Before Global Warming posters hung on the dingy walls of American classrooms, the atomic bomb was the original Great Bogeyman of the left. Nothing quite so demonstrated the madness of our war machine as our willingness to deploy weapons of mass destruction to stop Communism in its tracks.
The self-righteous antics over nuclear weapons in literature, art, film, at protests and in papers are far too numerous to document. But you can still spot the occasional clunker with “One nuclear bomb can ruin your whole day” or “You can’t hug a child with nuclear arms” peeling off one lopsided bumper.
Just don’t expect its owner to oppose Iran’s nuclear program over its day-ruining hug-denying nature.
What made nuclear weapons and nuclear power plants bad was not that they killed children, mutated fish or doomed mankind. There was nothing wrong with Plutonium or Uranium. In Iranian or Soviet hands they are perfectly good substances. It’s when Uncle Sam gets his hands on them that they go bad.
Soviet nuclear weapons were never the problem. Now anti-nuclear activists are defending Iran’s nuclear program because they were never really opposed to nuclear weapons; they were opposed to America.
The anti-nuclear crowd isn’t against nuclear power plants or even nuclear missiles; otherwise it would be on the front lines campaigning against Obama’s nuclear sellout to Iran, instead of supporting it.
The Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, which claims to be against everything from nuclear power to depleted uranium, cheered the Iran deal. Ploughshares campaigns against WMDs while linking up with [1] Iran’s lobby. The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists is on the same page. The organization’s motto, “70 Years Speaking Knowledge to Power”, communicates that it isn’t against nukes. It is against “Power”.
The United States is defined as possessing that intangible quality of “Power”. Not Iran, which is a victim of American “Power”. In his New York Times interview with Thomas Friedman, Obama said that he had told his team to be sensitive to the “defensive Iran that feels vulnerable”. That’s the Iranian inner child that, according to Obama, was scarred by the United States in the past. Nukes are just its radioactive security blanket against American imperialism. Our power is the problem. Not their nukes.
There is a long history of such reasoning dating back to spy-scientists like Ted Hall and Alan Nunn May passing along nuclear secrets to the USSR to prevent a US nuclear monopoly. And the May case was very nearly covered up because it would have interfered with a plan to demilitarize the bomb and bring the USSR into the club. As would so often be the case, the distinction between traitors and Democrats was that the former acted unilaterally while the latter put the stamp of considered policy on their treason.
Having created an atomic crisis by helping the USSR get the bomb, the left would then spend the bulk of the Cold War denouncing the “madmen” in the Pentagon for a mass destructive stalemate that the left had sought. It was not the Pentagon which wanted to see the world balanced on the brink of destruction. It was the left which had broken the “American monopoly” that had wanted it to happen.
And once it did, the left turned a crisis that it caused into its own pet cause by promoting unilateral disarmament. Having destroyed the American monopoly, it sought to leave America utterly helpless.
There has never been a credible plan for a world without nuclear weapons. The only plan that has ever existed is a plan for a world without American nuclear weapons. Nuclear proliferation was one of the means of realizing that goal. A nuclear crisis brings disarmament talk to the forefront.
The best possible way to promote the agenda of American disarmament is by helping Iran get the bomb.
After his original inauguration, Obama talked of a “world without nuclear weapons”. But what he really meant was a world without American weapons.
“As the only nuclear power to have used a nuclear weapon, the United States has a moral responsibility to act,” Obama said in that same speech. “We cannot succeed in this endeavor alone, but we can lead it, we can start it.”
The only American Exceptionalism that Obama has ever believed in is an exceptional American guilt. As the first country to have used a nuclear weapon, against an empire that was engaged in genocide and cannibalism, America has to give up its weapons first. American nuclear weapons are tainted in ways that no other weapons are. Our nukes are bad nukes. Everyone else’s nukes are good nukes.
The credibility of the other side doesn’t matter. As a dog returns to its vomit, Obama and the left eagerly tried to wrap up disarmament in a deal with Moscow despite a long history of nuclear treaty fraud. When Putin decided to take advantage of Obama’s flexibility by invading Ukraine, there was always Iran. And there has even been talk of renewing negotiations with North Korea. And why shouldn’t there be?
The Iran deal is just a replay of the terrible ideas that the Clintons used to let Kim Jong-Il go nuclear.
Disarmament is never the objective. Instead the negotiations invariably allow the other side to increase its arsenal and capabilities. That is what they are designed to do.
The left does not believe that nuclear weapons are evil. It did not believe that Soviet nuclear weapons were evil. It does not believe that Iran’s nuclear program is evil. It believes that American power is evil.
Iranian nuclear weapons are good because they weaken America. Like Soviet nuclear weapons, they undermine American power. They force the United States to “negotiate” and submit to international law. The more nuclear weapons spread, the more the “hawks” will have to realize that they have no option but to disarm the United States and put their faith in some international order to achieve peace.
That has always been the endgame.
The Council on Foreign Relations’ Foreign Affairs magazine had already run a piece promising that an Iranian nuclear bomb would bring stability to the region. As usual the word does not mean what you think it might. Stability is yet another euphemism for weakening the American coalition to create a new balance of power through Iranian power.
The same arguments now being deployed in favor of the Iran deal will later be redeployed to argue that Iran’s nuclear weapons will actually create stability. And as a bonus, Iran will be able to drive up the price of oil which means more Green Energy subsidies. For the left, that’s a win-win scenario.
The spy-scientists claimed to be concerned with the “safety of mankind” rather than such petty trifles as the security and freedom of the United States and its allies. Today men and women who think like them run the United States. And they are not concerned with the United States, but with “mankind”.
Obama intends to cut a nuclear deal with Iran on any terms and even on no terms at all. He intends to do it for the same old reasons. It’s not just about Israel, though as with regime change in Egypt, undermining the Jewish State is a nice bonus because it further weakens America.
A stronger Iran means a weaker America. And the left believes that a weaker America means a better world.
