In legal history, a crime was understood as an unacceptable action which was proscribed by law. In the 1920s a new concept arrived with prohibition of alcohol and marijuana … the idea of a criminal substance. Now President Bush has another innovation, illegal knowledge. Speaking about Iran he said “So I’ve told people that, if you’re interested in avoiding World War III, it seems like you ought to be interested in preventing them from having the knowledge necessary to make a nuclear weapon.”
Leaving from the alarming implications of this new kind of crime, the thought crime, for a moment, let’s look at the practicality of Bush’s aim of preventing Iran from learning how to make a bomb.
In the 1940s, a few thousand people had an understanding of how to make a nuclear weapon, and they were bound by military oaths of secrecy. By the late 1950s, however, any high school physics student could give you the lowdown. In the internet age, you just look it up on the net: here http://www.fas.org/nuke/intro/nuke/design.htm or here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_weapon_design
If Iran required more detailed instructions, they were available. Remember this story from CNN January 2004? “The government of Pakistan has removed the founder of the country’s nuclear program from a government advisory post in the midst of an investigation into allegations that Pakistani officials shared nuclear technology with other nations, including Iran and Libya.” It turned out that Libya had the plans, so it is reasonable to assume that if Iran wanted them, they got them too.
Perhaps Bush means that he doesnt want the Iranians to have the practical, as opposed to theoretical, knowledge of how to enrich uranium? If so, it is a false hope. The Iranians already know that, have already done that. What is more, they have known how to do that for longer than is generally realised. One of the reasons they began the present enrichment program was because they were denied their share of the output of the enrichment plant in France which they part-owned. The Eurdif plant was constructed in 1975 using a $1 billion loan from the then Shan of Iran. The deal was that Iran was to get ten percent of the nuclear fuel produced. You do not put up one billion dollars to build a plant of any kind without seeing the detail plans. Iran, and Iranian technologists have been in possession of the knowledge forbidden by Bush for over three decades.
The IAEA says there is no evidence that Iran has a nuclear weapons programme. The Iranians say they have no nuclear weapons programme.
Russia’s Putin says he can see no evidence of an Iranian nuclear weapons programme. George Bush can produce no evidence of an Iranian nuclear weapons programme, so in order to justify his continued threats, sanctions, and hostility against Iran he has resorted to a nonsensical accusation … the Iranians may not have acted criminally; they may not have possessed criminally, but they are guilty of knowing criminally.
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