This comment, from a cadet at one of the military academies during a seminar I had been invited to give on “Non-Proliferation of Weapons of Mass Destruction”, stopped me in my tracks. I made a prosaic comment about the consequences, even to Iranians, should their theocratic leaders elect to send a nuclear bomb into Israel. I (and many of the other students) also said it just wasn’t logical. My response was wrong on both counts.
A sovereign nation can build nuclear weapons if it wants to.
The vast majority of the 187 countries that have signed the NPT believe it is wrong for Iran to build the bomb, however. The UN Security Council voted in 2010 twelve to two (with one abstention) for new sanctions against Iran, the fourth round of sanctions, mostly to prevent the import of military weaponry. Unless some country (or some entity) launches a pre-emptive strike against Iran’s nuclear capability, Iran will not be stopped in its quest for the “greatness”, let alone the threat to others, that Iran’s bomb will bring.
Iran’s decision to build the bomb may be totally logical … from Iran’s standpoint.
The problem is, very few will ever understand “Iran’s logic”. First we must ask, “To whom do we refer when we say ‘Iran?’” Do all Iranians believe their country should develop the bomb? Some do, of course, as a matter of national pride. But this view may be held by just a tiny fraction of Iran’s citizenry; furthermore the country is ruled by just a small number of powerful mullahs who do not speak for all Iranians by a long shot. So we are talking about the logic of a handful of Islamic extremists. Their logic, for example, might be the following:
“We will destroy Israel with a small number of bombs, which might result in the subsequent annihilation of Iran. We will nonetheless be immortalized in Islamic history, being known as the heroes that rid the world of Israel and abetted the return of the 12th caliphate”.
All is quite logical … or, more aptly, “theo-logical”, but only to those few in charge, and maybe not even all of them. What may be perfectly logical to a small number of leaders in a theocratic, tyrannical autocracy, looking toward their place in immortality for centuries to come, may make no sense at all to the country’s vast majority of citizens who have no interest in risking the annihilation of their country because of actions of their very undemocratic and, to most of the 40 million or so Iranians under the age of 35, unwanted leadership.
Iran has a perfect right to develop nuclear weapons and I’m sure the reasoning of their leaders is quite logical; “they” are simply wrong on both counts. As for the ability of sanctions to influence autocratic leaders, Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said the sanctions are “annoying flies, like a used tissue.”
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