) by turning them into guinea pigs to study r the effects of radiation following nuclear tests? They also used the Marshall Islanders deliberately exposing them to radiation and blowing to smithereens some of their formerly beautiful real estate. Marshall Islanders continue to die to this day because of these nuclear weapons tests and have been compensated with insulting sums after their lawsuit was thrown out because of the Compact of Association.

Are you comfortable with the USA having over 12,000 nuclear warheads refusing to give up even a small amount?

What are you going to do about it?

Nothing?

What should be done with Israel's nuclear arsenal? They are the aggressor in the Middle East illegally occupying territory, treating the inhabitants like shit according to Israeli citizens among others. They have threatened to use them against Iraq.

Are you happy about that?

What are you going to do about it?

Nothing?

Is your continued arguing about evil Iran assuming they are in fact in the process of building nuclear weapons racist, or how do you justify your one sided arguments you keep on making over and over again whenever there is a thread dealing with the subject?

http://talkaboutsupport.com/group/alt.meditation/messages/116085.html

Or read:

Barker, Holly M., Bravo For The Marshallese

in particular pages (and the following are just a small selection of a sordid story):

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... In 1946, more than a year before the United States became the official administrating power of the Marshall Islands, the U.S. Navy approached the people and leaders of Bikini Atoll to request permission to use their islands to test atomic weapons and their effects. It was understandable that the Bikinians agreed to vacate their land so the U.S. government could conduct its weapons tests. The U.S. government told the Bikinians their move would be temporary. They did not have televisions or newspapers to provide images from Hiroshima or Nagasaki, and, like most people in the world at the time they did not have an appreciation for the destructive capacity of the weapons. [p/60]
....
By 1989, four years after the Rongelapese left the island for fear of their safety, U.S. government scientists reported that the "soil on Rongelap Island contains about 430 times more transuranics (plutonium and americium) than the average transuranic levels for the Northern hemisphere (Franke 1989:3). [p/66]
....
Ertilang is extremely familiar with U.S. physicians and researchers because of her participation in Project 4.1. Ertilang and the Project 4.1 subjects gravely needed medical attention after their acute radiation exposure; instead, decades later, they learned that the U.S. government enrolled them without their consent in an extensive medical and environmental research program. ...[p.98]
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The Likiepese women felt shame and hid their deformed babies because they did not know and were not told that their exposure to radiation would result in birth deformities. In the case of the Rongelap community, the U.S. government acknowledged that the community was exposed to radiation and planned its research to document the human effects of radiation exposure....

... I find Ertilang's bitterness appropriate given the amount of suffering she endures as a result of her brain tumors, a thyroidectomy, birth anom- alies, radiation treatments in foreign hospitals where they subjected her to "shock treatments" without any explanations or the benefit of a translator.[p.109] ...
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The Maohi people (the indigenous population that accounts for roughly 82 percent of the nation's 200,000 people) vehemently protested France's use of their nation for nuclear weapons testing. The international environmental organization, Greenpeace, assisted the Maohi people with their protest. Greenpeace sent its flagship, the Rainbow Warrior, to French Polynesia in 1985 just after relocating the people of Rongelap in the Marshall Islands from their contaminated home islands. French secret service agents bombed and sank the Rainbow Warrior, killing one crew member, when the ship arrived in French Polynesia to protest a nuclear weapons test by France ...[p.125]
...
For 12 years, beginning on January 27, 1951, the U.S. government conducted 126 atmospheric atomic weapons tests at the 1,350 square-mile Nevada Test Site. Radiation from these tests contaminated all of the continental United States and reached into Canada and Mexico. Each of the 126 tests contained radiation levels equivalent to those released by the Chemobyl explosion in 1986 (Gallagher 1993). The Atomic Energy Commission chose the Nevada Test Site for the same reason it tested nuclear weapons in the Marshall Islands; the AEC operated under the assumption that it could conduct secret tests and reduce threats to the American pub- lic by testing weapons in what the AEC perceived as a remote, harsh, uninhabited landscape. Like the Marshall Islands, the weapons testing sites exposed people downwind from the testing area, people who subsisted from the local resources for generations to high levels of radiation. In the case of the Nevada Test Site, the tests exposed Native Americans, cattle ranchers and farmers, test site workers (often migrant laborers who could not find employment in other states), and U.S. servicemen (those from the ranks, not the elite, often straight out of high school) to radiation. Like the Marshallese, the AEC considered all of the above mentioned populations expendable; any injuries sustained by these people was of less impor- tance than the military and strategic values of the tests. Immediately following many of the detonations, the AEC would march U.S. servicemen into the testing area to simulate battle scenarios and to assess the men's ability to cope with the physical and psychological effects of the tests. The servicemen who survived their radiation exposure refer to themselves as the Atomic Veterans. At the age of 17, the AEC marched Robert Carter and his company into the test site of the biggest atmospheric test conducted in Nevada on July 5, 1957 ... [p.130]
...
. In 1962, the U.S. government dumped 15,000 pounds of radioactive soil from the Nevada Test Site near Point Hope, Alaska, without the legally required containers. As they did in the Marshall Islands, U.S. government officials dumped radioactive soil near the community to study the movement of radionuclides through the ecological and human food chains. ..... [p.131]

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Documented in recently (under Clinton) declassified US documents and academic studies. My emphases.

In Alaska and the Marsahll Islands the people are brown and the Americans were in those days quite explicit that they were somewhat less than fully human and therefore felt quite justifed to use them as test subjects eventually killing or maiming them and their offspring.

And these people should be the police of the world?

This scan was cleaned by emailStripper, available for free from http://www.papercut.biz/emailStripper.htm

It's so easy to use and so fast.
Wow!

[ 17 January 2006: Message edited by: VanLuke ]

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Originally posted by VanLuke:
Sorry about the lousy formatting.

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I shall fix it now.

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...Noam Chomsky said Iran would be “crazy” not to develop nuclear weapons.

Speaking Tuesday to an audience of over 1,000 at University College, Dublin — Ireland’s largest university — Chomsky said, “No sane person wants Iran to have nuclear weapons,” but added that the Islamic republic had to respond to alleged threats from Israel and the United States, both nuclear powers.

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Originally posted by VanLuke:
Btw on their island where the Missile Defense Shield test range is only Marshallese servants are allowed - and then only for the day. They have to leave overnight.

The New York Times called the realation between Marshallese and the Americans the closest the USA has come to having a colony.

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Originally posted by Cueball:

Well that is just about as fucked up as the New York Times gets when looking for a glib line. What of Puerto Rico. But that is a little too close to the bone.

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Have you read the article in question or are you making the statement on just the basis of my statement based on the memory of having read it ages ago?

I think the latter.

And I don't have any illusions about the NYT and did watch Manufacturing of Consent a long time ago.

For one thing, they didn't conduct any nuclear tests in Puerto Rico did they?

Do Puerto Ricans need permission to go to any of their islands?

Here is the article in question (having taken out enough to make it conform to "fair use" principles) I do think that it is worse than Puerto Rico for the locals, But what's the point in quibbling over an unimportant side line to the present context?

My emphases:

The New York Times
June 11, 2001
American policy still shapes the destiny of Kwajalein Atoll.

[Cation for a photograph] :Howard W. French/New York Times
Marshall Island natives displaced from their homes feel hopeless about the link with the Americans there. The lucky few get to go by boat each day to places like Roi-Namur, which has a tracking radar installation.

KWAJALEIN ATOLL, Marshall Islands — Several times a year, these tiny Pacific islands witness a light show more spectacular than almost any offered by nature, when a gaggle of ballistic missiles, minus their warheads, streak in low, roaring through the night sky and hurtle into the nearby lagoon.

Such tests are no longer top secret, but the high-tech United States Army base here remains at the center of America's attempt to design missiles and missile defenses, right where it has been since the 1950's.

With the Bush administration vowing to develop a more expansive missile defense than ever, there is an atmosphere of excitement, at least among the Americans here, unrivaled since 1962, when a Nike Zeus rocket fired from here knocked out an incoming missile, the birth of the antimissile system era.

[That is the passage I 'quoted' from memory]:

But the story of the Kwajalein range is more than a tale of triumphant technology. It is also an account of one of the closest things the United States has to a colonial relationship: one in which an almost idyllic small-town America sits on a sand-covered sliver of Micronesian coral, segregated from the overcrowded ghettos where native islanders have been displaced in America's pursuit of greater security.

The United States won control of the Marshall Islands' 29 atolls, comprising 1,225 low-lying coral islands, from Japan in 1944 during the bitterly fought Pacific campaign. And Washington has exercised broad control over the destiny of one of the world's smallest nations ever since.

After the war, the United States administered the territory under a United Nations mandate until 1986, when the country entered into a "free association" with Washington. Since then, the United States has secured use of its base here by a series of 15-year renewable agreements.

Those pacts make the United States responsible for the country's defense and give Washington final say over its foreign policy. The United States also provides disaster relief and many other services for the country's 50,000 people through programs like Head Start and the Job Corps as well as from the Department of Agriculture, the Federal Aviation Agency and the National Weather Service.

But from the very start, with the dropping of atomic bombs on Bikini Atoll, about 200 miles east of here, it has been a relationship laden with harsh consequences for the Marshallese people: sickness and death from radiation poisoning, the displacement of many people, and the destruction of a self-sufficient island way of life.

With its 839-square-mile lagoon, its missile-launching pads and clusters of huge, ultrahigh-performance tracking radars nested between the ruins of Japanese bunkers, today this atoll easily conjures up images of the island of Dr. No.

....

"We think that all testing should come to Kwajalein Missile Range, because we've got the best capabilities in the world," said Lt. Col. Raymond Jones. "If you are living in New Mexico, the cities just get bigger and bigger, and begin to encroach on Los Alamos. Out here, they don't have cities to grow and encroach, and that's what makes this place an unduplicated national asset."

It also makes it something of a paradise, at least as far as the Americans are concerned. The Continental Airlines crew that flies an island- hopping route here from Guam announces the tone when it lands at Kwajalein, saying, "Welcome to the country club." Unlike the other stops along the way, here only American employees, their dependents and those with special permission are allowed to get off the plane.

The table-flat island of 1.2 square miles is home to about two dozen military personnel, along with 1,200 contractors and nearly as many family members in a closely knit community where people call one another by their first names, everyone pedals around on bicycles, and nine- hole golf, tennis, bowling and scuba diving provide recreation.

Church attendance is high, as are the test scores of the children who grow up here. Consumer goods are subsidized, keeping the cost of living down, and even recently released movies are shown for free at an open-air cinema. The result is that many of the people who come to work here for companies like Raytheon and Boeing often extend their tours as long as possible, some staying for 20 years or more.
.....

But the small-town-America feel has come at a high price for the Marshallese. Since 1946, when atomic testing began at Bikini Atoll, native islanders have been moved to make way for military programs.

Thirty-three years after the last of the 66 atomic and hydrogen weapons were exploded in the area, more than 350 displaced Bikini natives are still living on Kwajalein Atoll.

The American officer who persuaded Bikini's residents to evacuate during an impromptu meeting one Sunday in 1946, Commodore Ben Wyatt, told the villagers that their displacement was "for the good of mankind and to end all wars."

.....

But in the place of the simple fishing and farming existence they once knew on their lightly inhabited atoll, Bikinians and many other displaced Marshallese have been relocated to badly overcrowded islands like Ebeye and Enniburr, where cholera outbreaks are common and malnutrition is frequently reported.

There, they live from month to month on the proceeds of the $1.1 billion paid by the United States under the latest 15-year agreement, which is up for renegotiation.

"We must respect the terms of our agreements with the United States, but the United States needs to recognize what has happened here, too," said Alvin Jacklick, the Marshall Islands' foreign minister. "Ebeye and Enniburr have become the worst ghettos of the Pacific, and the conditions there are barely humane."

The lucky few on these islands commute daily by boat to the American bases on Kwajalein Island or other installations, at Roi-Namur, for salaried jobs as cooks, maintenance workers and groundskeepers. Often, their spouses make the same commute to collect drinking water. They would gladly shop on the American- controlled islands, too, where prices are far lower and the selection is wide, except that Marshallese are not allowed to.

The lure of jobs has reputedly made Ebeye — a scorching place with poor sanitation, inadequate water supply and few trees — one of the most densely inhabited places on earth. With 15,000 people, the three- square mile island is now home to nearly a third of the Marshall Islands' total population.

Speaking warily, a woman who works at the Cafe Pacific, a dining hall that serves hearty breakfasts of pancakes, grits, sausages and eggs to the American workers on Kwajalein, described the mood of the Marshallese natives who live on Ebeye and the other islands as one of hopelessness and defeat.

"There used to be protests about the situation here," said the cafeteria worker. "But the Americans control the biggest island in this atoll, and they decide who gets jobs, and how much we get paid, too. We know there is something wrong here, but we feel like a mouse up against an elephant. What can we do?"

Many Americans blame Marshallese outright for their plight, saying they have wasted large sums of aid and that they crowd together in substandard housing because of the islanders' communal culture.

"Everyone knows that Ebeye is horrible," said Michael J. Senko, the United States ambassador to the Marshall Islands. "But what we are working with is a culture in which everyone who is your relative moves into your home if you have a job. But we know we've got to do more on education, and that we have to do better on Ebeye."

But many Marshallese say such arguments fail to acknowledge the role the United States played in destroying a largely self-sufficient way of life here, and in failing to replace it with any sustainable alternative.

On Enniburr, a sparsely shaded island the size of a football field, where about 1,000 people have relocated, there is no electricity, no running water and no stores. A few of the residents make the five-minute motorboat ride to Roi-Namur, at the northern tip of the atoll, to work on the American base there.

The others, though, mostly sit around all day, dreaming of another life. Asked what people there use for toilets, one man in his 30's who gave his name only as Simon, answered: "That's a good question. I guess we mostly use the reef, or that big bunker over there left by the Japanese. Maybe the Americans could take that away for us one day, and give us some electricity."

Is the situation in Puerto Rico really like that?

[ 19 January 2006: Message edited by: VanLuke ]

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Mohamed ElBaradei, the head of the UN’s nuclear monitor, has turned down a request by the European Union to issue a far-reaching condemnation of Iran’s nuc­lear programme when the agency’s board meets in extraordinary session next month. ... because he believes in due process, ...

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quote:

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....By 1975, The U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, had signed National Security Decision Memorandum 292, titled "U.S.-Iran Nuclear Cooperation," which laid out the details of the sale of nuclear energy equipment to Iran projected to bring U.S. corporations more than $6 billion in revenue. At the time, Iran was pumping as much as 6 million barrels (950,000 m³) of oil a day, compared with about 4 million barrels (640,000 m³) daily today.

President Gerald R. Ford even signed a directive in 1976 offering Tehran the chance to buy and operate a U.S.-built reprocessing facility for extracting plutonium from nuclear reactor fuel. The deal was for a complete "nuclear fuel cycle". The Ford strategy paper said the "introduction of nuclear power will both provide for the growing needs of Iran's economy and free remaining oil reserves for export or conversion to petrochemicals."

After the 1979 Islamic Revolution, Iran informed the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) of its plans to restart its nuclear program using indiginously-made nuclear fuel, and the IAEA even planned to provide assistance to Iran under its Technical Assistance Program to produce enriched uranium. An IAEA report stated clearly that its aim was to “contribute to the formation of local expertise and manpower needed to sustain an ambitious programme in the field of nuclear power reactor technology and fuel cycle technology”. However, the IAEA was forced to terminate the program under U.S. pressure. ....

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It's not the fastest server and it's perhaps best to download the mp3 file first and then listen to it. Total length about one hour.

Part 1:
http://www.radio4all.net/pub/files/[email protected]/0208chomskyone.mp3
Part 2:
http://www.radio4all.net/pub/files/[email protected]/0215chomskytwo.mp3

I was a young man during the Cuban missile crisis living in central Europe and I remember clearly the fear we felt. However until I listened to Chomsky's talk today I did not know just how close we came to nuclear war. Apparently we all owe sub brigade deputy commander Vasily Arkipov an enormous debt as he was the one who probably stopped Armageddon in 1962. Hard to imagine what the world would be like if the commander had retaliated as he wanted to!

I googled it (as Chomsky didn't elaborate very much) and here is a quote from the top hit:

quote:

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...we were even closer to nuclear war than the policymakers knew at the time, and that's saying something, because on Saturday, October 27, Robert McNamara thought he might not live to see the sunrise. At the time, there was a crescendo of bad news: a U-2 shot down over Cuba, another U-2 straying over Siberia with US Air Force jets (also armed with nuclear air-to-air missiles) scrambling to head off possible MIG interception. The Joint Chiefs had recommended air strike and invasion of Cuba, as of 4 p.m. The Cubans were firing on all the low-level US recon flights. At the conference, we found out that exactly at that moment, US destroyers were dropping signaling depth charges on a Soviet submarine near the quarantine line that was carrying a nuclear-tipped torpedo -- totally unbeknownst to the US Navy. The Soviet captain lost his temper, there could be a world war up there, let's take some of them down with us, etc. Cooler heads prevailed, specifically the sub brigade deputy commander named Vasily Arkhipov, who was onboard and calmed the captain down. The sub came to the surface about 15 minutes after Soviet ambassador Dobrynin left Bobby Kennedy's office carrying RFK's urgent message to Khrushchev, time is running out, invasion in 48 hours, if you take the missiles out, we will pledge not to invade Cuba, ...

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http://discuss.washingtonpost.com/zforum/02/sp_world_blanton101602.htm

The other hits (I haven't checked them out) are here:

http://tinyurl.com/9pk27

If you believe Chomsky the dangers are at least as great today as they have been in the past and US security specialists expect (at the very least) a dirty nuclear bomb to hit a US city.

Telegraph (UK):

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Iran's hardline spiritual leaders have issued an unprecedented new fatwa, or holy order, sanctioning the use of atomic weapons against its enemies.

In yet another sign of Teheran's stiffening resolve on the nuclear issue, influential Muslim clerics have for the first time questioned the theocracy's traditional stance that Sharia law forbade the use of nuclear weapons.
...
The comments, which are the first public statement by the Yazdi clerical cabal on the nuclear issue, will be seen as an attempt by the country's religious hardliners to begin preparing a theological justification for the ownership - and if necessary the use - of atomic bombs.

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quote:

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Iran's hardline spiritual leaders have issued an unprecedented new fatwa, or holy order, sanctioning the use of atomic weapons against its enemies.

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A fatwa is NOT a holy order. It is a "legal opinion" (legal in the religious understanding). Exactly like in (secular) law, a fatwa is a dozen a dime. There can be as many fatwas as there are Fuqaha (pl. of faqiih, legal counsel in islamic law).