Abdul Rahman Al-Rashid

Nobody can have missed the edict issued by Iranian Foreign Minister Kamal Kharrazi calling for the ban of nuclear weapons. The edict looked strange, as the minister’s objective was implicitly to answer American protests against his country’s nuclear program.

But his edict did not succeed in convincing the Americans, who do not care for such edicts. They follow the Cartesian theory of hyperbolic doubt and want access to Iran’s secret nuclear workshops and reactors.

Kharrazi’s edict was not conclusive. A year ago the mufti of a satellite channel declared that the possession of nuclear bombs was compulsory for every Islamic country and that all Muslims had to work hard to get them.

Few listened to the edict on the possession of nuclear weapons or other weapons of mass destruction, although such edicts are very popular in today’s political circles. For many people nuclear weapons symbolize ultimate military supremacy — they are the only weapons that can guarantee victory in a battle.

But this concept, which has been popular for a while, is a rather narrow basis for a solution to Arab failures. This narrow concept seeking a solution for the Arab failure has become popular in our region for several years. The nuclear capabilities of the West are the result of its scientific and technological development, a fact which some people fail to understand. In their opinion, a country should get hold of nuclear weapons at any cost, either by purchasing them or by recruiting nuclear scientists, and spend the country’s financial and manpower resources on the production of one or two nuclear warheads. But actually, this is a dangerous project.

What happened at the Iraqi nuclear site of Tuwaitha supports Kharrazi’s argument that these repulsive weapons must be banned. People in the area are now suffering from dangerous diseases as a result of nuclear contamination. Many people stole containers of radioactive material from the nuclear plant soon after the collapse of Saddam Hussein’s regime. Some weeks later, people used these containers to wash or collect water for cooking, and Tuwaitha became the first victim of the Arab nuclear project.

Those who have watched the scenes in Russia’s Chernobyl after the reactor accident there and the subsequent spread of radioactive substances to neighboring cities will be afraid of the danger posed by these nuclear facilities to the environment and the people.

We must remember that we do not know of the enormity of the danger posed by nuclear sites in India, Pakistan and other countries, which lack the capabilities to prevent such nuclear disasters. These countries have kept their nuclear programs top secret not in order to prevent leakage of radioactive substances but to prevent leakage of the news of disasters caused by their deadly negligence and mistakes.

So the call for a ban of these weapons in our region is good for the safety of everyone, and this was what Crown Prince Abdullah proposed at the Sharm El-Sheikh summit when the Americans criticized Iran for its nuclear program. The crown prince’s aim was to prevent everybody from developing nuclear weapons, and that of course includes Israel.

When the first UN team was appointed to inspect weapons of mass destruction in Iraq seven years ago, they returned with a picture that showed a rusted bomb in a river. The UN inspectors said they were shocked when they saw a substantial quantity of biological material inside the bomb, a part of which would have been enough to poison the river Tigris for the next 100 years. One inspector said this could easily have happened if any vehicle had accidentally hit the bomb.

If the results are potentially this disastrous, is there anything to be proud of in scientific progress?

The only way to please these people and not to get “caught off guard” is for Muslim leaders to say that killing Palestinians is acceptable, but killing Israelis is terrorism.

Is it worth it?

Arab News Opinion 14 June 2003