Ol' Pappy & Son (Reuters)

Experteneinschätzung: Nordkorea könnte bald eine Atomrakete haben http://t.co/luFw9VFb

December 28, 2011 11:45 am via twitterfeedReplyRetweetFavorite

@weltonline

Welt Online

Atomrakete – yes! “Atom-rocket”! One that will be in North Korean hands, and thus under the “Great Successor’s” personal control, and rather soon!

Hey, that’s not nichts! It’s in fact the estimation of one Larry Niksch, long-time North Korea expert at the (US) Library of Congress, brought to us in an article from Die Welt, who in a recent paper set forth his view that the Pyongyang regime will be ready to mount its Nodong missiles with nuclear warheads within two years at the most, whereas most estimates up to now had foreseen at least five. Now, the Nodong is still but a middle-range ballistic missile – still out of reach of California, probably also Hawaii, but more than capable of hitting, say, Seoul or Tokyo. (Then again, mere North Korean artillery has always been able to devastate Seoul whenever the Great/Dear Leader/Successor felt like giving the order.)

A somewhat less dire prognosis is cited in this same piece from Siegried Hecker, who, despite what you might gather from his name, is former chief of America’s Los Alamos research laboratory. Hecker says that, before North Korea can go ahead confidently with anything very threatening (in the missile realm, you understand), it still has to have a third test-explosion, a successful one (there were doubts whether the first two were really that) to make sure that a nuclear device miniaturized so as to fit as a warhead will actually behave as ordered.

Two points here:

1. He might style himself the “Great Successor,” but “king” or “emperor” might be more pertinent titles for Kim Jong Un, given his absolute control over every aspect of the lives of his subjects. Actually, let’s go with “emperor” – as in “new clothes,” for the silence here is truly deafening. Just look at the guy! Only in his late twenties, having been outside the country only to study among luxurious conditions at some Swiss school, yet now he’s supposed to be in charge of a country still at war with its southern neighbor (at least formally – although northerners have certainly acted like it numerous times in the past, even after 1953), with a moribund economy where people starve to death and everyone wants to escape to China – and with nuclear warheads and, soon, the means to deliver them! Where is the innocent little child to cry out “You’re in way over your head, Jack!” and so to break this spell of fantasy, so that people can once again call things what they are?
   
2. This “Great Successor” was of course the “Dear Leader’s” son – his third it seems – and the mantle came the same way to the “Dear Leader” back in 1994 (although with seemingly much more opportunity to practice the job beforehand). Here we see again the amusing if wearying paradox where all-powerful rulers in what are putatively “republics” (here: “Democratic People’s Republic of Korea”) decide that no one is better qualified to succeed them in the people’s service after their demise than . . . their direct progeny. Abrupt terminations to this sort of farce have been realized over this past year in several North African/Middle Eastern countries (with one or two more possibly to come), as Prof. Juan Cole points out in an excellent recent blogpost. But this phenomenon was also addressed at more depth in Francis Fukuyama’s excellent new book The Origins of Political Order: it’s the sort of primitive, tribal-based urge that truly mature, developed systems of government usually leave far behind as they progress to leadership based on true merit and authentic popular choice. Yet as advanced as any ruling regime may be, those sorts of blood-tie yearnings (i.e. to set up one’s children for life in cushy positions) never cease to be a threat to the political order, Fukuyama states, and the extent of their re-intrusion into the body politic mirrors the extent of that regime’s decay.

UPDATE: Well, I guess we need to note and fully appreciate any bit of good news emanating from that part of the world that we can:

BREAKING: Kim Jong-Un Rebrands North Korea as “N. Kiddy”

December 30, 2011 4:39 am via webReplyRetweetFavorite

@BorowitzReport

Andy Borowitz

                          

As written, the piece is really something out of James Bond. “I’m not really here” Sei tells the Morgenbladet journalist, who cannot be permitted to provide any outside details whatsoever of the defector’s location, to protect him against Burmese assassination-teams scouring Europe to find him. But we do get some internal details: the locale is an anonymous apartment where even the landlord is not allowed to know who his tenant really is; the major sports long hair quite unsuited to the military man that he once was, along with glasses that are for disguise, not actual use; the living room is “furnished with military minimalism” that includes only a table, a computer, a book of “Business English verbs” – and a razor-sharp dagger.

And inside his head is copious information that he has already spilled about the Burmese government’s attempts to develop its own nuclear weapons. He has brought along “hundreds of photographs” as well. The regime back home has already denounced him as a “deserter and criminal”; on the other hand, no less than Robert Kelley, former chief of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), calls him “a source with truly extraordinary information,” information which happens to be consistent with the other evidence investigators have accumulated about the alleged Burmese nuclear effort. Kelley himself has already heavily relied on Sei Thein Win’s account for a report he brought out last May under the imprint of the dissident TV/radio station Democratic Voice of Burma (based in Oslo – there’s the Norwegian connection), entitled “Nuclear Activities in Burma” (whose short version is available here for you on the Scribd site).

It’s damning testimony. Then again, it’s (so far) based on only one witness. Can he be trusted? How will the world’s great powers react? And what will “M” say – especially when he learns that the account on the Morgenbladet’s website is but an abridged one, that the full Norwegian article on Sei Thein Win is only to be found in today’s printed edition?

Miss Moneypenny, get our man in Oslo on the line immediately! Not so fast, Chief. Turns out that the Independent newspaper has grabbed the full Norwegian piece and – with some shifting words-and-phrases around – brought it out in English.

                          

For anyone reasonably informed about recent nuclear weapons history, the name “Pakistan” does call forth many associations – but all of them related precisely to the sort of nuclear misuse that the IAEA is supposed to stop. Admittedly, the Volkskrant piece does devote a full three-quarters of its exiguous length to listing some of these doubts: Pakistan has never signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty; Pakistan has been locked in a dangerous nuclear stand-off with arch-rival India ever since first conducting nuclear explosions in 1998; the Pakistani nuclear scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan was primarily responsible not only for his own country gaining a nuclear weapons capability, but also (for a price) North Korea, Libya (since dismantled) and potentially Iran.

Still, the irony of another Pakistani being chosen to chair the IAEA’s governors was better captured by the lead paragraph in this report from the AFP (and not just because it’s in English):

VIENNA, Austria — Pakistan, which refuses to sign the nuclear [sic] Non-Proliferation Treaty and was home to a notorious nuclear smuggling ring, was named head of the UN nuclear watchdog’s governing board here Monday.

The AFP also judiciously supplements the previous reasons to doubt Pakistan’s anti-nuclear credentials with the additional fact that that country’s atomic weapons stockpiles are now the focus of widespread worry that they will somehow fall into Taliban and/or Al-Qaeda hands.

Yet, strangely, the tail-end of this AFP piece describes how many at the top levels of international nuclear policy find this new situation not to be at all unusual. “They are a member” of the IAEA after all, notes one diplomat, quoted anonymously. And the US ambassador to the IAEA declares that “The United States of America looks forward very much to working with the Pakistani governor as chairman of the board of governors.” In this light, appointing a Greenlander, say, to the UN’s Food and Agricultural Organization would be positively a breath of fresh air; at least no Greenlander has been known to go around burning grain warehouses to the ground.

                          

Aside from being refreshingly arcane – anybody see any sort of coverage of this at all in the American press? I thought not – how is any of this important? In a couple of ways, actually. First there’s our old friend German Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle, who explicitly campaigned during the last German nationwide election to have the Americans withdraw all of their nuclear warheads from Germany. It’s even a separate policy-point in the coalition agreement that undergirds the current CDU/CSU/FDP federal government in power in Berlin.

Obviously, though, if the Americans are seriously contemplating going forward with B-61 modernization, including for the many such warheads stored in Germany (the exact number is surely classified), then the German Foreign Minister can yell and demand all he wants, but it will remain painfully apparent that he has no say in the matter. Hey, they’re just devices sitting on German soil, each capable of annihilating a major city – but it’s highly unlikely that even Bundeskanzlerin Angela Merkel herself has any say, either, due to the web of defense agreements governing NATO military installations and US-German relations dating from back when Central Europe was a much more dangerous place.

It’s all something rather alarming to be made aware of, especially if you’re a German citizen, but this still is plainly the main message of this article’s author, Otfried Nassauer, even as he goes on in his article to describe – in what sometimes reads like rather unseemly detail – exactly what the proposed B-61 modernization plans entail. Right now there are five B-61 models, and that’s too unwieldy; those five are to be transformed into just two, namely Model 11 (which already exists and is said to be an atomic “bunker-buster” for tactical use) and Model 12 (brand-new, a multi-use model to take up the roles now covered by all the other models which are to be phased out). Further, in a yet more- explicit sign of the clear intention to keep these weapons in Europe for a long time to come, another aspect of the modernization will involve making sure these bombs are modified so that they can be delivered by the next generation of NATO tactical aircraft, such as the Joint Strike Fighter.

There’s yet another point Nassauer intends to make as well, however. Didn’t President Obama, in his speech to the adoring crowd last April in Prague’s Hradčanské náměstí (Castle Square), speak of his ambition to abolish nuclear weapons entirely? What ever happened to that notion? It’s true that Obama gets the last word in this modernization decision, which he will present in the “Nuclear Posture Review” that his administration is due to deliver to Congress shortly. But – surprise! – no sort of radical move to put aside the proposed modernization entirely is expected. There is too much money at stake, i.e. too many vested interests pushing for it both in DOE and DOD. Indeed, the main point of contention currently is whether the envisioned modernization will end up paving the way for the development of a new generation of nuclear weapons or instead just serve as a substitute for that.

But as for the Germans? Forget ‘em.

                          

But wait . . . here’s maybe a better reason to talk about Iran: the Munich daily Süddeutsche Zeitung is now reporting that that country has a design ready for atomic warheads. The newspaper hints heavily that this revelation is its exclusive scoop; according to information it has managed to obtain, the key to Iran’s efforts was a certain Russian nuclear expert, present in that country from the mid-nineties to the year 2000 (or maybe all the way to 2002), and whose work in developing a certain high-speed camera process was crucial to the Iranians being able to fashion a so-called two-point implosion system for setting off the nuclear explosion. Now the Iranians have the blueprints they need to develop bombs that in fact would be small enough to fit comfortably on the medium-range Shahab-3 missiles they possess. Supposedly, inspectors for the International Atomic Energy Agency know about this new development and concede that the warhead design would certainly work. (It was in fact an IAEA document that was the source for the Süddeutsche Zeitung’s revelations.)

Alright. But we still have that Munich Conference; maybe the world leaders and experts there can take note of this dangerous new situation and start thinking about how to deal with it. Instead, the Conference seems to be the target of some sort of Iranian charm offensive, according to an account in the Financial Times Deutschland (Security conference: Iran causes turmoil in Munich). You see, we first had at the beginning of this week the surprise mention by Iranian President Ahmadi-nejad in an interview that it should be OK to actually take the West up on its standing offer to take Iranian uranium and process it on the Iranians’ behalf, but only to purity-levels consistent with power-generation and not weaponry, before returning it. Now the Munich Conference has received the pleasant surprise of an announced intention to attend it from Iranian Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki. (Apparently it has been difficult for quite a while to get any Iranian foreign minister to show up, or in fact even to decline the invitation without adding some gratuitous comment casting doubt on the Holocaust.)

This is important. Mere declarations from Ahmadi-nejad in some interview have long since lost their ability to inspire confidence in other world capitals, but now the officials attending the Munich conference (including many foreign ministers and even some heads of state, like German Chancellor Angela Merkel) will have a chance to collar Mottaki (in a nice, diplomatic way, of course) to see whether Iran really means what its President just said. Mottaki has already declared that it does – sort of, in that he does intend to negotiate for higher levels of enrichment for that Iranian uranium than what was envisioned in the original Western offer. In any case, all this conveniently can occur just as the UN Security Council is preparing a new resolution imposing tougher economic sanctions on Iran, and also as public statements from Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov indicate that Russia is even ready to change its previous position and support the resolution. (Lavrov made these en route to Munich; also attending will be Chinese Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi, although there’s no indication from him or any other Chinese official that they are likewise willing to reverse their previous position and accept such sanctions, and that’s a problem.)

In the meantime, away from Munich, the US Department of State announced today a conference-call, initiated by Under Secretary for Political Affairs William Burns, the Department’s #3 official, between officials at analogous level to Secretary Burns at the other countries of the “Group of Six” presenting a common front against Iran (namely the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Russia, and China). This is reported in France’s Nouvel Observateur (The Group of Six discussed a nuclear Iran). Naturally, this event was likely prompted, not by the Munich conference, but at least by the sanctions resolution coming near completion in the Security Council, and probably also by a combination of Ahmadi-nejad’s pronouncement and the far more ominous news, uncovered by the Süddeutsche Zeitung, of Iran’s nuclear weapons progress. Again, the key country to bring around is China, which could simply veto the Security Council resolution, and the Nouvel Observateur reports that, this time, the Chinese at least did make available for this conference-call the counterpart in their Foreign Ministry to Secretary Burns. The last time there was a “Group of Six” meeting – last month in New York – they had only a lower-ranking official attend. (Those readers really on-the-ball will recall that this “send a lower-ranking guy to show disrespect” tactic was also one they used at various occasions during the COP15 climate-change conference in Copenhagen in December.) Such is progress.

                          

A report out of the Danish newspaper Berlingske Tidende (Hope for atomic agreement between USA and Russia, sourced to the Ritzau news-agency) largely confirms that assessment and adds further detail. For one thing, this will actually be the second time Obama and Russian President Dmitri Medvedev will discuss the subject. When they first met in London, at that G20 summit of early last April, they agreed to begin negotiations during this upcoming visit on strategic nuclear arms – which may have been somewhat of a no-brainer, as the current START-1 treaty that regulates the US-Russia strategic nuclear balance expires on 5 December of this year. In any case, it’s not like things have been quiet on this front (unfortunately); there is still that plan by the US to set up an anti-missile system in Central Europe, ostensibly aimed against Iran, with the control radar in the Czech Republic and the actual missiles in Poland, a topic which Medvedev is guaranteed to bring up into the conversations. Plus, the Russian president’s initial idea for greeting Obama’s election last November was to announce his intention to station short-range, nuclear-tipped “Iskander” missiles to the Russian enclave of Kaliningrad as a counter-move to that anti-missle system, although he has not followed through yet with the actual deployment.

But there’s another problem that the Economist article did not bring up, and that is NATO’s current difficulties with its supply line to Afghanistan. Routing provisions through Pakistan via the Khyber Pass has been a risky proposition for some time, and a few months ago it also looked like the US would be losing access to a key airbase in Kyrgyzstan, although recently the two governments signed an agreement to open it up again for American military use. Still, it would be handy also to be able to use Russian facilities – as well as Russia’s considerable influence on the Kyrgyz government – so that cooperation here would be very welcome. The BT article says American officials likewise have hopes of being able to settle this during the upcoming Russo-American summit.

                          

This development was recently revealed by an official at the South Korean Ministry of Defense. Of course, because of the recent North Korean nuclear explosion and rocket test-flights, and the accompanying heightened bellicose rhetoric coming out of Pyongyang, tensions are currently very high along that Armistice Line.

                          

All of these revelations are thanks to some reporting by the BBC, mainly from declassified US documents it got hold of through the US Freedom of Information Act. You can read all about this, in English, on the BBC News website here. What I find strange is how little echo there is in the Danish press. Yes, one of the Danish dailies, Politiken, has put up an article which mainly re-states the details of the BBC story (USA keeps atom-bomb secret from Denmark, although this piece did contribute the fact that that US base at Thule was authorized only for monitoring activities). And today I also happened to be listening to one of the Danmarks Radio hourly newscasts and heard a brief report about this. But none of the rest of Denmark’s print media seemed to have picked the story up. Because it’s old news? Because it’s embarrassing to recount how Denmark was misled by a powerful ally?

UPDATE: OK, now the reaction is setting in, and the Danish media is finally coming to grips with the story. Berlingske Tidende, for one, has an article: H-bomb in Greenland makes headlines again. You can tell by the way the headline is phrased, plus that they write “But the story is not new” in the lede, that the Berlingske editors are sensitive to accusation of getting to this story late. Meanwhile, Politiken once again forges ahead with its coverage: it has a new article, by Sanne Fahnøe (Denmark knew about the missing atom-bomb) that cites a historian from the Danish Institute for International Studies that the Danish authorities knew full well that the Americans were searching for their missing nuclear weapon. Oh, and the other main daily, Jyllands-Posten, reports that experts declare that that bomb, even though still unrecovered, no longer poses any danger to anyone.

                          

One aspect of the ongoing crisis around the alleged attempts by the Iranian government to develop nuclear weapons that usually goes unexamined is the attitude of Arab states, especially those in Iran’s immediate neighborhood. (Well, it’s true that the vagaries of the Iraq-Iran relationship have certainly received their fair share of attention – but let’s treat that as a special case.) Sami Al Faraj, President of the Kuwait Centre for Strategic Studies (all I could find on the Net was this), gives an enlightening interview to Der Tagesspiegel about the Gulf state perspective on Iran (specifically, that of the Gulf Cooperation Council, which includes Saudi Arabia) in the article “Against Iran Much Harder Economic Sanctions Are Necessary”.

To be sure, the Gulf states also recoil in horror at the prospect of Iran acquiring nuclear weapons, al Faraj makes it clear. There is a fundamental Sunni-vs.-Shia divide operating there that does not want to see Iran able to expand its sphere of inluence anymore. It just seems like no one is really doing anything about stopping them. Not the Europeans: they don’t understand how Iran is simply talking to draw things out and gain more time; and not the UN, that up to now has imposed meaningless sanctions (in his view) and otherwise just talks on the issue to hear itself talk. Anyway, whenever any tougher sanctions seem to be in the offing, it is Russia and China that block them. It’s time for the Gulf states to act together in a more unified way and approach new Russian President Dimitri Medvedev to make it clear that future sales of nuclear technology to the Arab Middle East (including to Egypt or Jordan, since its the Arab oil producers who will ultimately be paying the bills for that as well) will depend on Russian cooperation versus Iran. Dealings with the Chinese might be more difficult, considering their culture’s preoccuptation with not “losing face,” but the Arabs operate themselves within a “bazaar culture” and should be able to bring them around.

Gotta Cover Our Arab Tracks . . .

Those who do seem willing to do something about Iran – at least occasionally – are of course the US and Israel, from whom periodic warnings arise about a possible military strike against Iran. Al Faraj advances the quite striking view that the Gulf states would be willing to accept such a military strike, if there turns out to be no other way to dissuade the Iranians from their (alleged) course towards nuclear weapons. Naturally, that would unlease a grave crisis, and the GCC nations would unfortunately have front-row seats from their location right across the Persian Gulf (which they refer to as the “Arabian Gulf,” BTW). But if that has to happen, fine: in his view things are already too close to getting out of hand witht he Iranians. Now get this: If there has to be such a military strike, Al Faraj argues that the Gulf states would prefer that it be carried out by Israel. Why? Because then Teheran will assume that the GCC was in no way involved, so that maybe Iran would think twice before doing any retaliation against them, and maybe also Iran-GCC relations would have that much better a chance of being resuscitates when the dust finally cleared.

That’s certainly an interesting perspective. Frankly, Al Faraj’s anti-Teheran rhetoric in this interview is what is striking. (One can assume he is a Kuwaiti.) Not only is his view of the sanctions that should be imposed on Iran somewhat extreme – “There should be absolutely no more trade with Iran. No technology transfer, no financial transactions, no trade, nichts” – but he also expresses alarm over the trade and financial links already existing across the Persian/Arabian Gulf: “We Gulf states don’t need Iran for our economy. We only manage their money, we don’t need it. We have even created thousands of Jobs for the Iranians!” In normal times, it’s that sort of economic intercourse between countries that generally acts to make all parties well off – it’s called the “gains of trade.” Sami Al Faraj seems unable to imagine a world, in the past or in the future, where the countries around the Persian/Arabian Gulf can peacefully work together towards the prosperity of all.

                          

If it were, Petracek notes, that would be somewhat ironic, given that the WMD justification for the invasion of Iraq hasn’t panned out at all; last week also marked what was attempted as the “quiet” pull-out from Iraq of the main American team of 400 WMD-searchers (but the media are always watching, especially these guys). But actually there’s precious little connection; indeed, and unfortunately, there has been less progress in fighting the spread of WMD even after the fall of Saddam, even after he was caught in his spider-hole, than you would hope.

ROGUE-IN-THE-CLOSET

The key to this depressing conclusion is primarily to be found in yet another “rogue state,” or perhaps better stated, “rogue state whose name no one dares to speak” – Pakistan. Under a section in his article called “Pakistan – Ally with a Question-Mark,” Petracek lists the nuclear/missile shenanigans involving Pervez Musharraf’s Islamabad regime that have recently come to light. That Libya was starting to make progress towards enriching uranium on the way to building a nuclear device in the first place was due to Pakistani technical assistance and key supplies of machinery and fuel (this in return for considerable Libyan financial assistance which had eased its way towards acquiring the first “moslim A-bomb.”) For that matter, North Korea’s atomic progress is also largely thanks to Pakistan. (While Pakistan’s atomic-warhead-carrying-missile progress is largely thanks to North Korea; that expertise was what Pakistan felt it needed to get in a hurry, once its arch-enemy India developed its own nuclear weapons at the end of the 1990s.)

American and British officials, in the meantime, steadfastly resist labeling Pakistan as the source of nuclear-weapons technology to states that are not supposed to get it, rationalizing away the incriminating equipment that has been found in cargoes seized from ships as stuff that could have been ordered from anywhere in the world-wide black market. But Petracek himself asks, “Is Pakistan really an ally of the USA and the West in the War Against Terrorism?”

Meanwhile, in Pyongyang, whatever the reason for that recent (private) visit by a group of Americans to North Korea’s main nuclear facility, it cannot reasonably be attributed to Kim Jong Il starting to feel nervous about suffering the same fate as Saddam. Petracek is instead much more in agreement with a recent piece from the New York Times (I read it, too, back then, and I believe it is this editorial by columnist Nicholas Kristof, unfortunately already among the for-pay archives), which reasonably states that the lesson Kim Jong Il drew from the fall of Saddam was that he needs more nukes to deter the Bush administration, “the more, the better.” In fact, American experts already concede that North Korea possesses one or two nuclear devices. The upshot is that we shouldn’t be holding our breath waiting for Kim Jong Il to have a Libyan moment of revelation; indeed, North Korea’s stance has continued to be that it only offers to freeze the progress of its nuclear program, not roll it back, in exchange for the security guarantees and humanitarian assistance it seeks.

“NUCLEAR-FREE” SHAM

You would think that Syria’s case would be rather more encouraging. After all, Syrian president Bashar Assad recently admitted to the Daily Telegraph last week that his country possesses chemical and biological weapons – and has the right to do so, to defend itself. At least there’s no more silly denying what is plainly there. (A game Israel has long played; see below.) What is more, just last month during a visit to Egypt Assad joined President Hosni Mubarak in calling for the Middle East to be made into a nuclear-free zone.

But if you take this to be encouraging, especially that last part, you would be wrong – in fact, you would stand in need of a refresher course in Cold War history, as Zbynek Petracek does not (nor do most thinking Czechs of a certain age, as they experienced the Cold War rather more closely than most of the rest of us). The Soviet Union, you see, was also fond of the idea of a “nuclear-free zone,” but within Europe. This proposal would always be good for scoring propaganda points with Europeans terrified at what nuclear weapons could inflict on their homelands (the “Better Red than Dead” and unilateral nuclear disarmament points-of-view), but ultimately it was a thoroughly cynical ploy: nuclear weapons, and the implicit threat of their use (as can be seen, for example, that neither NATO nor the United States ever adopted a “no-first-use” policy) were key to defending Western Europe against the numerically-superior forces of the Warsaw Pact. Taking them out of that equation would have meant that the “Better Red than Dead” advocates would never have had to witness a nuclear explosion, but that they, together with the rest of their countrymen, would have likely had front-row seats at a Soviet conventional attack on Western Europe.

Petracek sees similar, if not identical, cynical motives in this call for a Middle East nuclear-free zone. Actually, the situation is not identical because, currently, it’s likely that Israel could still successfully defend itself against an attack by its Arab neighbors even without nuclear weapons (that it has never admitted to having, but which it is generally known to have possessed for over thirty years), especially in this era when the successor-state to the Soviet Union now demands hard cash, up front, for the military equipment it sells. But that was not always necessarily true, particularly back in the day when Israeli-Arab relations were more fraught, and when the Soviet Union was willing to ship top-class arms to its Middle Eastern client states for ideology rather than money; it seems that a catastrophic defensive breakdown on the Golan front, in particular, during the surprise Egyptian-Syrian attack on Israel in October, 1973, was averted by means that you wouldn’t exactly find described in any conventional military textbook.

WHO’S ALLOWED THE NUKES?

So take no comfort in what seems to be the refreshing sounds (in the key of WMD) coming out of Syria, and certainly don’t think they’re in any way connected to Saddam Hussein, OK? And that takes care of that, because for a coda Petracek wants to briefly take up instead a rather different subject, namely the whole debate of “If Israel can have these nuclear weapons – and we know it does – then why can’t we have them, too?” He gives a short answer in the form of his final section heading: “Weapons alone don’t threaten.” Does that remind anyone of “Guns don’t kill, people do”? Well, his point is that, in fact, it’s OK to let Israel have nuclear weapons (actually, there seems to be little that could be done to take them away) and not Israel’s bellicose neighbors because Israel has them, ironically, in order not to use them – i.e. as a deterrent. These other neighbors, on the other hand, would have them quite likely to actually use them – if not in the horrible physical sense, then at least to use them to make terrible threats.

Still: isn’t deterrence also a sort of threat? Petracek proposes a fuzzy criterion of judging whether states should be allowed to have nuclear weapons, in inverse relation to their “aggressivity” and ideologicnost, which is best-translated as “propensity to get carried away with ideology.” I would have preferred something more along the lines of degree of being a truly democratic state (which, among Arabs, not even Egypt qualifies for). In any case, the whole debate deserves its own treatment, rather than being at the tail-end of this otherwise useful, comprehensive article.