‘US playing dangerous game with Iran’

An analyst says the US is playing a dangerous game with Iran because it is doing everything in its power to provoke Tehran.

In the background of this, documents have been exposed that America had put in place instructions to implement a full nuclear attack on Russia and China also in the 1960s if America came under conventional attack.

Press TV has interviewed Mr. Dmitry Babich, political analyst and radio host, from Moscow about this issue. The following is an approximate transcription of the interview.

Press TV: With this new document revealed, how do you think both Russia and China feel now that they know they could have become the target of nuclear weapons?

Babich: Well, I think it’s nothing new for Russia and China because there was a lot of historic research done in the Cold War period and certainly Russian and Chinese historians know that the world was in great danger during the 1950s and most of the 1960s.

Obviously the United States was very nervous about the expansion of communist ideology in south east Asia and possibly in Europe and certainly they were going to respond by nuclear means to any sort of a conventional arms attack.

Of course, it shows just how easily Americans were prepared to use nuclear weapons until they felt they had absolute superiority in this kind of weapon.

It was only in the early 1970s when the Soviet Union developed a huge nuclear arsenal and it became quite clear that it would be enough to destroy the United States that America started to get more cautious and basically the doctrine of a nuclear response to a conventional attack was abandoned.

Press TV: Where will this leave global efforts for nuclear disarmament?

Babich: I think that the history of Soviet American relations shows that America starts talks on disarmament only when they feel a really strong force on the other side. If they are dealing with a weak partner they rarely start any sort of talk about arms reduction…

And that is why I think they are playing a very dangerous game with Iran because obviously they behave very defiantly they behave very aggressively and they make everyone in Iran believe that without nuclear weapons America cannot be stopped.

So it’s a dangerous game when on the one hand they say that they want peace and they don’t want Iran to become a nuclear state. On the other hand they do everything possible to provoke Iran into having a nuclear weapon, into acquiring a nuclear weapon.