Category Archives: United Nations

Britain, Iran, Israel, Middle East, United Nations, United States

Iran’s nuclear threat will be a concern for Netanyahu

IRAN-ISRAEL

ISRAEL’S Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, may feel he faces an impossible dilemma following the successful neutralisation of Iran’s missile and drone onslaught.

President Biden has counselled him to “take the win” and refrain from escalating hostilities. But the hawks in Mr Biden’s war Cabinet and the Israeli public want their PM to press home the advantage and take the battle to Tehran. After all, they say, the mullahs have never been closer to developing a nuclear bomb.

While there is no doubt Iran’s nuclear ambitions pose a grave threat to Israel and the West, as David Ben-Gurion (Israel’s prime minister from 1955 to 1963) once said, the Jewish state cannot afford long wars.

Ben-Gurion was right then, and he’s probably right today. Even with its allies’ help, defending itself against last weekend’s single Iranian attack is estimated to have cost Israel no less than $1billion. The last thing Tel-Aviv needs is a long and protracted internecine conflict with the theocrats of Persia.

But nor can Jerusalem do nothing. It does look evident that Israel will mount surgical strikes against Iran’s missile launch sites and the factories that produces its ordnance. Even if Iran does develop a bomb, without a delivery system it will be unable to use it against its enemies.

The world itself should be in no doubt as to the danger an Iranian bomb would present – and just how terrifying close the regime is to building one.

In a desolate mountainous region 140 miles south of Tehran is a one-square-mile site protected by anti-aircraft batteries, and a detachment of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard: the Natanz nuclear facility.

Over the years, Natanz has been subjected to a remorseless campaign of sabotage in a bid to prevent it creating the wherewithal for a nuclear warhead.

In 2009, it was hit by a sophisticated cyber-attack using a computer virus called Stuxnet. This is believed to have been created by Israel along with American cooperation.

For months, Iranian scientists scratched their heads in puzzlement as its centrifuges, vital tools in the uranium enrichment process, failed at an unprecedented rate. Israelis also organised the targeted assassinations of key scientists involved in the nuclear programme and destroyed elements of the Natanz facility using bomb-carrying drones.

Now, however, there are signs that great strides have been made in improving security at Natanz, to the point where it has become virtually impregnable.

A recent analysis of satellite images of the site concluded that the Iranians are building an underground facility at Natanz at a dept of between 260ft and 328ft.

As the US’ most advanced bunker-busting bomb, the GBU-57, is designed to plough through just 200ft of earth before detonating, this is bad news for the Israelis and their allies.

Meanwhile, in the five years since President Trump unilaterally withdrew America from a nuclear accord that strictly limited Iran’s enrichment of uranium to 3.67 per cent purity (enough to fuel civilian power stations) and by keeping its stockpile to some 300kg (660lb), it has made good progress towards developing weapons-grade uranium.

Last year, inspectors discovered that it had produced uranium particles that were 83.7 per cent pure, just short of the 90 per cent weapons threshold.

And Natanz and its various sister sites are not the Iranians’ only nuclear option. Just as Britain and Russia developed “civil” nuclear energy, which produces plutonium as a by-product of the electricity-generating process, to give themselves a source of the necessary nuclear warhead material, so Iran has acquired a plutonium-powered plant of its own.

At the port of Bushehr on the Persian Gulf, there is an atomic energy plant controlled by Russian engineers.

Conventional wisdom has it that the plant will not bring Iran any closer to building a nuclear bomb, because Moscow supplies the enriched uranium for the reactor and – under a “peaceful use” clause in the deal – repatriates to Russia spent fuel rods that could be reprocessed and enriched into weapons-grade plutonium.

Yet much has changed in the world of geopolitics since that deal was struck. Russia has turned itself into a pariah following its unprovoked, brutal, and bloody war against Ukraine.

It was also striking quite how pro-Iran Putin’s UN ambassador was at the Security Council meeting immediately following the attacks on Israel. Who’s to say, then, Russia would object to Iran purloining enough plutonium to produce a range of nuclear warheads?

Certainly, using the plutonium produced at Bushehr would be a quicker route to making a bomb than waiting for Natanz to come up with sufficient enriched uranium.

Given that Tehran could, theoretically, have a bomb within a matter of months, the need for Israel to take out Iran’s ability to make delivery systems could not be more urgent. The destruction of manufacturing facilities for rockets, guidance systems, and detonator plants at centres such as Parchin, would mean Iran would not have a deployable nuke even if it had sufficient highly enriched uranium. Precision strikes would also spare civilian Iranians the calamity engulfing Gaza.

Such a move would also send a powerful signal to Iran’s increasingly restive population. A decisive Israeli military strike now could destabilise the Ayatollah’s regime and remove the fear of his Revolutionary Guards enforcers.

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Arts, Britain, Economic, Government, Society, United Nations

The plunging birthrate will usher in a terrifying dystopia

SOCIETY

FOR MANY PEOPLE the cities of the future will be a landscape of glittering skyscrapers, bullet trains whizzing past green parklands, flying taxis and drones for deliveries, and limitless clean energy.

If this is the picture you envisage, then I’m afraid you may be disappointed. A century from now, swathes of the world’s cities are more likely to be abandoned, with small numbers of residents clinging to decaying houses set on empty, weed-strewn streets, much like Detroit is today.

According to a new report from the Lancet medical journal, by the year 2100, just six countries could be having children at “replacement rate” – that is, with enough births to keep their populations stable, let alone growing.

All six nations will be in sub-Saharan Africa. In Europe and across the West and Asia, the birthrate will have collapsed – and the total global population will be plummeting.

Eco-activists and environmentalists have long decried humans as a curse on the planet, greedily gobbling up vital resources and despoiling the natural world with their activities. Greens purport the message that “human population growth is our greatest worry… there are just too many of us. Because if you run out of resources, it doesn’t matter how well you’re coping: if you’re starving and thirsty, you’ll die.”

Activists seem to think that if we could only reduce the overall population, the surviving rump of humanity could somehow live in closer harmony with nature. On the contrary, population collapse will presage a terrifying dystopia.

Fewer babies mean older and ageing populations – which in turn means fewer young people paying taxes to fund the pensions of the elderly. And that means that everyone has to work even longer into old age, and in an atmosphere of declining public services and deteriorating quality of life.

If you worry that it’s hard now to find carers to look after elderly relatives, this will be nothing compared to what your children or grandchildren will face when they are old.

In modern industrialised society, it is generally accepted that the Total Fertility Rate (TFR) – the average number of children born to each woman during her lifetime – must be at least 2.1 to ensure a stable population.

By 2021, the TFR had fallen below 2.1 in more than half the world’s countries.

In Britain, it now stands at 1.49. In Spain and Japan it is 1.26, in Italy 1.21, and in South Korea a desperate 0.82.

Even in India – which recently overtook China as the world’s most populous nation – the TFR is down to 1.91.

There are now just 94 countries in which the rate exceeds 2.1 – and 44 of them are in sub-Saharan Africa, which suffers far higher rates of infant mortality.

The dramatic fall in Britian’s birthrate has been disguised until now because we are importing hundreds of thousands of migrants per year to do poorly paid jobs that the native population increasingly spurns. In 2022, net migration here reached more than 700,000. The Office for National Statistics expects the UK population to reach 70million by 2026, 74million by 2036, and almost 77million by 2046 – largely driven by mass migration.

Unless migration remains high, the UK population is likely to start shrinking soon after that point – especially as the last “baby boomer” (born between 1946 and 1964) reaches their 80th birthday in 2044. This mass importation of migrants to counteract a falling domestic birthrate spells huge consequences for our social fabric.

In years to come, Britain is set to face a pitiless battle with other advanced economies – many of them already much richer than we are – to import millions of overseas workers to staff our hospitals, care homes, factories, and everything else.

And once the global population starts to fall in the final decades of this century, it will become even harder to source such workers from abroad. At that point, we may find hospitals having to cut their services or even close.

So, while medical advancements will likely mean that people will be living even longer, we face a grim future in which elderly people will increasingly die of neglect or be looked after by robots – an idea that has been trialled in Japan already.

How has this crisis crept upon us so stealthily? It wasn’t so long ago that the United Nations and other world bodies were voicing concern at overpopulation.

For decades, self-proclaimed experts have warned – in the manner of early 19th-century economist Thomas Malthus – that global supplies of food and water, as well as natural resources, would run out. Graphs confidently showed the world’s population accelerating exponentially, with many claiming that humankind had no choice but to launch interplanetary civilisations as we inevitably outgrew our world.

They could not have been more wrong.

Amid all the activist-esque hysteria about a “population explosion”, many failed to notice that birth rates had already started to collapse: first in a few developed countries, such as Italy and South Korea, and then elsewhere.

As societies grow wealthier and the middle classes boom, women start to put off childbearing. This means that they end up having fewer children overall. In Britain especially, there are the added costs of childcare and the often-permanent loss of income that results from leaving the workforce, even temporarily.

The striking result of all this is that the number of babies being born around the world has, in fact, already peaked.

The year 2016 is likely to go down in history as the one in which more babies were born than any other: 142million of them. By 2021, the figure was 129million – a fall of 9 per cent in just five years.

To be clear, the global population is for the moment still rising because people are living longer thanks to better and improved medical care. We are not dying as quickly as babies are born.

According to the UN, the global population reached 8billion on November 15, 2022. It should carry on growing before peaking at 10.4billion in the 2080s – although the world will be feeling the effects of the declining birth rate long before that.

On current trends, the world’s population will start to fall by the 2090s – the first time this will have happened since the Black Death swept Eurasia in the 14th century.

What, then, if anything, can be done to stop ourselves hurtling towards this calamity?

For one thing, governments must work tirelessly to encourage people to have families. Generous tax incentives for marriage, lavish child benefit payments, and better and cheaper childcare, are all a must. This would mean that many mothers wouldn’t have to stop their careers in order to start families.

Britain could, if it chose to, lead the way on this.

But that seems highly unlikely with the imminent prospect of a ruling Labour government: the statist Left habitually loathes any measures that could be seen to benefit the nuclear family or that incentivise people to have more children.

In truth, however, the scale of this problem is so vast – and the issue so widespread – that effectively counteracting it may be next to impossible.

Bar some extraordinary shift, the gradual impoverishment of an ageing and shrinking population seems the planet’s destiny. It is not an attractive thought.

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Arts, Britain, Defence, Government, History, Politics, Russia, Society, United Nations, United States

Politicians are comparing Putin to Hitler

BRITAIN

Intro: Putin’s totalitarian regime and its war in Ukraine is synonymous with Hitler and Nazi Germany. As Churchill urged in the 1930s, that’s why we need to spend much more on defence. It’s woefully inadequate

IN May 1953, Sir Winston Churchill told a Coronation lunch being held in Westminster Hall, “Study history. Study history . . . In history lies all the secrets of statecraft.” One of the reasons Churchill was an historian himself was because he profoundly believed that a primary purpose for studying the past was to inform and encourage action in the present.

What are we to make then of Foreign Secretary David Cameron’s recent reference to history – his powerful speech to the United Nations in which he equated Russia’s actions towards Ukraine with the way that Hitler and the Nazis behaved in the 1930s?

Lord Cameron’s speech was precipitated after the Russian ambassador tried to accuse Volodymyr Zelensky of being a Nazi. The Foreign Secretary responded by saying: “The only people behaving like Nazis are Putin and his cronies who thought they could invade a country, take its territory, and ultimately the world would look away.”

There are serious political consequences that follow upon equating Putin to Hitler, and one of them is that you need to put your money where your mouth is. You cannot make such a comparison, and then not spend the necessary money to counter the threat that you have just articulated in front of the whole world.

You cannot act as Churchill did before the Second World War, which was to warn the world of the impending threat, but not then do what Churchill did, which was to call for largescale rearmament to deal with it.

There are absolutely no signs that the UK Government is prepared to do this. In last week’s spring Budget, the Chancellor made no commitment to spending more on defence.

Britain currently pays just 2 per cent of her national income on defence, and that figure can be reached only by adding the costs of such indirect defence expenditures like widows’ pensions and the intelligence services. Strip out the nuclear deterrent costs and Britain pays the equivalent of 1.75% of GDP on defence.

At a time when we are witnessing the worst war in Europe since 1945, the British Army itself cannot even fill its already-depleted ranks, the RAF is mothballing its fighter squadrons, and the Royal Navy can barely put a flotilla together to protect shipping in the Red Sea, while its recent Trident missile test was an embarrassing national failure.

Meanwhile, Moscow is threatening to put nuclear weapons into space.

In the 1930s, Churchill articulated the pressing need for boosting spending on all three services. That was pivotal in deterring the Nazis if at all possible, or to defeat them if not. Churchill started warning of the dangers the Nazis posed within weeks of Hitler becoming Chancellor, telling the House of Commons on April 13, 1933, that, “As Germany acquires full military equality with her neighbours… while she is in the temper which we have unhappily seen, so surely should we see ourselves within a measurable distance of the renewal of European war.”

By November of that year, Churchill was speaking of “the obvious fear which holds all the nations who are neighbours of Germany”. This also has modern parallels with the way that Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, and Poland view Putin’s Russia. In a 2021 essay written before the full-scale invasion in which Putin laid claim to Ukraine being Russian territory, he mentioned Lithuania in a similar vein no fewer than 17 times.

Yet the British Army is in danger of becoming merely “a domestically-centred land force” with no capacity for projecting force overseas to defend our allies. That was a view expressed in a leaked letter from the Chief of the General Staff, General Sir Patrick Sanders. There is no hyperbole in what he writes.

By early 1934, Churchill was saying the RAF needed far more fighter and bomber aircraft. Following the declaration of war by Germany, Churchill warned: “Within the next few hours the crash of bombs exploding in London and cataracts of masonry and fire and smoke will apprise us of any inadequacy which has been permitted in our aerial defences.” The nation was still mourning the Great War and refused to listen, fearing that rearming might provoke another, or by his own government which thought him an opportunistic warmonger.

Churchill recognised that far from provoking war, heavy Western rearmament might instead deter the man whom David Cameron has now compared to Putin. “I could not see how you could prevent war better,” Churchill said in July 1934, “than by confronting an aggressor with the prospect of such a vast concentration of force, moral and material, that even the most reckless, even the most infuriated leader would not attempt to challenge those great forces.” Instead, however, public apathy won the day, and British rearmament was postponed until it was almost too late.

“Moral and material.” Churchill understood that the demoralisation of the West, in the sense that democracies such as Britain and France were weak and divided, influenced the decision-making of the totalitarians in Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, and Imperial Japan. Similarly, moral vigour is desperately needed on the part of the United States, the G7, NATO, and Britian today in order to deter countries such as Russia, China, and Iran from ripping up the rules-based international order.

No message would be stronger, especially in the aftermath of the suspicious death in custody of Alexei Navalny, than if the West were to sequester the $300billion of Russia’s frozen assets presently being held in Brussels and give it to Ukraine for its defence and reconstruction.

That would be the Churchillian approach. But does our present Government have the anti-appeasing moral vigour to do it?

Fervently, we should all hope so. In stark truth, the Government needs to do far more than just this. It must increase defence spending to a minimum of 3.5 per cent of GDP. The Budget would have been an ideal moment to show it plans to do so, but – as we have seen – the Treasury continues to sit on its hands.

It’s not as if an increase to 3.5 per cent would be an earth-shattering break with custom and practice. Historically, defence spending was around 5.5 per cent of GDP during much of the 1970s and reached 6 per cent during the Falklands War in 1982.

Neville Chamberlain’s government finally woke up to the Nazi threat, and it was able to build the Hurricanes and Spitfires that saved Britain. The year of peace bought by the humiliating Munich Agreement was used by the Nazis to build much more weaponry and train many more soldiers than Britain, but nonetheless British air defences were in a much better state in 1940 than in 1938.

Modern defence industries require far longer research and development lead times today than in the 1930s, so if rearmament is to take place using new technologies, there can be no time to waste. Logistically, we currently have only enough 155mm shells – the standard type – in this country for one week of fighting at the rate experienced in Ukraine today. That’s how limited we are.

Churchill would be sickened by the brinkmanship being practised by Britain in the presence of a clearly growing global threat to democracy by evil totalitarian and murderous regimes.

Aldous Huxley, the English writer and philosopher, once wrote: “That men do not learn the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons that history has to teach us.” Lord Cameron may have correctly used the Second World War as the analogy by which to judge our present dangers, but where is the clear counterpart to go with that, namely large-scale rearmament?  

Back in the 1930s, Churchill wrote in his war memoirs how his exhortations were ignored by fellow parliamentarians. “Although the House listened to me with close attention,” he said, “I felt a sensation of despair. To be so entirely convinced and vindicated in a matter of life and death to one’s country, and not to be able to make Parliament and the nation heed the warning, or bow to the proof by taking action, was an experience most painful.”

Are we to undergo something similar now?

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