CND Press Roundup - 4 January

Posted: 4th January 2021



Nuclear weapons

  • Nuclear proliferation in Asia? 
  • Doug Bandow, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute and a former special assistant to Ronald Reagan, has suggested in Foreign Policy that America’s Asian allies should develop their own nuclear weapons, as Washington’s interests in their security are not so great as to be worth the “risks to America’s homeland” that results from their current reliance on US nuclear weapons for deterrence. Bandow says that the Biden administration should therefore “reconsider reflexive U.S. opposition to ‘friendly proliferation.’” 
  • He concludes: “The United States should think creatively about new approaches to old problems. One way to do so is to stop hectoring partners and preventing them from doing what they want to do. Including, perhaps, developing nuclear weapons.”
  • Israel nuclear weapons
  • Archbishop Desmond Tutu has written in the Guardian arguing that “Joe Biden should end the pretence over Israel’s ‘secret’ nuclear weapons”. Tutu wrote that since Richard Nixon, there has been an “oral agreement to accept Israel’s ‘nuclear ambiguity’ — effectively to allow Israel the power that comes with nuclear weapons without the responsibility.” 
  • He calls for Biden to acknowledge Israel as “a leading state sponsor of nuclear proliferation in the Middle East”, and to implement US laws that limit funding and aid for nuclear proliferators. “It’s quite possible that one of the reasons that Israel’s version of apartheid has outlived South Africa’s is that Israel has managed to maintain its oppressive system using not just the guns of soldiers, but also by keeping this nuclear gun pointed at the heads of millions”, Tutu concludes. 
  • Cummings on nuclear risk
  • Dominic Cummings, writing publicly for the first time since leaving Downing Street, used his column inches in a feature for The Spectator’s Christmas edition to discuss nuclear risk. Cummings recounts a close brush with nuclear catastrophe in September 1983, when Soviet Air Defence soldier Stanislav Petrov was monitoring the country’s satellite system, which indicated that the US had launched five ICBMs. 
  • Cummings adds: “We have fluked many similar episodes since the 1960s. ‘Launch on warning’ protocols combined with flawed early warning systems remain a huge danger today. Nuclear and biological weapons are proliferating. Issues of existential importance are largely ignored”. He concludes by noting his approval of efforts to upgrade Britain’s “nuclear enterprise”, and by arguing for “far greater intellectual and material resources ought to be deployed on such apparently low-probability, high-impact events.” 


Iran nuclear deal

  • Persian Gulf tensions
  • The AFP reports that Washington has reversed its decision to bring an aircraft carrier home from the Persian Gulf. In a statement, the Pentagon said that the USS Nimitz would be staying in the Strait of Hormuz due to “recent threats” by Iran. The acting US defence secretary, Christopher C Miller, said: “The USS Nimitz will now remain on station in the US central command area of operations. No one should doubt the resolve of the United States of America.”
  • Iran uranium breaches 
  • According to the IAEA, as reported by the BBC, Iran intends to start enriching uranium to 20% purity, in its “most significant breach” of the nuclear deal so far. Such a level of enrichment falls far short of the 90% necessary to make a nuclear bomb, but is significantly above the 3.67% limit stipulated by the 2015 JCPOA. 
  • Tehran did not specify in its letter to the UN nuclear agency when the enrichment activity would take place. The increase to 20% was mandated by Iran’s parliament in December, in retaliation for the assassination of Mohsen Fakhrizadeh.
  • Iran’s current enrichment levels are 4.5%, Sky News reports. 
  • Soleimani: one year on
  • Arguing that Trump’s “maximum pressure” policy on Iran has worked, Joseph I. Lieberman (the 2000 Democratic nominee for vice president and chairman of United Against Nuclear Iran) and Mark D. Wallace (CEO of United Against Nuclear Iran and a former Bush 43 administration official), have called on Biden “not to re-enter the original agreement but instead work with both parties in Washington and our allies in Europe and the Middle East to develop a new Iran policy — one that reflects the regional realities of 2021, not 2015.”
  • Barbara Slavin, director of the Future of Iran Initiative at the Atlantic Council, has argued on the contrary that the Soleimani assassination failed to re-establish ‘deterrence’ against Iran, concluding: “There is a window for a return to diplomacy with Iran before its own presidential elections in June. The United States—and Israel—can’t kill their way to Iranian non-proliferation or accomplish that goal through cyber attacks. Only diplomacy has proven effective in constraining Iran’s nuclear activities. It is the only sensible way forward.”

NATO 

  • Effectiveness of Atlantic alliance
  • The Times’ editorial on NATO this morning argues that “it will take more than a new American leader to restore trust in the increasingly exhausted postwar institutions, which were set up in part as a vehicle for western global leadership.” It suggests that combatting China falls “outside Nato’s north Atlantic remit”, pointing out that much cooperation on the matter is being undertaken by the ‘Quad’. 
  • Western Sahara occupation 
  • The Morning Star reports that NATO has “inflamed simmering tensions in north Africa after its website showed a map with Morocco’s border extending deep into the occupied territory of Western Sahara”. 


Nuclear power

  • Poland nuclear power
  • Poland’s climate minister Michal Kurtyka has said that Biden’s administration will not derail Washington’s cooperation with Warsaw on plans for the latter to develop its own nuclear energy capacities, the FT reports. “There is an advanced discussion with the US on this subject and I think it is very promising…As far as I know there is bipartisan support for the development of nuclear energy in the US, and I wouldn’t expect any changes in a strategic decision which has been engaging [our] countries for a long time”, Kurtyka told the Financial Times. 
  • Nuclear fusion 
  • A report on nuclear fusion in the Guardian says that scientists hope that fusion reactors will be able to start producing electricity by the end of this decade. Daniel Jassby, a retired Princeton researcher, expressed scepticism about whether fusion will ever be a reliable energy source, saying: “When you consider we get solar and wind energy for free, to rely on fusion reaction would be foolish”. 

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