The odds are that Iran will acquire a nuclear military capacity in the next year or 18 months. The subject has been bandied about for so long that the implications of such a step are now widely accepted with resignation — much as with North Korea, when it joined the nuclear club. And the United States is duly distributing anti-missile defense around the Persian Gulf.
Barack Obama never formally took the military option “off the table.” Nevertheless — if the United States, especially with John Kerry and Chuck Hagel in the State Department and the Pentagon — lifts a finger to prevent Iran from crossing this threshold, it would be the greatest Middle Eastern backflip since Anwar Sadat flew to Jerusalem.
It would also be a welcome sight. North Korea is essentially a puppet of China’s, which the People’s Republic unleashes on the West for its own amusement from time to time, but which it can contain. Iran, as the noted behaviourist Monty Python would say, is something completely different.
All that is good that can be said about the Iranian nuclear initiative is that it exposes the nuclear disarmament regime as the fraud that it is.
The United States developed atomic weapons for their potential to save American and Allied lives in ending the Second World War, and because they were afraid the Germans would develop them first. The Soviet Union developed them because Stalin could not stand not having atomic weapons if the Americans had them. The British developed them because they and the United States were supposedly partners in the atomic weapons program, and they were the supreme criterion of military power, and so the United Kingdom felt Western Europe, and particularly Britain, should not be without them. France produced its nuclear weapons because the other three acknowledged Great Powers had them, and Charles de Gaulle declined to have France consigned to any lesser status.
China’s nuclear program was designed to strengthen that country opposite the Americans and Soviets. India’s was to endow that country with what China possessed, and Pakistan developed nuclear weapons because its arch-rival and enemy in the sub-continent, India, had them. Israel and the white minority regime in South Africa developed nuclear weapons because they were endangered by more numerous groups around and among them. (When the white-dominated regime ended in South Africa, the weapons were disposed of and the nuclear capability renounced.) North Korea’s Kim Jong Il, though insane, was, as has been mentioned, a Chinese puppet, and was useful to Beijing as a flail and goad of the West.
In other words: The nuclear club grew out of a form of bomb envy. And the rest of the world, which resisted the contagion, was served the pacifier of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) of 1968, in which all signatories pledged to facilitate the use of peaceful applications of nuclear power, non-nuclear countries pledged to eschew them, and the nuclear powers pledged to seek nuclear disarmament. The NPT has been signed or acceded to by 190 countries, but North Korea withdrew and India, Israel and Pakistan have not signed.
Of course, the nuclear military powers have not made any serious effort to disarm. The Americans and Soviets have reduced absurdly excessive over-supplies of warheads and delivery systems, but disarmament is nonsense beyond a certain point, because if it were ever enacted, a North Korea or even a gangster or terror organization operating from a failed state, like the Somali pirates or a faction of the Taliban, could rule the world.
None of the nuclear powers prior to North Korea was an intolerable risk of irresponsible first use. Mao Tse-tung occasionally made vapid threats about China’s ability to absorb hundreds of millions of dead in a nuclear attack, which was neither true nor relevant, as both the United States and U.S.S.R. had the ability to incinerate every living organism in China in a nuclear attack.
There have been worries about Pakistan’s political stability, but as long as its arsenal is in the hands of its military, which has provided Pakistan with the closest approximation to functioning government it has had during its 66-year tumultuous history, there is little likelihood of impetuosity. Stalin would not have hesitated to threaten nuclear destruction on anyone, but American deterrent power has always been adequate to dissuade whoever ruled in the Kremlin from trigger-happy conduct. (When Nikita Khrushchev told President Eisenhower in 1959 that the Soviet Union could overpower Western conventional forces in Germany, Ike responded at once: “If you attack us in Germany, there will be nothing conventional about our response.” The subject of a Soviet attack in Germany did not come up again between them.)
Iran is of more concern because its leaders have spoken almost ceaselessly of destroying the Jewish state, and they have often claimed a wish to die for the cause of militant Islam. They certainly have no shortage of followers ready to make such a sacrifice. But — as is indicated by the conduct of the Hamas leaders when Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon had the Israeli Defense Forces kill the head of Hamas after each terrorist outrage in Israel, and of Osama bin Laden, hiding like an animal behind high walls against American retribution — militant Islamist leaders tend to be more careful with their lives than their rhetoric might suggest.
Those truly determined and eager to die, especially if they are in positions of power, have no difficulty doing so. Iran’s leaders have not done so yet, nor come close to doing so.
But there will be terrible consequences if Iran obtains these horrible weapons, even if they do not use them. Turkey, Egypt and Saudi Arabia will feel obliged to do the same, and a general movement will then spread to replace the present furtively expanding club of sensible nuclear hypocrites, arming themselves to deter aggression but not initiate it, with a vast nuclear club of unlimited membership.
Like a neighbourhood that leaps from gradually slipping gun control to being universally armed to the teeth, the world will bristle with nuclear weaponry like hand guns and switchblades on Saturday night in an American slum. This will continue to deter most countries, though most do not need to be deterred, but it will make nuclear exchanges inevitable, eventually, and deterrence will then have to regress to early Cold War massive retaliation, which will only accelerate and spread the arms race.
It is not quite too late to institute and enforce a policy of insistence on denial of nuclear weapons to countries that do not plausibly renounce first use, but the chances are eroding every day, through the irresolution and misjudgments of the U.S. government. If Iran becomes a nuclear military power, the consequences are easily foreseeable, are as described, and they will be terrifying.
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