The hard liners in Israel, the Republican Party and Iran have one thing in common. They hate the deal to delay the acquisition of an Iranian nuclear weapon. Those in Israel and the GOP trust President Obama even less than they trust the ayatollahs. The Republican Guards of Iran take the opposite view, fearing the agreement will work, thereby keeping them from nuking infidels for a decade or more.
The question for members of congress who refuse to endorse the inspection regime is what better choice they have to offer. So far, not much other than hope and change. They claim a better deal could have been had by tougher negotiators, though the Bush administration didn’t even got to the table nor did it cooperate with other powers to impose the crushing sanctions that brought the Iranians there.
Failing a better deal, they claim the sanctions, designed to isolate and beggar Iran, should have been kept in place and made even more onerous. But the U.N., Russia, China, England, France et al. accepted the agreement reached as sufficient and are unlikely to have gone further if the United States walked away. In which case, we not the Iranians would have been isolated, and unilateral sanction would have been unlikely to discommode Iran or deter its race to nuclear status.
So what’s left as a strategy to keep Iran free of nuclear weapons if a deal is ruled out and ratcheting up a united sanctions regime is unavailable? Bloodthirsty critics appear to favor military action, but it seems unlikely bombing alone could be relied on to completely eliminate any chance of Iran’s nuclear program reaching fruition. Even if it did set back development of the bomb, would we be prepared to continue making war on a country of 80 million people in perpetuity? Would we have put boots on the ground?
Invading Iraq looked easy for the first months, but the aftermath was long, bloody and unsuccessful. And Iran is a lot more formidable that Saddam Hussein’s regime ever was. In the 1980-1988 Iran-Iraq War, Iran lost a minimum of 100,000 dead and fought on. Iranians are the only competent troops other than the Kurds now opposing ISIS. To defend their homeland, they could be counted on to be ferocious and united. Do we have the stomach for that?
The ugly fact, one that has been plain since 1949, is that there is very little other than “ultra-violence” that can prevent a determined regime willing to cultivate technical expertise and spend what it takes from obtaining nuclear arms. Only a collective diplomatic effort to demand non-proliferation, backed by the threat of economic and military destruction has kept the count as low as it is.
Our monopoly on the atomic bomb was broken within four years of Hiroshima, in part due to espionage, but largely because, once it was revealed that an atomic bomb was feasible, clever physicists, nuclear chemists and metallurgists were able to figure out the trick. Indeed, the USSR soon leapfrogged ahead, beating us to a deliverable hydrogen bomb in 1953.
At first, naive American politicians refused to believe the Soviets could have done science sophisticated enough to engineer their own gadget and assumed a dark conspiracy was at work. But it quickly became obvious that once the nuclear genie was out of the bottle, the world shattering weapons could be had by many.
The UK and France followed in 1952 and 1960, frightened by the Soviets and unwilling to trust their survival to the promises of the United States. That logic has ruled ever since. China felt itself vulnerable between a nuclear USSR on the one hand and a nuclear United States on the other. It got the bomb in 1964 in order to deter either from getting ideas. India feared China, having seen what it did to adjacent Tibet, and got its deterrent weapon in 1974.
That, in turn, freaked out sectarian enemy Pakistan, which got its bomb in 1998. North Korea, afraid of us and South Korea, China, Russia, Japan and everybody else joined the club in 2005. For awhile the white South African apartheid regime feared being overwhelmed by its African neighbors and sought a bomb, but eventually calmed down, changed internally and found the cost of seeking a bomb prohibitive.
Israel, surrounded by enemies from its birth, has never admitted to having a bomb, but began woking toward one as early as the 1960s and has had the weapons for at least thirty years. It is estimated that Israel has 80 deliverable weapons. North Korea is believed to have less that 10, India and Pakistan have around a hundred each, France, England, and China between 200 and 300 each and the United States and Russia about 7,500 each.
The numbers don’t seem that great, until you recall that each weapon today is orders of magnitude more destructive that the 1945 bombs that caused no less than 200,000 casualties in the blink of an eye. How many millions would be incinerated if Pakistan and India lobbed 100 nukes at each other one fine day?
It is not surprising that Iran, surrounded by states to which it is hostile and which return the favor — Israel, Sunni Arab states led by Saudi Arabia, ourselves — would want a weapon. Nor, given their track record, that even erstwhile friends China and Russia night find it disquieting to have Iran join the club. If Iran were to get a nuke, the Saudis and other neighbors would surely feel the need to get their own deterrent. And so it goes.
It is a miracle no nuclear weapons have been loosed on helpless populations and the global environment since Aug. 9, 1945, despite a number of frighteningly close calls. Bully boys who think they can deter regimes from acquiring a bomb by targeted violence are living in a fool’s paradise, as the history of the last 70 years suggests.
If a country wants the bomb badly enough, it can be obtained. And if a country is punished harshly enough to deter their doing so, they are only likely to want the ultimate deterrent and ”Big Stick” even more. In a nuclear world, self-preservation demands patient diplomacy first and force as a last resort, because once the first mushroom cloud blooms, there’s no telling where it will end.
Leo Szilard, the Hungarian-American physicist who drafted Einsteins’s letter to Roosevelt urging him to pursue the bomb, was present in Chicago when Fermi achieved the first controlled nuclear chain reaction which demonstrated the feasibility of weapons. Later when he recalled the moment, he said “We turned the switch, saw the flashes, watched for ten minutes, then switched everything off and went home. That night I knew the world was headed for sorrow.”
He wasn’t wrong. And the goal of sane leaders ever since has been to minimize the vast sorrow that can potentially be caused by these poisonous creations.