Arab News November 19, 2006
American Demands on Iranian Nuclear Program Questioned
By Lulwa Shalhoub
JEDDAH, 19 November 2006 — The College of Business Administration (CBA) hosted a lecture entitled “Iran’s Nuclear Program: Where is it headed and what can be done about it?” yesterday morning.
The lecture was presented by Charles Ferguson, fellow for Science and Technology Council on Foreign Relations and an adjunct professor in the security studies program at Georgetown University. “My main interest is to work together with people to stop nuclear weapons from all countries,” he told Arab News.
But some members of the audience took umbrage at the demands on Iran regarding its nuclear program, considering that the United States and Russia have far more nuclear weapons than the rest of the world combined and continue to refuse to make a concerted effort to reduce their own deadly stockpiles. “Doesn’t Iran have the right to have weapons to defend itself?” asked one woman attendee.
Ferguson answered that having nuclear weapons will harm Iran more than help it.
Another woman questioned the efforts of the US to keep Iran from becoming a nuclear power based on the fact that the Bush administration used the false claim that Iraq was stockpiling WMD as justification for the invasion and occupation of that country.
“It was only a trick to justify invading Iraq,” she said while questioning if the world can trust any claims by the United States regarding Iran’s alleged WMD program.
Ferguson said the Council on Foreign Relations needs to know Iran’s nuclear program. “We want to deal with Iran in a very transparent manner,” he said. “We need to know what their nuclear technology is about.”
While the West has no objection to Iran’s use of nuclear technology to meet its energy needs, the issue lies with the fact that the same technology employed for power generation can easily be upgraded to refining the high-grade uranium necessary for weapons making.
During the lecture, Ferguson presented the history of Iran’s nuclear program. According to him, Iran is developing nuclear technology not just for power generation but also for weapons to serve as a deterrent as well as to flex its muscles as a regional leader in science and technology.
Ferguson suggested some options to stop a potential Iranian bomb program, including seeking and obtaining a UN Security Council resolution imposing economic sanctions, intensifying efforts to change the Iranian regime, launching pre-emptive military strikes against Iran’s nuclear facilities, reluctantly accepting Iran as a nuclear-armed country, or re-energizing diplomacy with Iran.
In response to a question that the sanctions should be fair to all countries that have nuclear weapons including Israel, Ferguson said that all countries should be disarmed.
While some progress in reducing nuclear weapons has been made in recent years, the world’s largest nuclear superpowers — the United States and Russia — still overwhelmingly top the list of the largest possessors of these deadly weapons.
The United States, the world’s largest nuclear power, reduced weapons stockpiles from 13,731 in 1992 to 10,640 in 2002, according to the National Resources Defense Council. For comparison, Pakistan is estimated to have between 5 and 25 nuclear weapons. India may have up to 35 nuclear weapons. And China, the world’s fourth largest nuclear power, has about 400 nuclear weapons, according to the website Globalsecurity.org. Russia is the only other country on the planet with nuclear weapons that number in the thousands.
© Copyright 2006, Arab News
