SA - nuclear threat?

Nuclear threats, of course, have historically been at the heart of U.S. foreign policy and have proven extremely useful for justifying U.S. actions.[3] This time around, however, there is a new twist added to the more traditional threats by the U.S. to unleash nuclear devastation on any nation challenging its powers.[4] In the past, preventing nuclear proliferation had been a low priority for U.S. policymakers. Now, the U.S. claims the right to intervene militarily around the world to stop alleged proliferation. . . .

While the U.S. richly rewarded Israel, South Africa, and Pakistan, which all had extensive clandestine nuclear facilities, it used Iraq's primitive bomb-building efforts to justify a war. In that conflict, the U.S. and its allies dropped 88,500 tons of high explosives (seven times the Hiroshima bomb), killed perhaps 200,000 to 300,000 people, and according to the U.N., reduced the country to a "preindustrial" state. . .

Clearly, South Africa's vast nuclear program . . . dwarfs the puny Iraqi program by several orders of magnitude and can generously supply both its own and Israel's need for fissionable materials.[14] The exact figures on South African plutonium refinement capability are unknown because Pretoria had refused to sign the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) until 1991. Iraq, by contrast, was a signatory to the NPT, allowed inspections by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) every six months, and only possessed about 50 pounds of enriched uranium. . . .

Compare the unsubstantiated charges of imminent nuclear capability launched against Iraq with the solid evidence provided six years earlier by Israeli defector Mordechai Vanunu. The nuclear technician claimed that Israel possessed possibly several hundred atomic bombs, developed at the secret Dimona plant, and even sent color photographs of the nuclear bomb cores to the "London Sunday Times." According to Vanunu, Dimona produces 1.2 kilograms of pure plutonium per week, or enough to manufacture four to twelve atomic bombs per year. Despite this evidence, the U.S. publicly supported the convenient fiction that Israel did not possess nuclear capability.[15] . . .

A journalist once asked President Reagan whether the rightwing strategy of "spending Russia into a depression" might backfire; might not the U.S. be spent into a depression instead? In one of the few lucid moments of his presidency, Reagan answered, "Yes...but they'll bust first." For once, Ronald Reagan was correct. The Soviets indeed did bust first, but there are indications that the U.S. may be next.

The national security states of hypocritical america are well described below. Why worry about vague abstractions like "moral authority" when you can simply cop-out with rule-of-the-club/might-makes-right kind of neanderthal "thinking"? For the sake of accuracy, simply replace "may" with "will" in the last excerpted sentence above.