Editor,
Santhosh Chandrashekar's column "West needs new plan to calm Iran," published in the Daily Lobo on Tuesday, is illuminating.
Today at 7:30 p.m., there will be a talk titled "The Folly of Attacking Iran" at the UNM Conference Center, 1634 University Blvd. N.E., by Stephen Kinzer, former New York Times correspondent and author of All the Shah's Men. Speakers from the Physicians for Social Responsibility and the Cato Institute will join him.
Chandrashekar points out the double standards held by those in the nuclear club. In the past several years, Israeli leaders have compared Iran to Nazi Germany and stridently warned of the dangers of Iran's nuclear ambitions.
But what about the U.S. response to Israel's nuclear program? In a newly declassified 1969 memo about the Israeli nuclear program available at nixon.archives.gov, Henry Kissinger wrote to Nixon, "The Israelis are probably more likely than almost any other country to actually use their nuclear weapons. There is circumstantial evidence that fissionable material for Israel's weapons development was illegally obtained from the U.S. about 1965. This is one program on which the Israelis have persistently deceived us."
Although Kissinger wanted, as a minimum, for Israel to sign the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, another option set forth was to simply pretend, publicly, that the U.S. did not know about Israel's nuclear program.
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Subsequent U.S. administrations have taken this easy way out, not confronting the dangers of Israel's nuclear weapons.
But Iran has signed the treaty. In this context, is the U.S. response toward Iran just? Or just warmongering?
Vicki Johnson
UNM alumni
