United States President Donald Trump at a dinner for Crown Prince and Prime Minister Mohammed bin Salman Al Saud of Saudi Arabia IMAGE/White House
Nuclear weapons
The United States was the first country to develop nuclear weapons which are extremely dangerous and destructive, without any doubt. The only time they were used was in 1945 when the Second World War had almost ended. The honor of both bombings goes to the US. It was an instantaneous mass murder of Hiroshimians and Nagasakiites — a terror from heavens. It was also a message to the world, particularly the USSR (Union of Soviet Socialist Republics), that US is the sole super power. The two nuclear bombs killed around 100,000 people on the spot. Another 100,000 died over the next few months due to radiation. Also a large number of people were wounded.
US President Harry S. Truman called the creation of atom bombs as “the greatest achievement of organized science in human history,” in the speech he recorded for his bombing of Hiroshima. More than two billion dollars were spent on the “greatest scientific gamble in history,” in the words of Truman and he was proud that the US “won.” During the filming, he is seen laughing (at 2:29 in the video.) President Donald Trump doesn’t have a monopoly on cruelty, many other presidents have displayed it too.
Even years later, the atomic war for Truman was a joke as is clear from another Truman video:
A young lady who asked me the question: ‘What we were going to do about birth control?” And then a boy asked me: ‘What we going to do with an all out atomic war?” And I told him it was one thing, the young lady wouldn’t have to worry about birth control any more.
A grandson of slaveowners, Truman didn’t like blacks and had similar feeling towards Chinese and the Japanese too.1In 1911, 27 year old Truman wrote to his future wife, Bess:
I think one man is just as good as another so long as he’s honest and decent and not a nigger or a Chinaman. Uncle Will says that the Lord made a white man from dust, a nigger from mud, then He threw up what was left and it came down a Chinaman.
(Uncle Will) does hate Chinese and Japs.
So do I. It is race prejudice, I guess. But I am strongly of the opinion Negroes ought to be in Africa, yellow men in Asia and white men in Europe and America.
Germany and Italy were defeated by the end of April 1945. The only Axis power left was Japan — a spent force. It was ready to surrender but the US wanted to try the new weapon. Many people in the US told Truman that there was no need to use the highly lethal force of the atom bombs.
Japan itself was urging leniency: “The Tokyo Radio, in an English-language broadcast to North America, has urged that the United States adopt a more lenient attitude toward Japan with regard to peace.” (New York Times, July 26, 1945, quoted in Asia-Pacific Journal — Japan Focus)
The US nuked Japan despite the fact that it was prepared to capitulate.
The Soviet Union, (now Russia), realized the atom bombs had tilted the balance of power too much towards the US; the nuclear weapons became a necessity, because no country would want to witness mushroom clouds on its own territory.
For decades, Britain, Germany, the US, and the USSR had been involved in atomic research. Following the dropping of US atom bombs on Japanese cities, the Soviet Politburo (political bureau) was instantly given control of the atomic bomb project.
The US superdom lasted four years plus three weeks. The Soviet Union exploded its atomic bomb on August 29, 1949; thus becoming the other superpower. And the nuclear race began — i.e., proliferation of nuclear weapons.
Gradually the enmity turned into the US led God believing Western capitalist front against the Godless commies. Soviet request to join NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization) was refused. If the Soviets had joined NATO, the arms race wouldn’t be devouring huge chunks of national budgets of so many countries.
Britain had worked on its atomic project for a long time, but in 1943 decided to join the US. In 1952, it exploded a nuclear bomb.
The same year in November, the US tested hydrogen bomb which was 450 times more powerful than the bomb it had dropped on Nagasaki.
It just took human gestation period for the Soviet Union, i.e., to deliver its own hydrogen bomb.
In the 1950s, many insane people in the US wanted their country to explode a hydrogen (thermonuclear) bomb on the Moon to display the US supremacy to the world.2On October 4, 1957, the Soviet Union launched a rocket named Sputnik in space. The people in the US were shocked and some came up with the idea of dropping a thermonuclear bomb on moon. The US Air Force started
Project A119 and asked the Armour Research Foundation (ARF—now known as the Illinois Institute of Technology) to work on it. Many scientists, including Gerard Kuiper (of the Kuiper belt) and Carl Sagan, became part of the program. But some years later, the project was discarded — no reasons were provided.
France joined hands with Israeli scientists in 1949, hoping that relations with Israel could help them get more Jewish nuclear scientists from other countries. In 1956, when Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal Company, Israel, Britain, and France formed a military alliance and invaded Egypt. The Soviet Union and the United Nations ordered them to halt the war and retreat. Their humiliating egress was the result of US President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s strict order to do so. The episode came to be known as the Suez Crisis; which also was the watershed moment for France who decided to hasten its nuclear program to remain a global power. In 1960, France became the fourth nuclear power.
China came under the communist rule when the civil war ended in 1949. Mao Zedong took over the power there. The US supported Chiang Kai Shek and his people escaped to Taiwan with huge amount of stolen gold and money. China, the most populated country, wasn’t allowed United Nations membership until 1971, because of US opposition.
On March 16, 1955, at a press conference, Eisenhower was asked by Charles S. von Fremd of the CBS News to say something about his Secretary of State John Foster Dulles’s remarks on using “some tactical small atomic weapons” in case of a “general war in the Far East.”
Now, in any combat where these things can be used on strictly military targets and for strictly military purposes, I see no reason why they shouldn’t be used just exactly as you would use a bullet or anything else.
Eisenhower knew that wars rarely restrict themselves to “strictly military targets” and “strictly military purposes,” most of the time civilians suffer greatly. Most people killed and wounded in Nagasaki and Hiroshima were civilians. For argument’s sake, lets say, only the enemy military is bombed. But what about the atomic radiation which lingers for a long time, that affects civilians?
The term Far East, not in use anymore, comprised of several countries, including China. Between 1951 and 1958, the US deployed nuclear weapons in Guam, Japan, Philippines South Korea, and Taiwan — all part of the Far East. (In 1962, the US ally Britain deployed nuclear arms in Singapore, also in the Far East.)
Some scholars observed that Eisenhower’s threat to use nuclear weapons against China during the First Taiwan Strait Crisis (1954 – 1955) led Mao to go the nuclear way.
On April 25, 1956, Mao Zedong addressing China’s Political Bureau of the Central Committee hinted at developing nuclear weapons:
We do not have atomic bombs yet. However, we did not have planes and cannons in the past. We defeated Japanese imperialism and Chiang Kai-Shek with millet and rifles. We are stronger now than in the past, and we will be stronger in the future. We must not only have more planes and cannons, but also atomic bombs. In today’s world, we cannot do without this thing if we don’t want to be bullied by others.
China got its atom bomb in 1964 and its hydrogen bomb in 1967.
Israel, even before it turned Palestine into a Jewish state, was thinking of becoming an atomic power. Its would-be first Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion decided to recruit Jewish scientists from other countries.
Ben-Gurion: “What Einstein, Oppenheimer, and Teller, the three of them are Jews, made for the United States, could also be done by scientists in Israel, for their own people.”
Israel, the regional rogue which is militarily very advanced and is under full US protection, became a nuclear power in 1967 without ever announcing it.
Israel received substantial help from France. French Prime Minister Maurice Bourgès-Maunoury told Israelis: “I gave you [Israelis] the bomb in order to prevent another Holocaust from befalling the Jewish people and so that Israel could face its enemies in the Middle East.”
Another Holocaust never befell Israel, instead many of Israel’s Jewish leaders turned into Nazis and committed genocide of Palestinians; they also dream of Eretz Israel or Greater Israel. Many Jewish leaders, including Elie Wiesel, have benefitted from what Norman Finkelstein calls The Holocaust Industry.
Former national security advisor and secretary of state Colin Powell,3Powell, one of the mildest members of the US establishment, talks this about blowing up these countries, one can only imagine the language of the extremists in the establishment. It’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Iran’s 6th president between 2005 and 2013, Powell misspelt in his email. in the email to his business partner and democratic donor Jeffrey Leeds, commented on Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s speech to the US Congress about stopping President Barack Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran:
[The US] negotiators can’t get what he [Israel’s Netanyahu] wants.”
Anyway, Iranians can’t use one [a nuclear weapon] if they finally make one. The boys in Tehran know Israel has 200 [or perhaps 400], all targeted on Tehran, and we have thousands. As Akmdinijad (sic) [said], ‘What would we do with one, polish it?’ I have spoken publicly about both nK [North Korea] and Iran. We’ll blow up the only thing they care about – regime survival. Where, how would they even test one?
Only President John F. Kennedy persistently demanded that Israel should open up its Negev Nuclear Research Center in Dimona for inspection. Israel kept on prolonging and opened the plant for inspection two months after Kennedy’s assassination. The Lyndon B. Johnson administration’s inspections were lenient and were discontinued by the Nixon government.
A private understanding between President Richard Nixon and Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir at the White House in September 1969 was: Israel wouldn’t conduct nuclear tests and the US would let Israel keep the nuclear weapons without forcing it to sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). Win win situation for both.
In October 2023, Amihai Eliyahu, a junior government minister in Netanyahu’s government, hinted in a radio interview that Israel could nuke Gaza. Later he defended his remarks as “metaphorical.” He was just suspended from cabinet meetings, that’s it.
India, the second most populous country then but now most populous since 2023, can’t be blamed for becoming a nuclear power in 1974 when its next door neighbor China has it. Both countries have a border issue, too. When the Indian subcontinent was under the British colonial rule, Britain decided what the border between India and China should be and imposed the McMahon Line4Read John Cherian’s article “Border disputes between India and China: A colonial legacy” in India’s Frontline magazine to get a clear picture on the border dispute between both nations. Frontline is one of the very few outlets which is not part of the “Godi media.” This permits it to fearlessly counter Hindutva Modi government’s lies and hypocrisy. It has brilliant writers and reporters. Another great website is The Wire. on China with the aim of dismembering that country. China never accepted it. Both India and China went to war in 1962. India’s codename for its nuclear test was Smiling Buddha.
Pakistan, India’s neighbor, also decided to put a smile on Allah’s face. (Pakistan came into existence when the sub-continent was divided by the British, in 1947). After the 1965 war between Pakistan and India, Pakistan’s foreign minister Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto was asked how would Pakistan act if India went nuclear.
Bhutto’s reaction: “Then we should have to eat grass and get one or buy one, of our own”.
In 1975, Pakistan’s Prime Minister Bhutto to placate US and other Western nations changed his stance, at least, publicly:
For poor countries like us, [the] atom bomb is a mirage and we don’t want it. In 1965, when I was the foreign minister, I said that if India had the atom bomb, we would get one too, even if we had to eat grass. Well, we are more reasonable nowadays.
However, the work on nuclear program continued. In 1976, US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger personally visited Pakistan to warn Bhutto to not go for the nuclear weapons. But once India became a nuclear power, it was not possible for Bhutto or for any other Pakistani government to discontinue the nuclear program. Under US pressure (p.105), many Western countries broke their contracts with Pakistan about selling nuclear plant related equipment.
It was Bhutto’s determination to get nuclear weapons that saw Pakistan joining the nuclear club in 1998. Bhutto wasn’t alive to witness that. He was overthrown in July 1977 in a military coup and was tortured and hanged in April 1979 by the US supported military dictator General Zia-ul-Haq.
North Korea and South Korea had been one country since the early 1700s. In 1910, Korea came under Japanese occupation. Korea’s liberation by the Soviet and US forces at the end of World War II occurred on 2 September, 1945. Korea was divided into two zones: the northern portion under Soviet control became North Korea, and the southern portion under US control became South Korea. It’s also known as the 38th parallel. The capital Seoul went to South Korea. In June 1950, North Korea invaded South Korea with the intention of unifying both Koreas. The US called it a “surprise attack,” even though she was well aware that an attack was going to happen. The US jumped in under the garb of United Nations and that war lasted just over three years.
In 1969, journalist I.F. Stone wrote that the UN was “stampeded.” The chapter title “The UN Gets A Commander It Can’t Command” of his book The Hidden History of the Korean War says a great deal about this in the following paragraph:
… to make the ‘United Nations’ forces subject to [US General Douglas] MacArthur without making MacArthur subject to the United Nations. This came on July 7 in a resolution introduced jointly by Britain and France. This is commonly supposed to have established a United Nations Command. Actually, it did nothing of the sort. It set up a ‘unified command’ which was authorized to use the United Nations flag but was not subject in any way to United Nations orders.
The US called the Korean War a “limited war” but for Koreans, Charles Armstrong points out, it was a “total war.” The heaviest devastation was borne by the North — 635,000 tons of bombs, which included 32,557 tons of napalm, were dropped. When the war ended, three million Koreans, i.e., ten percent of the overall population, were dead, missing, or injured. The US does most of the things on a grand scale, especially death and destruction.
This was in the early 1950s. Even after the passage of 3/4th of a century, the US still uses the United Nations in a similar way. In this century, the US used the UN in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, etc.
The US maintains 73 bases with 26,414 troops stationed in South Korea and they conduct joint military drills too. Between 1958 and 1991, US nuclear weapons were present in that country.
In this situation, North Korea was bound to find ways to develop nuclear weapons and it did take that path. The Clinton administration started negotiations with its leader Kim Jong Il and came up with the “Agreed Framework” which covered, beside other issues, full normalization of political and economic relations and ending of nuclear weapons program. As it happens to any country dealing with the US, the deal didn’t work for various reasons. In 2006, North Korea conducted its first nuclear test.
Nuclear proliferation
The US committed the original sin. Britain and France were part of the NATO; thus they were under the US nuclear umbrella and had no need for nukes — it was just the ego thing. There was absolutely no need for Israel to develop nukes. Israel was created with British support. Israel had and continues to have support of the US and Western countries.
The Soviet Union, China, India, Pakistan, and North Korea really needed nuclear weapons for the reasons enumerated above. There are many other countries who need it too but the US and Western restrictions prevent them from acquiring nukes. Many people in the West see non-Western countries as dangerous and should not be permitted to have nuclear weapons5Just one example from Maria Ryan:
After more than two decades of testing, North Korea finally has a missile that is powerful enough to deliver a nuclear warhead to US territory – that is, to Alaska and/or Hawaii, if estimates are to be believed. This is an extremely dangerous development, and if the Trump administration is to avoid spiralling into a nuclear confrontation with North Korea, it needs to understand what North Korea wants and why it behaves the way it does.
The US nukes can reach the entire planet and destroy it many times over. even though it is the US who was the first to develop and the only country to use it.
According to the Doomsday Clock, as of March 2026, the world has more than 12,000 nuclear weapons — more than 87% are with the US and Russia. The rest are in the hands of the seven other countries.
The destructive force of weapons with the more powerful atom and hydrogen bombs, advanced technology, and faster delivery systems today, is such that life on earth can be completely erased many times over.
In such a dangerous world, if someone feels new countries should be stopped from gaining nuclear technology, and ultimately nuclear weapons, that person deserves applause provided the goal is to see a nuclear-weapon free world.
Bad deal?
Mel Gurtov’s article, “A Bad Deal with Saudi Arabia,” (Counterpunch, August 6, 2026) talks about “the [nuclear] proliferation danger” if Trump government goes ahead with its deal to provide Saudi Arabia with a nuclear plant. He also fears that other Middle Eastern countries, “such as Syria,” could follow suit.
Gurtov questions whether the Saudis will accept the NPT, let international inspectors in, and, what if in the name of “national security” it discards the precautionary measures? He then cites the example of North Korea which left NPT and secretly speeded up its nuclear weapons program, and of India, Israel, and Pakistan having nuclear weapons without any safeguards.
But Gurtov’s central worry is:
And for Israel, the prospect of a Saudi bomb unconstrained by outside inspection would be a nightmare—essentially, another Iran. That might prompt Israel to increase its nuclear weapon arsenal, which currently stands at about 90 warheads, and change its nuclear doctrine in ways that further destabilize the Middle East strategic picture.
His first point is Saudis will have freedom to pursue whatever they want because of a lack of outside inspection on their plant. That could happen. But then Israel has never declared its nukes and so never had to go through an inspection. Saudis don’t even have the plant yet; it’s unlikely they’ll get one.. Even if they receive the plant and decide to have nukes, it will take many years.
His other worry is that the Saudi bomb would be a “nightmare” for Israel, in a way, a second Iran. The world knows and is witnessing everyday what a nightmare Israel has been for a long time for Palestinians in Gaza and in the West Bank, for Lebanese, for Syrians, for Iranians, for the entire region. Netanyahu also uses Holy Bible to incite Israelis to commit violence against Palestinians.
In June 2025, Israel’s surprise attack on Iran from 13th to 24th assassinated 14 physicists and nuclear engineers. Several generals and politicians were fatally targeted too. Many civilians lost their lives. The US joined Israel on 22nd to bomb three nuclear sites in Iran. The retaliatory attacks by Iran on Israel were intercepted by the US.
If Iran was a nuclear power like North Korea, the US and Israel wouldn’t have attacked Iran.
Israel’s ambassador to France Joshua Zarka told the Associated Press:
The fact that the whole group [of nuclear scientists] disappeared is basically throwing back the [Iranian nuclear] program by a number of years, by quite a number of years.
I do think that people that will be asked to be part of a future nuclear weapon program in Iran will think twice about it.
Israelis, with hundreds of nuclear weapons, sitting in the lap of US which provides full protection, attacks Iran and thinks it will finish Iran. Even after 78 years’ illegal existence in the area, Israel has failed to discover that Iran is not going anywhere.
On February 28, 2026, Netanyahu’s 40 year dream of dragging US into a war against Iran came true. The attack assassinated Iran’s Supreme leader, politicians, generals, and scientists. Both countries also remembered to murder civilians too. The on again off again war has again resumed after US attacked Iran on September 1.
Iran defended itself bravely by fighting back against the two most violent forces and is still shielding itself.
Israel is terrorizing the entire region with vicious violence, including targeting Palestinian children to bring an end to the Palestinian race.
Srinivasan Muralidhar, chair of the UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem, and Israel noted:
The evidence shows that Palestinian children have been deliberately targeted and killed by the Israeli security forces.
Even after the October 2025 ceasefire, children continue to be killed and seriously injured, with continued disregard by Israel for the ceasefire and for the protection owed to Palestinian children under international law,
Journalist Jawed Naqvi describes how a baby being nursed was aimed precisely and killed without any harm to mother:
The Palestinian woman was breastfeeding her baby in a tattered shelter abutting the ruins of her devastated home. Right then, a direct sniper shot pierced the infant’s semi-formed skull, leaving a limp body without scratching the mother. The child evidently posed a threat to the ancient oracle’s prophecy for a country called Israel, which would prosper from the Euphrates to the Mediterranean Sea but only after vanquishing its enemies, the Amalek. The child Amalek of Gaza would become an adult Amalek and that’s problematic.
The number of total people killed in Israeli genocide is at least 70,373, out of that at least 20,179 are children, i.e. more than 28%. The number is much much higher as Ralph Nader constantly reminds us. United Nations Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese gives the figure for total deaths at 680,000 and that of infants under five at 380,000, which comes to over 55% infants. Nader reminds us that the US mainstream media never see any problem in guesstimating the deaths caused during Syrian civil war under Bashar al Asad or giving estimates of deaths in wars in Iran, Sudan, or Ukraine. But it wouldn’t permit reporters to explore the number of Palestinians murdered by Israel.
Somehow, media editors do not let their investigative reporters assess the extent of Israel’s mass murder of civilians in Gaza—an exposed, defenseless population of 2.3 million people in an enclave the geographic size of Pennsylvania.
The real “nightmare” is Israel.
Another issue he brings up is that if Saudis produce nukes, Israel might increase its stock of nuclear weapons, and alter its position about nukes that may “further destabilize the Middle East strategic picture.” It seems like Gurtov is implying that Israel might use nuclear weapons making Middle East more unstable.
The nuclear weapons Israel has, are more than enough to incinerate the entire Middle East. It doesn’t need to produce more but it will irrespective of Saudis get those weapons or not. Of course, the cost of more nukes for Israel will be covered by an increase in the US budget deficit.
It would be very undemocratic if a tiny country like Israel with a population of 10 million has nukes but Saudi Arabia (36 million), Iran (88 million), Egypt (110 million), Iraq (47 million), Yemen (19 million), Turkey (86 million), and many other Middle East nations can’t have those weapons because Israel doesn’t want its monopoly on these challenged.
For Middle East’s stability, we should all genuinely write about and work for nuclear weapon-free Middle East and then for nuclear-weapon-free world.
On June 7, 1981, Israel with US supplied F-16s, secretly flew over Jordanian and Saudi airspace, destroyed Iraqi nuclear reactor site, still under construction by Italian and French engineers, on the order of Prime Minister Menachem Begin. 10 Iraqi soldiers and a French civilian were killed.
A couple of days later, Begin addressed the bombing. His speech came to be known as “Begin Doctrine.”
We chose this moment: now, not later, because later may be too late, perhaps forever. And if we stood by idly, two, three years, at the most four years, and Saddam Hussein would have produced his three, four, five bombs. … Then, this country and this people would have been lost, after the Holocaust. Another Holocaust would have happened in the history of the Jewish people. Never again, never again! Tell so your friends, tell anyone you meet, we shall defend our people with all the means at our disposal. We shall not allow any enemy to develop weapons of mass destruction turned against us.
Saudis were angry and told President Ronald Reagan’s government that Israelis used Saudi territory to reach Iraq, with Israeli pilots falsely signaling they were Jordanians.
One Saudi official (name deleted) told his US counterpart:
This is one of the most dangerous situations Saudi Arabia has ever faced. It is an insult to both Saudi Arabia and the US and puts the Saudis in an embarrassing situation vis-a-vis other Arabs.
In 2007, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert’s government, following Begin Doctrine, ordered the destruction of Syrian nuclear facility.
Gurtov says Mohammed bin Salman is “unreliable and faithless.” But why should MbS be faithful and reliable to the US. Has the US been reliable and faithful ally to the Saudis and so many other nations? No. Saudis are not getting any aid or help from the US. Whatever they get, they pay very good money. And like most of the other leaders, MbS looks after his country’s interests too.
Netanyahu has been lying since the early 1990s that Iran is going to get nukes very soon. In 2012, while addressing the United Nations General Assembly he also showed an illustration to make a point that Iran’s nukes are 90% ready. This was fourteen years back, the tune hasn’t changed.
IMAGE/Milwaukee Independent
It is Netanyahu from whom people in the US should expect reliability and loyalty to the US because the US gives $3.8 billion (it used to be $3.5 billion, President Barack Obama raised it) every year, plus more money when it’s warring which is often but, Netanyahu insulted Obama openly (see here and here). Netanyahu just didn’t like Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran.
On top of that it is Netanyahu who is responsible for the US losing military credibility in the world, due to the war against Iran. The Gulf countries with US bases feel the bases have become a liability — instead of providing protection they have become targets of Iran’s retaliatory attacks because Iran suffers US attacks.
Gurtov says MbS is an “autocrat” who ordered Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi’s murder. He is right. Murder was totally wrong and should be condemned, and it was by many but not Trump. But then he hasn’t shed a tear for hundreds of journalists killed by Israel in Gaza, Palestine.
Between October 7, 2023 and August 11, 2025, Israel killed 278 journalists, 273 Palestinians, see all the names and some photos here. How many in the US and the West have denounced Netanyahu for that?
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