Late getting the blog out this week; traveled most of last week and over the weekend and am just now getting over jet lag. As I rouse from my travel induced stupor, I find I have Iran on the brain. The latest issue of Foreign Affairs magazine has an excellent article called “After Iran Gets the Bomb” by James M. Lindsay and Ray Takeyh. The article’s central premise is “Despite international pressure, Tehran is continuing its march toward getting a nuclear bomb (or the ability to assemble one quickly). If it succeeds –as seems increasingly likely – the Middle East could become even more unstable. But Washington would still be able to contain and mitigate the consequences of Iran’s nuclear defiance, keeping an abhorrent outcome from becoming a catastrophic one.”
Those reading my last few blogs know I have been featuring highlights from the intelligence community’s annual threat assessment, presented by DNI Dennis Blair to Congress on Feb.2. Concerning Iran, the assessment says “Iran’s overall approach to international affairs will remain relatively constant and will continue to be driven by longstanding priorities of preserving the Islamic regime, safeguarding Iran’s sovereignty, defending its nuclear ambitions, and expanding its influence in the region and the Islamic world. We judge Iran’s influence and ability to intervene in the region will remain significant and that it will continue to support terrorist and militant groups to further its influence and undermine the interests of Western and moderate regional states.”
With the above as background, I’ll give you my thoughts on the issue. There is a trend among nations that I call “Boys and Their Toys”. If you are a great nation or wish to attain great nation status you have to have the biggest, most modern and fastest weapons around. Iran has regional ambitions; the top world powers have nuclear weapons, to include neighbors in the region India and Pakistan, so they want nukes too. I could go into a very high brow argument to further support this but I think you get the picture.
I’m inclined to believe if Iran does develop a nuclear weapon, that doesn’t necessarily mean they will use it. I remember during the Cold War, there was great concern over whether China would use nukes. It didn’t help that Chairman Mao was making statements saying stuff like because China had such a large population they could afford to loose large numbers of people in the event of a nuclear conflict. There was also concern over whether North Korea would develop a weapon and, if it did would that nation use it. For years we also played a high stakes nuclear chess game with the former Soviet Union. My earliest current event memory is of Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev banging on a table with his shoe at a UN meeting making threatening comments. At any moment in time a nuclear storm could have erupted. Although there were many tense moments, it never happened.
I think the reason for this is no matter how crazy things got during the Cold War; each side realized a nuclear war would mean the end of civilization as we knew it. Therefore the nukes were a weapon of last resort. In the end, the presence of nukes acted as a deterrent preventing their use. Iran has lots of weapons it could use in its inventory to make life difficult for the nations of the world like mining the Straits of Hormuz; an area where a large part of the world’s oil supply has to travel through. Thus far it has not used them.
I think in addition to the “Boys and Their Toys” things, Iran’s military planners know if they have nuclear weapons countries will think long and hard before attacking them. I’m not suggesting we should stop trying to prevent them from developing nukes; simply that unless something changes, even in the unlikely event China and Russia agree to the sanctions, I believe Iran will develop a weapon. Unless there is a major change in international relations in the area, I think they’ll use the nukes only as a weapon of last resort.
I believe the biggest potential nuclear threat still comes from terrorists. My biggest fear is if some terrorist group is able to obtain nuclear weapons, they would not hesitate to use it. As always my thoughts are my own.
