Alarmism about nuclear proliferation has become common coin in the foreign-policy establishment. Anxieties now are driven in large part by Iran’s apparent intention to obtain nuclear weapons. Some politicians hint that military action might be needed to keep Tehran from developing a nuclear bomb. During the 2008 presidential campaign, Hillary Clinton insisted that Iran must be denied the bomb “at all costs"—without, of course, pausing to tally up what those costs might entail. Barack Obama pointedly pledged that, as president, he would “do everything in my power to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon. Everything.”
Such tough talk is also being heard among experts who follow Iran. Graham Allison, director of Harvard University’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, has called for drastic sanctions and airstrikes if diplomacy fails; Amitai Etzioni, a professor of international affairs at George Washington University, insists that Iran should “forcibly be deproliferated” if necessary.
But our track record with aggressive counterproliferation policies should give pause to anyone advocating such an approach. The sanctions imposed on Iraq in the 1990s, and the continuing war there, are responsible for more deaths than were inflicted by the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
The uncomfortable truth is this: If Iran’s leaders want to develop a nuclear weapon, there is no way to stop them, at least in the long term, except by invading the country, which would make America’s costly war in Iraq look like child’s play. The casualties would be substantial. An airstrike on a nuclear facility would cause extensive collateral damage (particularly because air defenses would have to be suppressed) and might cause radiation to seep out into the atmosphere, triggering alarm, some of it desperate, in neighboring countries. In response to an attack, moreover, Iran would likely seek to make life markedly more difficult for U.S. forces in Iraq and Afghanistan.
A nonhysterical approach to the Iran nuclear issue should take the following considerations into account:
Iran claims that it has no intention of developing nuclear weapons. The country’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has declared, “We do not need these weapons.” Using nuclear bombs, he added, would be expensive and against “Islamic rules” of warfare. If Iran does develop an atomic arsenal, it will find, like all other nuclear-armed states, that the bombs are essentially useless and a very considerable waste of money, effort, and scientific talent. Iran would most likely “use” nuclear weapons strictly for prestige (or ego stoking) and deterrence.
Although the ravings of Iran’s president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, are distinctly unsettling, he does not have final control of the military, is in considerable disrepute within Iran because of economic difficulties, and, while extremely hostile to the state of Israel, apparently intended a remark routinely translated as calling for Israel to be “wiped off the map” to mean that it should eventually disappear from history, not that its Jewish population should be exterminated. The United States and Western Europe lived for decades under a similar threat from the Soviet Union, which was explicitly dedicated to overthrowing their form of government and economy. From time to time, the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev would casually point out that it would take only a few of his nuclear bombs to annihilate France or Britain.
Comparing people like Ahmadinejad to Hitler, as has commonly been done, verges on the absurd. A far more valid comparison would be to far lesser devils like Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser, Indonesia’s Sukarno, Iraq’s Saddam Hussein, and Libya’s Muammar el-Qaddafi, all of whom were preposterously envisioned to be new incarnations of the Nazi leader. Each of these venom-spouting dictators, moreover, exerted far greater control over their countries than does Ahmadinejad over Iran.
The leadership of Iran—hostile and unpleasant in many ways—does not consist of a self-perpetuating gaggle of suicidal lunatics. Accordingly, if Ayatollah Khamenei is lying or undergoes a conversion (triggered perhaps by an Israeli airstrike), and Iran does develop nuclear weapons, it is exceedingly unlikely that they would ever be given to a group like Hezbollah to detonate—not least because the nonlunatics in charge would fear that the source of the weapon would be detected, inviting devastating retaliation.
Indeed, suggests Thomas C. Schelling, a professor of economics at the University of Maryland at College Park, deterrence is about the only value that nuclear weapons hold for Iran. They “would be too precious to give away or to sell” and “too precious to waste killing people,” he writes when they could make other countries “hesitant to consider military action.”
Moreover, if Iran brandishes nuclear weapons to intimidate others, it will find that those threatened, rather than capitulate, will ally themselves with others (including conceivably Israel) to stand up to Iran’s bullying. In addition, there isn’t much credence to the notion that an Iranian bomb “will unleash a cascade of proliferation in the Middle East,” as Ariel Ilan Roth, associate director of national-security studies at the Johns Hopkins University, recently argued in Foreign Affairs. William Potter and Gaukhar Mukhatzhanova, of the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies at the Monterey Institute of International Studies, have pointed out that decades of predictions about proliferation chains, cascades, dominoes, waves, avalanches, epidemics, and points of no return have proved faulty, and that such metaphors are “inappropriate and misleading” because they imply “a process of nuclear decision making and a pace of nuclear weapons spread that are unlikely to transpire.” Despite an unblemished record of predictive failures, notes Jacques Hymans, an assistant professor of international relations at the University of Southern California, an influential cadre of unduly alarmed observers continues to insist “that with just one more setback we may well reach a ‘tipping point’ at which not just ‘rogue states’ but the whole world” will become nuclear.
It is certainly preferable that a number of regimes—including Iran—never obtain nuclear weapons. However, if Iran’s leaders are determined to get one, there are essentially two possible responses: (1) let them have it; or, in distinct contrast, (2) let them have it.
Under the first option, the United States and its allies might seek to make things difficult and costly for Iran but in the end would stand back, trusting that Iran can be kept in line, if necessary, by deterrence and containment. Historical experience strongly suggests that newly nuclear countries—even ones that once seemed to be hugely threatening, like China—have been content to use their weapons for prestige and to deter real or perceived threats. Under the second option, the United States would give in to the spell of extravagant imaginings about what could conceivably transpire should Iran get the bomb, and resort to military action or severe economic sanctions. Such an approach could be counterproductive, the costs far greater than the imagined problems it seeks to address.
I have nothing against making nonproliferation a high priority. I would simply like to top it with a somewhat higher one: avoiding the obsessive sway of worst-case-scenario fantasies that might lead to the deaths of tens or hundreds of thousands of people.
