Iran’s Nuclear Ambition: Dealing with the Threat Against Israel and Others

By Brigitte L. Nacos
Iran is not alone in denying Israel’s right to exist and threatening to wipe the Jewish state off the map of the Middle East. But the determination of Tehran’s decision-makers to establish a nuclear program and most likely the capability of building nuclear weapons differentiates the Persian danger from the perennial threats against Israel issued by her Arab neighbors. It is this clear, albeit not yet present danger that needs to be addressed. On the one hand, there are those who invoke the specter of WW III, as President Bush recently did, and favor military strikes against Iran as leading neo-cons, Vice-President Cheney and most of the Republican presidential contenders do. An editorial in today’s New York Times put is this way, “Four years after his pointless invasion of Iraq, President Bush still confuses bullying with grand strategy. He refuses to do the hard work of diplomacy — or even acknowledge the disastrous costs of his actions. The Republican presidential candidates have apparently decided that the real commander in chief test is to see who can out-trash talk the White House on Iran.”
On the other hand, there are those who minimize or ignore the threat, among them most Democrats in the presidential race. As Sebastian Mallaby writes in today’s Washington Post, “All the Democratic presidential hopefuls know that a nuclear Iran is scary. They know that the Europeans have been patiently negotiating with Iran to secure a freeze of its program and that the Iranians have been stalling. But Clinton is the only Democratic candidate who unequivocally embraces the obvious next step: Push hard for the sanctions that might change Iran's calculations.”   
Although efforts by European governments have failed so far, diplomacy is the way to go now. But Washington’s new unilateral sanctions, or multilateral ones (if they could be achieved) do not assure at all that decision-makers in Tehran change their nuclear plans. The war-mongering rhetoric on both sides is not helpful either.

So, what other options are available if Iran continues with its program?

The Times suggests in its editorial today, “The world should not allow Iran to have a nuclear weapon, but there is no easy fix here, no daring surgical strike. Consider Natanz, the underground site where Iran is defying the Security Council by spinning a few thousand centrifuges to produce nuclear fuel. American bombers could take it out, but what about the even more sophisticated centrifuges the administration accuses Iran of hiding? Beyond the disastrous diplomatic and economic costs, a bombing campaign is unlikely to set back Iran’s efforts for more than a few years.”
In other words, surgical strikes are unlikely to do the job. Nor is it likely that such strikes would strengthen the democratic forces in Iran and lead to the demise of the current regime, as the neo-con crowd wants us to believe.
After the Iraq debacle, nobody can seriously think about an invasion of Iran.
So, if air strikes will not prevent Iran from getting a nuclear weapon and an invasion is out of the picture, what can be done to deter a nuclear Iran?

A look back to the Cold War era is instructive. Just as an all out conflict was prevented during the hottest periods of the Cold War, there is a similar approach to avoid military conflict over a nuclear
Iran. The idea behind the MAD (Mutual Assured Destruction) doctrine of the cold war era was that launching an all out nuclear attack by one of the superpowers would result in equally lethal counter-strikes and thus assure the destruction of the attacked and the attacker. To translate that into Middle East setting: The Iranian government has already a good idea that a nuclear weapon deployed against Israel would immediately launch an in-kind response. But MAD as deterrence here would be even more credible if backed by U.S.policy.
Seen in the global setting, mutual assured destruction was more likely to work in the old world order with a limited number of nuclear powers and two superpowers with their respective spheres of influence than it may the new world (dis)order with a larger number of influential nation states and a growing number of nuclear powers. But with respect to Iran’s nuclear threat, the assurance that Israel and the U.S.would immediately respond in kind should deter Tehran from going down this path.

And what about the prospect of nuclear weapons falling into the hands of ruthless terrorists of the al-Qaeda variety? Just as the former head of Pakistan’s nuclear program, Dr. Abdul Qadeer Khan, provided Iran as well as Libya and North Korea with nuclear weapons technology, there could be a secret transfer from a number of nuclear powers to terrorist organizations (There also remains the danger of material from the former Soviet Unions stockpiles of weapons could find its way to terrorists).
But Iran was in the past and is today the premier state sponsor of terrorism with particular ties to
Israel’s enemies, such as Hezbollah, Hamas and other groups that share Tehran’s hostility toward Israel. And while there is no evidence of Iranian support for al-Qaeda, future cooperation is not unthinkable. In case of a terrorist nuclear strike against Israel or against the U.S.as well, Iran would be the prime suspect, if it had nuclear weapons.

My point here is that the MAD doctrine deserves to be reexamined in the familiar case of Iran’s threat against Israel and, equally important, with respect to the danger of catastrophic terrorism. Perhaps, the MAD principle can be adapted to the realities of today. One way or the other, we must search for effective alternatives to war.