Fred Kaplan: Should We Stop Worrying and Love the Iranian Bomb?
[Fred Kaplan is a journalist and contributor to Slate magazine.]
Iran's announcement of an advance in its uranium-enrichment program—and thus a potential step closer to an A-bomb—has sparked four responses in various opinion pages:
1. It's time to attack Iran now, before it's too late.
2. It's time to rally the world to impose sanctions on Iran now, before it's too late.
3. It's time to engage Iran in diplomacy now, before it's too late.
4. Relax: An Iranian A-bomb is not a big danger, and, in fact, it might help stabilize the Middle East.
There are problems with all four arguments, but let's deal with the last one first, since, if it's true that we can stop worrying and love the Iranian bomb (to paraphrase Kubrick and Southern), the rest is moot.
The most recent sampling from this school of thought is an op-ed published in the Feb. 10 New York Times by Adam Lowther, a defense analyst at the Air Force Research Institute. Lowther argues that an Iranian bomb might be beneficial to U.S. interests: The Saudis and Egyptians would want us to protect them by pledging to retaliate against Iran if Iran attacks Saudi Arabia or Egypt; in exchange for this guarantee, we could insist that they institute massive economic and democratic reforms and make peace with Israel. Furthermore, Lowther claims, the Palestinians would also rush to make peace, because the radioactive fallout from an Iranian attack on Jerusalem would kill them, too.
This is one of the nuttiest op-ed pieces ever published in a major American newspaper. Brief rebuttal: No American president is going to treat an attack on Cairo or Riyadh as an attack on the United States. Even if a president said he would, no Egyptian or Saudi leader would believe him. Even if they did believe him, they'd assume that the United States was doing this for its own interests; they'd see no need to adopt democracy and capitalism or to snuggle with Israel; certainly, they wouldn't agree to any such deal. The argument is delusional from start to finish.
There are smarter people—"international realists" such as Kenneth Waltz of Columbia University and Barry Posen of MIT—who make a more limited argument: that, if Iran built A-bombs, it could be deterred from using them by a credible threat of retaliation from the United States, Israel, or Arab countries that might build their own atomic arsenals in response. Some argue that a Middle East arms race, in this sense, might stabilize tensions, as each power would deter the others from a nuclear attack. Some also argue that revolutionary regimes have tended to moderate their behavior once A-bombs enter the equation. Knowing that wars can escalate, they have an interest in tamping down conflicts before they start.
This argument has some validity. If they hadn't possessed the bomb, China and the Soviet Union probably would have gone to war with each other in the late 1960s; border clashes between East and West Germany might have erupted at some point during the Cold War; India and Pakistan might have fought more intensely in the past decade. The bomb has reduced the likelihood of major war between large powers.
However, it hasn't eliminated the possibility. Moscow and Washington came very close to nuclear war at least twice. During the 1961 Berlin crisis, the Pentagon drew up highly specific plans for a nuclear first strike against the Soviet Union. On the final day of the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, all of President John F. Kennedy's advisers, civilian and military, urged him to attack the Soviet missile sites. (JFK and Nikita Khrushchev ended the crisis by striking a secret deal.) If the U.S. Strategic Air Command had possessed independent control of the atomic arsenal during those crises or at any other tense moments in the 1950s or early '60s (when Gens. Curtis LeMay and Thomas Power were SAC chiefs), bombs almost certainly would have been dropped on the Soviet Union at some point. Perhaps the same can be said of the Soviet general staff dropping bombs on the United States.
During the Berlin and Cuban crises, U.S. and Soviet leaders had time to think the problem through; and the president and the premier had control over the bomb's use. Over the decades, both sides took costly steps to make their weapons less vulnerable to attack (putting the missiles in underground concrete silos or on submarines or in bombers that could take off from runways on short notice). They also devised technologies—permissive action links, go codes, and redundant command-control links—that minimized the chance of accidental or unauthorized launches. All the other nations that subsequently built nuclear arsenals (Britain, France, China, Israel, India, and Pakistan) adopted similar systems, in some cases with U.S. assistance. (North Korea may be another story, but it doesn't have a usable nuclear weapon—yet.)
This is where the realist's case for insouciance about an Iranian bomb falls apart...
Read entire article at Slate
Iran's announcement of an advance in its uranium-enrichment program—and thus a potential step closer to an A-bomb—has sparked four responses in various opinion pages:
1. It's time to attack Iran now, before it's too late.
2. It's time to rally the world to impose sanctions on Iran now, before it's too late.
3. It's time to engage Iran in diplomacy now, before it's too late.
4. Relax: An Iranian A-bomb is not a big danger, and, in fact, it might help stabilize the Middle East.
There are problems with all four arguments, but let's deal with the last one first, since, if it's true that we can stop worrying and love the Iranian bomb (to paraphrase Kubrick and Southern), the rest is moot.
The most recent sampling from this school of thought is an op-ed published in the Feb. 10 New York Times by Adam Lowther, a defense analyst at the Air Force Research Institute. Lowther argues that an Iranian bomb might be beneficial to U.S. interests: The Saudis and Egyptians would want us to protect them by pledging to retaliate against Iran if Iran attacks Saudi Arabia or Egypt; in exchange for this guarantee, we could insist that they institute massive economic and democratic reforms and make peace with Israel. Furthermore, Lowther claims, the Palestinians would also rush to make peace, because the radioactive fallout from an Iranian attack on Jerusalem would kill them, too.
This is one of the nuttiest op-ed pieces ever published in a major American newspaper. Brief rebuttal: No American president is going to treat an attack on Cairo or Riyadh as an attack on the United States. Even if a president said he would, no Egyptian or Saudi leader would believe him. Even if they did believe him, they'd assume that the United States was doing this for its own interests; they'd see no need to adopt democracy and capitalism or to snuggle with Israel; certainly, they wouldn't agree to any such deal. The argument is delusional from start to finish.
There are smarter people—"international realists" such as Kenneth Waltz of Columbia University and Barry Posen of MIT—who make a more limited argument: that, if Iran built A-bombs, it could be deterred from using them by a credible threat of retaliation from the United States, Israel, or Arab countries that might build their own atomic arsenals in response. Some argue that a Middle East arms race, in this sense, might stabilize tensions, as each power would deter the others from a nuclear attack. Some also argue that revolutionary regimes have tended to moderate their behavior once A-bombs enter the equation. Knowing that wars can escalate, they have an interest in tamping down conflicts before they start.
This argument has some validity. If they hadn't possessed the bomb, China and the Soviet Union probably would have gone to war with each other in the late 1960s; border clashes between East and West Germany might have erupted at some point during the Cold War; India and Pakistan might have fought more intensely in the past decade. The bomb has reduced the likelihood of major war between large powers.
However, it hasn't eliminated the possibility. Moscow and Washington came very close to nuclear war at least twice. During the 1961 Berlin crisis, the Pentagon drew up highly specific plans for a nuclear first strike against the Soviet Union. On the final day of the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, all of President John F. Kennedy's advisers, civilian and military, urged him to attack the Soviet missile sites. (JFK and Nikita Khrushchev ended the crisis by striking a secret deal.) If the U.S. Strategic Air Command had possessed independent control of the atomic arsenal during those crises or at any other tense moments in the 1950s or early '60s (when Gens. Curtis LeMay and Thomas Power were SAC chiefs), bombs almost certainly would have been dropped on the Soviet Union at some point. Perhaps the same can be said of the Soviet general staff dropping bombs on the United States.
During the Berlin and Cuban crises, U.S. and Soviet leaders had time to think the problem through; and the president and the premier had control over the bomb's use. Over the decades, both sides took costly steps to make their weapons less vulnerable to attack (putting the missiles in underground concrete silos or on submarines or in bombers that could take off from runways on short notice). They also devised technologies—permissive action links, go codes, and redundant command-control links—that minimized the chance of accidental or unauthorized launches. All the other nations that subsequently built nuclear arsenals (Britain, France, China, Israel, India, and Pakistan) adopted similar systems, in some cases with U.S. assistance. (North Korea may be another story, but it doesn't have a usable nuclear weapon—yet.)
This is where the realist's case for insouciance about an Iranian bomb falls apart...