GEOFFREY ROBERTSON
Vintage Books, 2012, 389 pages, $34.95 (pb)
Review by Phil Shannon
“Just how much blood is on the hands that could soon grasp
nuclear weapons”, asks human rights lawyer, Geoffrey Robertson, of Iran’s
rulers. Quite a bit, he shows in Mullahs
Without Mercy, with the logical inference that “it is surely obvious that a
state which mass-murders its own people is more likely to misuse a weapon that
can mass-murder its enemies”.
Robertson documents three episodes of human rights abuses by
the Islamic state which usurped power in Iran following the 1979 popular
revolution against a brutal, US-supported dictatorship. The first mass liquidation of regime
opponents came in 1988 when seven thousand jailed members of an Islamic-Marxist
party were executed, followed by thousands of their more godless socialist
peers whose atheistic thought-crimes and refusal to adopt the religious rituals
of the theocratic state condemned them to whipping, torture and murder.
Second, the terror regime spread its global wings between
1989 and 1996 with an assassination campaign of Iranian dissenters in foreign
countries (160 killed), plus the ‘chain murders’ of Iran’s domestic
intelligentsia (80 killed), all victims of a regime that “could not tolerate
the intellectual, the scholar or the poet”.
Third, ‘Green Movement’ protests over the rigged 2009 elections
which returned President Ahmadinejad were met with four thousand arrests
involving rape, beatings, torture, show trials and murder.
Many of the regime authors of these atrocities remain in
power in Iran, men in the “Ayatollah’s inner circle, ministers and diplomats
who knew what was happening, judges who betrayed their calling by zealously
sentencing prisoners to death and torture without trial, prison governors and
intelligence officers who ushered victims into the gallows’ queues”. These same men want nuclear weapons - for
nationalist political fervour, for Shia supremacy against Iran’s Sunni
neighbours and for deterrence against Israel’s strike-ready nuclear arsenal.
Iran’s bomb aspirations began with the Shah who established
a covert nuclear weapons program, ironically scuppered by the
post-revolutionary Islamic leaders who regarded the nuclear bomb as
‘Western-inspired’ and therefore ‘un-Islamic’, a religious dogma which was to
be overcome by a draining eight year war with Iraq.
Iran’s history about its nuclear ambitions has, says
Robertson, involved some honesty larded with lying, evasion, deception,
secretiveness and diplomatic time-buying.
From the 2011 and 2012 reports of the UN’s nuclear monitoring body, the
International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), Robertson concludes that Iran is “on
course” for producing a bomb by around 2015.
Can Iran’s rulers, such flagrant human rights criminals, be
trusted on nuclear weapons?, asks Robertson.
Clearly not, he says, arguing, as he would in court, that past illegal
form matters to any consideration of current or future illegality.
As a lawyer, however, Robertson might have been expected to
produce better evidence on Iran’s nuclear bomb acquisition than that contained
in IEAE reports, although, to be fair, he notes that the IEAE often relies on
“the CIA and other state intelligence services prepared to inform, not always
accurately, on their enemies” and that the current IEAE head, Yikia Amano, has
declared (secretly, until Wikileaks got hold of it) that he is ‘solidly in the
US court’. Robertson argues, however,
that IEAE “suspicions” of an Iranian bomb-making program are not allayed by
Tehran’s refusal to allow inspections of its underground military base site.
Should the necessary “clear proof” of an Iranian bomb be
produced, Robertson argues, then bombing of Iran, targeting its four nuclear sites, may be required as a
“last resort” but he is aghast at the prospect because it would result in tens
of thousands of deaths with hundreds of thousands exposed to radiation fallout.
Such an unappetising Hobson’s Choice, says Robertson, is a
result of weak international law. The only
global nuclear weapons legal agreement, the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), was
designed to keep the bomb in the hands of the big five initial nuclear-armed
powers (America, Britain, Russia, China and France) by promising, at some
unspecified time, to reduce their stockpile to zero in return for assisting
other countries with civilian nuclear energy.
The NPT failed to ban the bomb because the big five have not
disarmed (although down from Cold War heights of 70,000, some 19,000 nuclear
weapons still bristle) whilst forty countries have been encouraged to develop a
nuclear fuel cycle which inevitably includes a nuclear weapons potential.
The nuclear fuel cycle enriches the concentration of
‘fissile’ uranium (U-235, capable of nuclear chain-reaction) from 0.7% of
naturally-occurring uranium (the rest is non-fissile U-238) to 3.5% (suitable
for nuclear power). It is only a few
months and a few spins of the gas centrifuges to enrich to 90% (suitable for
nuclear weapons). Iran is reported to have reached the 29% mark.
Given the jealous guarding of their nuclear weapons’
monopoly by the big five, since joined by the nuclear-armed NPT non-signatories
(India, Pakistan and Israel) and the NPT-withdrawalist (North Korea), “the
non-proliferation system now serves the interests of proliferators” desirous of
joining the bomb club for domestic and international politico-military reasons.
Robertson’s preferred, legalistic, solution is for a
revamped international human rights law, one which recognises that the nuclear
bomb is the ultimate human rights issue (vaporised humans are not around to
have human rights). For “untrustworthy”
nations (Robertson puts Iran at the head of a queue of bomb-seeking countries
whose “rulers lack all decency”), this law would put the bomb-making
“politicians and prelates, scientists and generals, in prison”. The law would also compel existing nuclear
powers to decommission all their nuclear weapons.
Robertson’s solution, however, raises an obvious question –
how are governments to be assessed as sufficiently vile to be candidates for
sanctions and military intervention?
They must be, says Robertson, “headed by international criminals” but
will we see NATO countries invading themselves to enforce disarmament, for,
after all, their track record for illegal mass-murder and torture of foreigners
gives Iran’s scorecard some competition.
Robertson’s proposed legal solution to nuclear weapons is likely to be
just a law of the powerful, as Robertson himself concedes, noting that forcible
nuclear disarmament “will be used opportunistically and mainly by the US
against its enemies”.
Robertson does, however, approach the political nub of the
issue when he argues that any “global legal architecture” for disarmament
merely “supports but does not bring about” a nuclear-free world and that
“public awareness” is needed to force governments to act. Robertson’s most cogent argument in his book
is that nuclear energy, even if it was ‘clean’ energy, is inseparable from the
nuclear bomb. Nuclear disarmament begins
at home, at whatever stage of any country’s nuclear fuel cycle, from finished
bomb product to raw material input, including Australia’s uranium which, at 40%
of the world supply, is nearly half of the world’s nuclear problem right here.
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