by Bruce A. Gorcyca

Created on: December 29, 2006   Last Updated: November 11, 2010

No matter who the current leader may be, Iran is still a sovereign nation. But sovereignty is a concept that is mostly ignored by the Bush Administration whenever the nation in question is not the United States of America. Canada got a taste of this first-hand with the softwood lumber fiasco in the world court, but the most visible example of this blatant disrespect for another country is clearly manifested in their manipulations in the nuclear arena, as they try to dictate which nation is "allowed" to have nuclear energy and weapons, and which are not. How the Bush administration assumes or justifies this authority to decide is not found in any treaty, U.N. resolution, or other written agreement. Instead it is self-claimed, arbitrary, and bestowed upon themselves as the current bully on the world's block.

Without question, there is no greater nor effective way to deter military aggression in the world than the threat of nuclear retaliation. For those of us baby-boomers growing up through the cold war with the Soviet Union, we learned this lesson well as we witnessed the biggest and most dangerous arms race in history, and added a new phrase to our universal vocabulary "mutual assured destruction". For almost five decades, we justified our own huge nuclear arsenal with the "deterrence" argument as we boasted of the clean and reliable nuclear energy source born from related military research.

But now that we ourselves have become the most feared military aggressor in the world with more foreign invasions in the last century than even Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, our leaders simply and conveniently, cannot seem to understand how and why another country would like to have the same "deterrence" we enjoyed all along for half a century. The self-righteous Bush administration would prefer to keep their iron grip on the nuclear monopoly and risk yet even another war over the matter. A war that children, other than their own would again, have to fight and expend their lives.

Enough is enough. Each and every sovereign nation on Earth has the right to develop nuclear energy and weapons, provided they do not use them for any offensive purpose. Further, nobody in Washington is so clairvoyant or psychic that they can solely decide in advance what nation will abuse nuclear technology, especially since we ourselves are the only country to every use nuclear energy against another as a weapon. This "minority report" attitude is shameful and borders on paranoia. Nuclear

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