by Harry Browne

George Bush likes to remind us over and over that an Iranian nuclear bomb would be a violation of the 1970 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. Iran signed that treaty and agreed not to develop nuclear weapons.

However, the treaty also calls for the five countries who had nuclear weapons in 1970 - the U.S., Britain, France, Russia, and China - to begin reducing their stockpiles and eventually eliminate them entirely. To the best of my knowledge, not one of the five countries has intentionally destroyed a single nuclear weapon. So are we going to have to attack Britain, France, Russia, China, and the United States as well?

Neither Pakistan, India, nor Israel signed the pact, and each of them developed nuclear weapons. But the U.S. government is only harassing Iran who, by the terms of the treaty, has allowed international inspectors into its country to see what it's doing. And so far, the inspectors have found nothing.

Since the United States is not only dishonoring the treaty by not reducing its weapons, but in fact has been developing new nuclear weapons, non-nuclear nations are condemning the U.S. for violating the treaty while trying to impose it upon other nations.

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George Bush has responded to these condemnations by saying that - you guessed it - 9/11 changed everything. If we take his words literally, he's saying that the U.S. can develop new nuclear weapons and use them to bomb terrorists. But that would certainly mean the murder of enormous numbers of innocent civilians.

No one has answered - or until now, even asked - the obvious question: Why is it that the United States can have a nuclear arsenal far larger than that of every other country in the world combined, but that Iran can't have even a single nuclear bomb - especially when Israel, Pakistan, and India have nuclear weapons?

But then, that's the mission of TV news: to avoid asking the obvious questions.

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Harry Browne (RIP 1933-2006), the author of Why Government Doesn't Work and many other books, was the Libertarian Party presidential candidate in 1996 and 2000, a co-founder of DownsizeDC, and the Director of Public Policy for the American Liberty Foundation.  See his website.