Nearly every comment on the war between Israel and Iran, even those that are critical of Israel, seems to come with a disclaimer along the lines of “Of course it would be a very bad thing for Iran to acquire nuclear weapons.” I too think that would be a bad thing, but I want to try to explain why I don’t see it as catastrophic – not something that it’s worth igniting a major conflict in order to prevent.
There are nine men (they are all men, although in the past some women have held the position) who currently have control over nuclear weapons. To avoid committing to any judgements about their relative importance or sanity, I’ll simply list them in alphabetical order:
- Kim Jong-un (North Korea)
- Emmanuel Macron (France)
- Narendra Modi (India)
- Benjamin Netanyahu (Israel)
- Vladimir Putin (Russia)
- Shebaz Sharif (Pakistan)
- Keir Starmer (United Kingdom)
- Donald Trump (United States)
- Xi Jinping (China)
No leader anywhere, including these nine, rules absolutely without constraints; all of them would face some obstacles, of varying status or efficacy, to the capricious use of a nuke. But ultimately their decisions would be the ones that mattered. You can have a go yourself at ordering them along a spectrum, say from “broadly sensible” through to “barking mad”. Not everyone will agree on the order, but it’s disturbing how many of them belong somewhere down near the latter end.
Yet the world survives. For a variety of reasons, nuclear deterrence is an unsatisfactory way of keeping the peace; it leaves us only one miscalculation away from disaster. But it is better than nothing, and for the last 75 years it has worked despite often hostile relations among the nuclear powers. If Ali Khamenei or some other Iranian leader were to join the above list, it would not fundamentally change that position.
No-one, I hope, will mistake me for a friend of the Iranian regime: I have been a committed opponent of it from day one. I loathe religious fundamentalism and theocratic government of any sort. But I see no basis for the idea that Iran’s leaders are less rational or more disconnected from reality than some other controllers of nuclear weapons. They are wicked, but they are not fools.
I don’t know if Iran has already been trying to build a nuclear bomb. I think it’s probable that it has at least been trying to put itself in a position where it would be able to build one at relatively short notice. (It would not be the only country in that position – Japan is often cited as an example, and there are no doubt others.) And its purpose for doing so is clear: it recognises the efficacy of nuclear deterrence and wants some for itself.
Back in 2017 I explained the logic of the situation with reference to North Korea, and Iran’s leaders will have paid close attention to its position. Its nukes have kept its brutal regime safe in the face of world disapproval, while others such as Iraq’s Saddam Hussein were toppled. The last week has amply demonstrated why Iran would like the same sort of security, but in neither case does that imply any intention to launch a nuclear attack. Everyone knows that that would invite immediate and massive retaliation.
Nuclear non-proliferation is very much desirable, and western efforts to lead Iran down that path – particularly through the 2015 agreement that Trump later denounced – were, it seems to me, the right approach to take. But the idea that their failure poses an existential threat, to Israel or to anyone else, is unfounded, except in the sense that the existence of nuclear weapons anywhere represents an existential threat to all of us.
We have learned, uneasily, to live with that threat, and if we have to we will live with a nuclear-armed Iran as well.
The World is Not Enough 
However , you overlook Iran’s’ proxies.
The Houthis in particular .They have involved them selves in the current conflict, the only proxy to do so.
It’s all about deniability , no matter how weak that denial may be.
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The intended relationship between your comment and the post you’re responding to isn’t clear. Even if Iran does develop nuclear weapons, that’s not going to give its proxies nuclear weapons.
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Thanks Lawrence. Yes, Iran’s proxies are important, although it’s unclear how much control it has over them. But I don’t know that it really matters for the nuclear question. Other nuclear powers have had a variety of proxies – think of the Russian-backed separatists in eastern Ukraine, for example – but they never let them have any nuclear weapons. I can’t see why the Iranians would be any different.
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I agree, Charles. The Iranian leaders are many things, but I doubt they are suicidal.
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Nuclear weapons are far more powerful today than in the 1940s. If Israel was using nuclear weapons in Gaza we wouldn’t just be looking at “from the river to the sea,” we’d be looking at:
From the river to the sea,
All are dead to you and me,
And in the sea there’s more dead, too,
Flora and fauna are now atomic goo.
The shores of Egypt are turned to glass,
There’s tritium inside the grass.
Ancient Petra’s in disarray,
The Kingdom of Jordan’s had its day.
The land is static, but fallout’s not
The Middle East has gone to rot.
Syria’s in mortal danger
Life in Lebanon’s a mortal wager.
Because, you see, the H-bomb’s strong.
I think it’s very likely that multiple modern atomic bombs going off in Gaza, even “small” atomic bombs (small is relative here), would make the entire MENA region at least temporarily uninhabitable.
This is one reason we absolutely don’t want Iran to have nuclear capabilities, by the way. They want to be a big fish, but the MENA region is, from a physical standpoint, a very small pond.
If Iran goes nuclear on Israel, it’s all over. There won’t ever be a caliphate because the entire caliphate region would be a wasteland.
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Absolutely, the use of nuclear weapons anywhere in the region would be a disaster. But that just makes them all the more effective as a deterrent. Which in turn is one reason why Israel doesn’t want any of its neighbors to have them – they would remove its ability to attack them at will.
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