Shanbeh   7 Ordibehesht 1387     شنبه 07 ارديبهشت 1387     

Gulf of Tonkin Act II

The US Navy is back again releasing sketchy details of another incident between US and suspected Iranian vessels in the Strait of Hormuz.  This time, a cargo ship under private contract opened fire with small arms in the general direction of one or more motor boats which approached the ship.  The details are maddenly thin:

A civilian ship contracted by the U.S. military fired warning shots at two small boats that approached it in the Persian Gulf, the U.S. Navy said Friday, the latest in a string of similar incidents to trigger concern in Washington…

The Navy said it does not know whether the two boats that approached the Western Venture cargo ship on Thursday were from Iran. Iranian officials have denied their vessels were involved.

Last month, a U.S. Navy-contracted ship fired warning shots at approaching motor boats in the Suez Canal, accidentally killing an Egyptian citizen.

The Western Venture was headed north in international waters in the central Gulf when it was approached by two small boats of unknown origin, said Cmdr. Lydia Robertson, spokeswoman for the Fifth Fleet based in Bahrain.

“Following proper procedures, Western Venture issued standard queries to the small boats via bridge-to-bridge radio but received no response,” said Robertson. “Western Venture then activated a flare but again did not receive a response.”

The boats continued toward the ship, and the ship’s security team fired warning shots with .50-caliber machine guns and M-16s into the water in front of the small vessels, causing them to leave the area, said Robertson.

A unit that identified itself as an Iranian coast guard vessel radioed the Western Venture a short time after the incident to determine its identity, said Robertson.  “It is not clear if this was one of the small boats or a separate boat,” she said.  The Western Venture is owned by U.S.-based Totem Ocean Trailer Express Inc. and was carrying military cargo to Kuwait when the incident occurred, said Robertson.

This incident should recall one at the begining of the year where the Navy released a video purporting to show Iranian motor boats making high speed runs at a Navy convoy while broadcasting in the clear in plain Engliesh, “In five minutes you will explode.”  It turned out that the threat was a ham radio prankster. 

As with the January incident, Iran is denying any threat or challenge.   

The IRGC Navy is fully prepared to carry out its duty in guarding Iran’s waters in the Persian Gulf and Sea of Oman, an IRGC official says.   The remarks were made after US officials alleged that a US vessel had opened fire on Iranian patrol boats.

“If UK or US vessels had fired at Iranian boats, based on previous experiences, they would have faced the harshest reaction by Iranian forces,” a senior IRGC (Islamic Revolution Guards Corps) official told Press TV Friday.  An IRGC official had earlier rejected the reports that an American ship had opened fire on Iranian patrol boats in the Persian Gulf.

There has been no confrontation between Iranian boats and US military vessels in the Persian Gulf, he told Press TV.

This will take some time to settle out, but one of these days, it might become real, and we’ll have ourselves a shoot’n war.

Chairman of US Joint Chief Sends New Warning

Admiral Fallon, who was notoriously booted upstairs to the Joint Chiefs and out of CENTCOM (now Gen Patraeus) took out after Iran:

The nation’s top military officer said today that the Pentagon is planning for “potential military courses of action” against Iran, criticizing what he called the Tehran government’s “increasingly lethal and malign influence” in Iraq.

Adm. Michael Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said a conflict with Iran would be “extremely stressing” but not impossible for U.S. forces, pointing specifically to reserve capabilities in the Navy and Air Force.

“It would be a mistake to think that we are out of combat capability,” he said at a Pentagon news conference.

Still, Mullen made clear that he prefers a diplomatic solution to the tensions with Iran and does not foresee any imminent military action. “I have no expectations that we’re going to get into a conflict with Iran in the immediate future,” he said.

Mullen’s statements and others by Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates recently signal a new rhetorical onslaught by the Bush administration against Iran, amid what officials say is increased Iranian provision of weapons, training and financing to Iraqi groups that are attacking and killing Americans.

Message to all:  Admiral Mullen is no peacenik.  If the circumstances present themselves, he will follow orders like anyone else.

This years’ hard-to-find “WMD” is hard evidence of Iranian military fingerprints in Iraq.  So far, the evidence has been less than compelling:

Army Gen. David H. Petraeus, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, who was nominated this week to head all U.S. forces in the Middle East, is preparing a briefing soon to lay out detailed evidence of increased Iranian involvement in Iraq, Mullen said. The briefing will detail, for example, the discovery in Iraq of weapons that were very recently manufactured in Iran, he said.

“The Iranian government pledged to halt such activities some months ago. It’s plainly obvious they have not. Indeed, they seem to have gone the other way,” Mullen said.

He said recent unrest in the southern Iraqi city of Basra had highlighted a “level of involvement” by Iran that had not been understood by the U.S. military previously. “It became very, very visible in ways that we hadn’t seen before,” he said.

But while Mullen and Gates have recently stated that Tehran must know of Iranian actions in Iraq, which they say are led by Iran’s Revolutionary Guard, Mullen said he has “no smoking gun which could prove that the highest leadership [of Iran] is involved in this.”

That’s a problem, all right, but it’s likely that something will be bound to turn up - like the planted drugs in Serpico.

Trident missile launch from sea.

by Andrew Lichterman

On May 11, a National Academy of Sciences panel issued an interim letter report on equipping Trident submarine launched ballistic missiles with conventional warheads. ArmsControlWonk.com provides an easy to download copy of the report here.

Congress requested that the NAS provide an analysis of conventional Trident in the conference report accompanying the 2007 Defense Appropriations Act. A final report from the NAS committee is scheduled to be issued in 2008. The reports are not limited to the conventional Trident proposal, but will “consider and recommend alternatives that meet the prompt global strike mission in the near-, mid-, and long-term.” The NAS panel recommended that research and testing of the conventional Trident should proceed with funding levels sufficient to keep the program on course to allow deployment in three to five years. It advised against full funding for production and deployment, because other “ global strike” technologies also being researched may prove more promising in the long run, and because various technical and policy issues, including the danger that a conventional Trident might be mistaken for a nuclear launch, remain unresolved.

Despite some reservations about nuclear ambiguity and the relationship of new conventional long-range systems to nuclear arsenals, the NAS panel appeared enthusiastic about pushing ahead with a new generation of strategic weapons. It endorsed further exploration of a variety of other concepts, such as a new sea-launched global strike missile design, high speed cruise missiles, and hypersonic boost glide vehicles with intercontinental range. It concluded that “[t]he committee believes it is preferable to consider all proposed CPGS weapons as elements of a portfolio, one that needs balancing in terms of technical risk and time to deployment.”

These programs, intended to yield highly accurate delivery systems with global reach for conventional weapons, are proceeding with little public debate. Further, the barriers to using improved or new non-nuclear long-range delivery systems for nuclear weapons are largely made of paper. Buried in its discussion of the danger that a conventional long-range missile might be mistaken for a nuclear one, the NAS committee acknowledges this, stating that “[i]ndeed, the ambiguity between nuclear and conventional payloads can never be totally resolved, in that any of the means for delivery of a conventional warhead could be used to deliver a nuclear warhead.” [emphasis added]

U.S. research on new strategic weapons continues apace, with advances in delivery systems and in supporting technologies used to find and track targets and to guide weapons to them appearing more significant than anything (or at least anything publicly known) happening in nuclear warhead development programs. Yet most NGO arms control and disarmament work concerning U.S. strategic weapons programs remains focused on a narrow set of nuclear weapons design and production activities. Is it more likely that there will be some development in nuclear warheads as opposed to delivery systems that affects the nuclear strategic/political calculus– including everything from the level of U.S. military commitment to nuclear weapons to the way potential adversaries view U.S. capabilities and intentions to the likelihood of nuclear weapons use– in ways that adversely affect disarmament prospects? If new, more accurate delivery systems are developed that can be paired with existing nuclear weapons (perhaps with modifications) to destroy difficult targets that the majority of Congress members (and likely still a majority) repeatedly have voted to find ways to destroy, will Congress deny the military such capabilities? Why should we believe this? I have yet to see much of a discussion of such issues in the “arms control and disarmament community,” much less their implications for disarmament strategies. But perhaps I am not looking in the right places.

These questions, however, beg even larger and more important ones. How much do the details of all of this matter? If we believe that nuclear weapons are fundamentally immoral and that a global empire ultimately underwritten by weapons with global reach is fundamentally illegitimate, why do we allow ourselves to be caught up in debates about the minutiae of one or another weapons program? These are debates that those who hold long-term power usually win even when they appear to lose, the sci-tech-military-industrial complex leviathan surging inexorably on, growing insatiably regardless of whether we knock off a barnacle or two.

“You already know enough. So do I. It is not knowledge we lack. What is missing is the courage to understand what we know and to draw conclusions.” Sven Lindqvist, “Exterminate all the Brutes”: One Man’s Odyssey into the Heart of Darkness and the Origins of European Genocide (New York: The New Press, 1996), p.2

For more on the U.S. “Prompt global strike” programs, see the preceding entry, “Next generation strategic weapons and the possibility of arms races to come.”

Trident missile launch photo from U.S. Navy, Vision… Presence… Power: A Program Guide to the U.S. Navy - 2000 Edition

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by Andrew Lichterman

In its current budget request, the military is pushing ahead with its proposals for “prompt global strike,” a broad effort aimed at giving the United States the ability to hit targets anywhere on earth in an hour or two. In the near term, the military wants to deploy conventional warheads on Trident submarine launched ballistic missiles, taking advantage of accuracy improvements resulting from programs conducted in recent years that have received little public attention. In the current proposal, two missiles on each ballistic missile submarine would be conventionally armed. At the same time, the U.S. is exploring other technologies and weapons concepts, ranging from land-based missiles with accurate, maneuverable re-entry vehicles to hypersonic glide vehicles that could deliver a variety of weapons. Although the technologies that would be developed in the Global Strike program currently are slated to be used to deliver only conventional weapons, there is nothing, aside from current policy, to prevent them from being adapted for nuclear weapons delivery in the future, potentially resulting in significant increases in the capabilities of the U.S. nuclear arsenal. Together with initiatives to rebuild the U.S. nuclear weapons production complex and to design new warheads with the flexibility to be fitted to a variety of delivery systems, the pieces are being put in place for a renewed arms race in the 21st century, with the U.S. leading the way.

In testimony to the Senate Armed Services Committee Strategic Forces subcommittee last week, high ranking military officers and administration officials insisted that the United States absolutely must have the ability to strike targets inside any country, anywhere, anytime, in short order. Rear Admiral Stephen Johnson, Director of Navy Strategic Systems Programs noted that the budget request “frontloaded the funding,” asking for $175 million for FY2008 in order to allow the Conventional Trident to be deployed by 2010. Statement of Rear Admiral Stephen Johnson, Director of Navy Strategic Systems Programs before the Strategic Forces Subcommittee of the Senate Armed Services Committee, March 28, 2007, p.5. Johnson noted that considerable development and flight testing of technologies allowing the requisite accuracy already has been done:

“CTM [Conventional Trident] will use existing D5 missiles, MK4 reentry bodies equipped with aerodynamic controls, GPS-aided terminal guidance, and a conventional warhead. Advanced error-correcting reentry vehicles with GPS-aided Inertial Navigation Systems have been flight proven in a previous D5 test program. Total time from decision to weapons-on-target is about 1 hour. CTM technology can be rapidly developed and deployed within 24 months.” Johnson Statement, p.5

Strategic Command (STRATCOM) Commander James Cartwright lamented the lack of “the means to deliver prompt, precise, conventional kinetic effects at inter-continental ranges. ” Statement of General James E. Cartwright Commander United States Strategic Command Before the Strategic Forces Subcommittee of the Senate Armed Services Committee, March 28, 2007, p.14. Neither Cartwright nor any other witness thought it relevant to mention that no other country has any such capability, or shows any signs of developing one). Cartwright noted that in addition to the Conventional Trident, the “Air Force Space Command is developing a promising concept for a CONUS [Continental United States] -launched conventional strike missile (CSM), which capitalizes on the maneuverability and precision-to-prompt-effects offered by maneuvering flight technology to produce effects at global distances.” (Id., pp.14-15). Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Strategic Capabilities Brian Green told the subcommittee that the Defense Department also “is considering other, longer-term solutions, both sea- and land-based, to broaden the portfolio of prompt, non-nuclear capabilities. The additional concepts include sea- and land-based conventional ballistic missiles and advanced technologies, such as hypersonic glide vehicles, employing precision guidance, advanced conventional weapons, and propulsion.” Statement of Mr. Brian R. Green Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense Strategic Capabilities for The Senate Armed Services Committee Strategic Forces Subcommittee Hearing Regarding Global Strike Issues, March 28, 2007, p.8. Conventional Prompt Global Strike, Green concluded, “is critical to meeting evolving U.S. security needs in the 21st Century.” id. p.11.
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John Burroughs

Direct actionists are sometimes faulted for not doing, or not doing well, all the other things needed besides sitting on the road. The Ground Zero Center for Nonviolent Action is a model for doing everything well, as I experienced last week in the Seattle area in connection with a trial of the “Ground Zero Three.”

From January 22 to January 26, 2007, three individuals with the Ground Zero Center - Brian Watson, CarolAnn Barrows, and Shirley Morrison - were on trial in a local court in Port Orchard, Washington, for their anti-Trident direct actions in May and August of 2006. They were charged with the misdemeanor of obstructing traffic into the Trident nuclear submarine base at Bangor, Washington, “without lawful authority.” Unusually, the judge allowed David Hall, former national president of Physicians for Social Responsibility, and me to offer expert testimony on January 24. The defendants also testified at length about the reasons for their actions. The jury, while sympathetic as revealed by post-trial comments, failed to seize the opportunity and instead convicted, as the Kitsap Sun reported.

Another Kitsap Sun story described my testimony. It is somewhat garbled, but does convey the gist. I certainly did not say that international law allows use of nuclear weapons defensively! Nor did I indicate that citizens who fail to write letters in theory could be convicted of complicity! I did not get to all of it, and simplified quite a lot, but if you’re interested here’s the written outline of my testimony.

Beyond the trial, the Ground Zero Center is doing a magnificent job of organizing, and participation and interest is on the rise. On January 15, 2007, Martin Luther King Day, 12 people were arrested at the submarine base, with over 200 there in total. In connection with the trial, they organized several events. I did a talk on “From Auschwitz to Trident” on January 20 at the Seattle Town Hall, with about 200 in attendance. You can see it on YouTube; the slides for the talk are here. I also was on Seattle’s National Public Radio affiliate KUOW on Jan 24, with a Center for Defense Information expert, Philip Coyle - here’s the audio.

It was sobering for me personally, for all the time I spend on these issues, to think about the eight or nine Trident submarines based at Bangor. Based on Natural Resources Defense Council estimates in the Nuclear Notebook, November/December 2006 Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, each carries 144 warheads, six per each of the 24 Trident II missiles on a submarine. The warheads mostly are 100 kiloton, about seven times the yield of the bomb with which the U.S. destroyed Hiroshima; some are around 450 kilotons, 30 times the Hiroshima bomb. About one-half of the subs are thought to be on patrol at a given time. The buildup of the more capable Trident II missiles in the Pacific clearly is aimed at exerting additional leverage on China, with the posture of readiness to actually wage nuclear war by striking enemy nuclear forces familiar from the Cold War era. For more on this, see the January-February 2007 Nuclear Notebook by Robert Norris and Hans Kristensen.

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John Burroughs

The Declaration of Independence refers to a “decent respect for the opinions of mankind.” A central setting now for the registering of the opinions of humankind is the UN General Assembly. Every year, the General Assembly adopts scores of resolutions on disarmament and security, calling for UN member states to negotiate treaties or take other actions on a wide range of matters. And every year for many years now, the United States has distinguished itself by opposing many of the resolutions.

During the Bush administration, that trend has accelerated, and it was especially marked in votes on December 6 as described in a UN press release. As Michael Spies comments in a piece entitled “Growing U.S. Isolation at the United Nations on Disarmament and Security,” on December 6 the United States cast the lone “no” vote on 12 of 54 resolutions, and opposed 26 of the 54. Among the resolutions where the United States stood alone in opposition were ones on control of small arms, promoting development through disarmament, and prevention of weaponization of outer space. (See table at end of “Growing U.S. Isolation”; see also First Committee Monitor.)

On nuclear weapons resolutions, the United States was in very poor company indeed. Only the United States and North Korea voted “no” on the resolution calling for bringing the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty into effect, reflecting the Bush administration opposition to ratification of the treaty following the Senate’s failure to approve it in 1999. Another example is the “Renewed Determination Towards the Total Elimination of Nuclear Weapons” resolution, as to which the only no votes came from the United States, India, Pakistan, and North Korea. Virtually all governments supported the resolution, including close U.S. allies like Britain and Japan. It calls for holdout nations like the United States to ratify the nuclear test ban treaty, negotiation of a ban on production of plutonium and enriched uranium for weapons, a diminishing role of nuclear weapons in security policies, reduced operational status of nuclear forces, and verified and irreversible reductions of nuclear arsenals leading to elimination.

The General Assembly gets little attention in this country. The media and elites view it as a “talk shop,” as opposed to the Security Council, largely U.S. controlled, which can back up its edicts with sanctions and even military action. But activists and the public should become more informed about the General Assembly. It’s mostly true that it’s a “talk shop,” but it’s an important one: it’s where the opinions of the world’s nations are expressed, they’re usually opinions that should be acted upon, and they’re often consistent with the positions of Americans as shown by polling data.

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Michael Spies

On Thursday, November 16, student activists from the Coalition to Demilitarize the University of California (UC) shut down a Board of Regents committee meeting, which was set to discuss issues related to the University’s management of two U.S. nuclear weapons laboratories: Los Alamos National Laboratory and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

According to the UCLA based Daily Bruin, the student coalition acted to shut down the meeting after “they were cut off during the morning’s public comment period.” Members of the Coalition included students and alumni from UC campuses in Santa Barbara and Santa Cruz, and community members from the Santa Barbara based Nuclear Age Peace Foundation. The Coalition was able to make a statement during the public session detailing its demands:

1. that the University of California Board of Regents sever their ties with the nuclear weapons laboratories at Livermore and Los Alamos;
2. that the Regents issue a public statement in opposition to the insanity of US nuclear weapons policy, and
3. that the Regents lobby the federal government, in the interest of true national security, to build a new, federally-funded sustainable energy research laboratory, with said funding to be transferred from the budgets of the Los Alamos and Lawrence Livermore laboratories. Any serious national research effort toward sustainability must be fully autonomous from militarized institutions like the weapons labs.

Later, as the Department of Energy (DOE) Lab Oversight Committee of the UC Regents was set to convene, nine members of the Coalition “adjourned” the meeting by sitting on the floor, chanting and linking arms. As the UCLA police intervened to “disperse” the protest, the regents filed out of the meeting room, thus conceding the day to the protesters.

The nine members of the Coalition were arrested and, one by one, dragged from the meeting room. They vowed to be back and to not let the regents meet until the University met their demands.

Video clips of the protest are available on YouTube (part one, part two, part three, part four, part five).

Additional coverage of the protest and the full Coalition statement is available on Indymedia here.

For more information about military spending at universities see: Military Spending: Researching Impacts on Your Campus or Community

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Michael Spies

Hans Blix was the primary witness at a September 26 congressional hearing titled, “Weapons of Mass Destruction: Current Nuclear Proliferation Challenges,” held by the House Subcommittee on National Security, Emerging Threats and International Relations, chaired by Christopher Shays (R-CT). The hearing also featured two additional panels, one comprised of governmental officials and the other comprised of non-governmental representatives.

Beyond the narrow-minded conception of non-proliferation prevalent in Washington, Blix, focusing on the findings made in the Weapons of Mass Destruction Commission’s report, Weapons of Terror, took the opportunity to inform Congress:

A large number – if not all – of the non-nuclear weapon states parties to the NPT consider that the nuclear weapon states parties are seriously failing in compliance with their commitments under the treaty to move to nuclear disarmament.

However, in his prepared testimony Blix declined to highlight the inextricable connection between non-proliferation and disarmament as forcibly as was done by the WMD Commission, which forcefully noted:

So long as any state has nuclear weapons, others will want them. So long as any such weapons remain, there is a risk that they will one day be used, by design or accident. And any such use would be catastrophic.

However, Blix did note that, in the view of the Commission, “nuclear weapons may be particularly dangerous in some hands but constitutes a danger in anybody’s hands.” Thus he reasserted Commission’s pointed rejection of the “suggestion that nuclear weapons in the hands of some pose no threat, while in the hands of others they place the world in mortal jeopardy.”

Two other notable non-governmental panelists, Ambassador Thomas Graham, chairman of the Bipartisan Security Group, and Jonathan Granoff, president of the Global Security Institute, also focused primarily on disarmament issues in their testimonies.

Iran and the Nuclear Fuel Cycle

Blix also highlighted the connection between threats to state security and proliferation, saying specifically in the context of Iran that:

Just as security considerations are important behind some states’ non- adherence [India, Israel, Pakistan] such considerations may also figure among the factors which have led some states’ failure to comply. Iran’s enrichment program appears to go back to the 1980s. If there were intentions to acquire nuclear weapons or getting closer to the option, these might well have been based in suspicions that Saddam Hussein in Iraq was working to develop nuclear weapons and that Iran’s security required a response. The suspicion would have been right.

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Andrew Lichterman

On August 9, 61 years after the United States dropped the second of the two atomic bombs used in war on Nagasaki, Japan, groups around the country gathered to protest continued U.S. commitment to war as a means of achieving political and economic ends, with a focus on the global corporations that profit from war and preparation for war. The focus was Bechtel Corporation, a company with a history intertwined with U.S. ascendance as the world’s dominant military and economic power and with its nuclear power and weapons industries. With billions in Iraq reconstruction contracts and billions more in U.S. military contracts, Bechtel continues to profit from U.S. war making.

In San Francisco, about 200 people gathered at Bechtel’s global headquarters for a program of speakers and music. Keiji Tsuchiya, a survivor of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, spoke of his experience, and there were speakers addressing various aspects of of Bechtel’s global impact. A number of people blocked the entrances to the building complex housing Bechtel, resulting in a small number of arrests by the San Francisco police. A few people chanted “this is what a police state looks like” as one protester was carried off, but to those who experienced San Francisco street demonstrations in decades past (for example, in the 80’s under Mayor Dianne Feinstein), the police presence was pretty low key– no truncheons, no beatings, no one run over by motorcycles or stepped on by horses.

I had three or four minutes on the program for some remarks on Bechtel’s nuclear weapons role and its connection to their other activities; several people asked for a text. For those interested, it can be found after the “more” jump below.

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Andrew Lichterman

A Department of Defense chart outlining the future of the nuclear stockpile, discovered by the Federation of American Scientists, forecasts that the U.S. will “develop warheads for next-generation delivery systems” between 2010 and 2020. Titled “Stockpile Transformation,” the chart also has a “long term vision” that includes “possible new DoD platforms and delivery systems.” In addition, the “long-term vision” includes “2-4 types of RRW’s” (reliable replacement warheads), while most media coverage to date has suggested that there will be only be two RRW designs%2

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Michael Spies

Less than a week after the United Nations Security Council unanimously adopted a resolution condemning North Korea for test launching several ballistic missiles, the United States is set to launch an unarmed Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missile on Wednesday from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. The missile, carrying three dummy warheads, will be fired across the Pacific toward the missile test range at Kwajalein Atoll in the Marshall Islands, with a flight time of about 30 minutes.

According to the Santa Maria Times, the test scheduled for early Wednesday morning is intended to test the reliability and capability of the missile system. The United States currently deploys 500 Minuteman III missiles, kept on high alert and each carrying a single nuclear warhead with a yield, depending on the configuration, of 170 kT or 335 kT, respectively 10 or 20 times more powerful than the U.S. atomic bomb that devastated Hiroshima.

This test is the latest in an ongoing series of regularly scheduled ballistic missile tests conducted by the U.S. military. In the period between January 2000 and the present, the U.S. has test launched at least 23 Minuteman III ICBMs from Vandenberg. The last test of a Minuteman III occurred on June 14th. Regarding the purpose of the test, Andrew Lichterman pointed out that according to the 30th Space Wing, the goal was to “provide key accuracy and reliability data for on-going and future modifications to the weapon system, which are key to improving the already impressive effectiveness of the Minuteman III force.” He further noted that “as this blog has documented, this is only one small part of a wide-ranging effort to develop the next generation of U.S. strategic weapons, with the intention of being able to strike targets anywhere on earth in hours or less.”

The ongoing conduct of these tests represents yet another example of U.S. exceptionalism; the U.S. feels no embarrassment in criticizing others for the same activities it or its allies engage in. For instance, days after the North Korean tests the Bush Administration “offered an unprecedented defense and rationalization of India’s missile test and nuclear programme” following India’s test launch of a nuclear capable Agni-III missile. The tests of such weapon systems is ill-timed following the international chorus of condemnation, partially led by the U.S., of the North Korean tests. In the regional context of the Korean Peninsula, given the heightened tensions surrounding North Korea’s nuclear weapons program, the U.S. test of a nuclear capable missile is unambiguously provocative. In the global context, the U.S. missile test is blatant hypocrisy, symptomatic of a dangerous foreign policy based on the imposition of discriminatory, self-serving norms backed by the threat and use of force.

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