Please don't blow everyone up

The Iranian regime’s current actions over their nuclear capacity are certainly not very helpful. On this most of the world agrees, however, let’s not let that fact blind us to some other aspects of the current situation.

First, we have the West’s hypocrisy. The hypocrisy that says we can have nuclear weapons but no one else can. Obama expressly cited non-proliferation when he condemned the Iranian regime. Well, I think he might have to take a little more action on that himself before he starts pulling on his hiking boots for that journey up the moral high ground.

Token gestures towards a nuclear free world, like Brown’s idea to reduce our nuclear fleet from four to three submarines are thrown into sharp perspective when we discover that this does not reduce the number of missiles we own, just the number of craft they are to be launched from. We get the same level of genocide but with savings to the public purse - that's one of those good news bad news things isn't it?

The sky would not fall in if the UK, for example, was to scrap its nuclear weapons. Plenty of nations are able to play their part on the world stage without the ability to obliterate millions. However, if the UK did pursue unilateral disarmament it would be the biggest step towards world wide nuclear disarmament the world has ever seen. Brown's got until May to get that started, what are the chances do you think?

The Iranians (and others) would find it far harder to justify building their potential nuke building capacity in the context of other nations disarming. Instead we surround them with war and openly call for the overthrow of the regime by foul means or fetid. That’s not helpful either.

Second, the West has been teaching rogue nations for the last couple of decades that the one way to ensure you don’t get invaded is to have nukes. It might not be an incredible surprise then if some of these 'rogue nations' start thinking that some of their nation’s resources need to be diverted away from corruption, torture equipment and hospitals into developing actually existing weapons of mass destruction.

Third, it is of course great to hear our foreign secretary, David Miliband, say that he is 100% committed to a diplomatic solution. I welcome that, but the evasions and fudging we get when he is asked about military intervention is completely counter-productive. Britain is currently responsible for civil wars in two of Iran’s neighbours (Iraq and Afghanistan) and has somewhat of a record of being willing to use force it’s when necessary, and when it’s not.

No one needs convincing that the UK and the US are up for it when it comes to an international bundle, what some of us do need convincing of is whether the tried and tested methods of belligerence, violence and sanctions actually achieve their stated aims.

While we hear news of tougher sanctions, Israel demanding a military strike and the possibilities of wider military action in the future (and for the record I should say I don’t think it’s going to come to that right now) what we don’t hear is how on Earth this is going to help the situation. Surely our experience is that it will make both the circumstances we’re trying to address more intractable and have far wider implications across the globe. That’s without considering the fact that sanctions will indisputably have a terrible impact on the lives of ordinary people while actually consolidating the hold on power of the current regime.

I don’t want that. You don’t want that. Let’s not go there.