If you ask, “Do you really believe Brownies are potential airliner hijackers?” – the Grand Pooh-bahs reply, “We can’t rule them out.” If you ask, “Are you going to preemptively nuke “suspected” nuke facilities in Iran and/or Iraq?” – the answer is, “We can’t rule that out.”
Why can’t they?
Doesn’t the Girl Scout Promise and Law prohibit – or at least strongly discourage – such activities as hijacking airliners? Doesn’t being a Brownie in good standing mean anything to the Grand Pooh-bahs?
And hasn’t the International Atomic Energy Agency – the U.N. agency responsible for preventing non-nuke signatories to the Non-Proliferation Treaty from acquiring or developing nukes – recently searched both Iran and Iraq, high and low, and not found any nuke-proliferating activities? Doesn’t being a NPT signatory in good standing mean anything to the Grand Pooh-Bahs?
The IAEA-NPT international nuke proliferation-prevention regime was originally established in 1972. The NPT signatories that didn’t already have nukes promised to not acquire or develop nukes and – in return – the have-nuke states (U.S., U.K., France and Soviet Union) promised to provide the non-nuke states access to all peaceful nuclear energy, nuclear medicine and related technologies.
Throughout the Cold War, there was also an unwritten promise by the U.S. to shield Western-bloc NPT non-nuke signatories from nuke attack, thereby removing the need for them to develop nukes on their own. The Soviet Union had a similar unwritten promise with Soviet-bloc countries.
In retrospect, it appears these unwritten promises by the U.S. and Soviet Union were more effective in preventing non-nuke states from seeking to acquire or develop their own nukes than was the NPT-IAEA proliferation-prevention regime, itself. NPT membership, in and of itself, doesn’t seem to have prevented several NPT signatories from attempting to develop their own nukes.
In the 1970s, Iraq, as was its right as a non-nuke NPT signatory, bought from France a 40-MW light-water nuclear reactor. The Osiraq reactor, sited near Baghdad, was to use fuel – supplied by the French – containing highly enriched uranium. Since HEU can be used to make a nuclear bomb, all operations involving that HEU fuel – in France as well as Iraq – were subject to the IAEA-NPT inspection regime.
But, on June 7, 1981, before the Osiraq reactor could begin operation, Israeli air force planes flew to Baghdad and totally destroyed a reactor and associated facilities that were in full compliance with the IAEA-NPT safeguards and physical protection regime.
The Israeli government – not a party to the NPT – stated that it had discovered from “sources of unquestioned reliability” that Iraq was producing nukes at the Osiraq plant, and had no choice but to launch a “pre-emptive strike.”
That ‘s nonsense.
To make a nuke you need either HEU or plutonium-239. As the Israelis well knew, since they had a reactor very similar to Osiraq, if you forgo using the HEU as reactor fuel, then enough HEU could be recovered for maybe one nuke. Conversely, if the HEU fuel was actually loaded into the reactor and started up, then it would be possible to insert uranium-238 targets into the reactor and irradiate them, making small quantities of plutonium-239, which could later be chemically recovered. Eventually, the Iraqis might even make enough plutonium for a nuke.
But, it’s either one or the other. Either the Iraqis had salvaged the French fuel-elements for HEU and had made a nuke right under the noses of the IAEA inspectors, or the French fuel was still intact, ready to be loaded into the reactor as planned. If the Iraqis had made an HEU nuke, then it would make no sense to destroy the reactor, which now couldn’t be fueled. On the other hand, if the French fuel was already loaded into the reactor, the HEU could not be recovered and it would be years and years before the Iraqis could make enough plutonium – right under the noses of the IAEA inspectors – to make a nuke.
So much for the “sources of unquestioned reliability.”
Now this is not meant to say that Saddam Hussein is a Girl Scout. But it is meant to make you wonder why our government refuses to rule out a “pre-emptive” nuke strike against the facilities that those same “sources of unquestioned reliability” now claim that NPT signatory Iran – Iran, not Iraq, Iran – is building, underground, right under the noses of the IAEA.
And is it really necessary to strip-search all those little Brownies?
WATCH Tucker Carlson in Moscow: U.S. is now in a ‘hot war with Russia’
Tucker Carlson