WarSclerotic

To nuke, or not to nuke, Iran? | Al Jazeera Blogs.

October 26th, 2009.

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I would guess that, for most people, the use of nuclear weapons is not even a matter for debate. Indeed, since the last actively deployed nuclear weapon showed its true colours 64 years ago, even the most belligerent of world leaders have yielded to a saner instinct and kept their fingers off the button, to few complaints.

But there’s another opinion. Its current champion, in the media at least, is John Bolton, George W. Bush’s one-time pick as Ambassador to the United Nations. In a conference ironically entitled “Ensuring Peace”, Bolton argued that the only sure way to stopping a nuclear first strike is – to initiate a nuclear first strike.

“So we’re at a very unhappy point — a very unhappy point — where unless Israel is prepared to use nuclear weapons against Iran’s program, Iran will have nuclear weapons in the very near future.”

In Bolton’s mind, then, the issue here is not to question the strategic value of nuclear weapons or the impact that using them would have on humanity; the only important question is – “who should use them first?” If it’s “us”, that’s ok. If it’s “them”, not so good.

If you are a casual user of media you would probably conclude that he’s not alone in that opinion. Even as President Barack Obama attempts to steer the nuclear bandwagon onto a path towards fewer weapons, the louder voices (or those most often quoted) are warning of proliferation and impending nuclear destruction at the hands of crazed foreign leaders.

But weighing into the debate recently, in an article in Foreign Policy magazine, Professor John Mueller frames the issue in a different perspective. In reality, he says, the nuclear trend is encouraging, because even though a few countries do still feel the need to arm themselves with the ultimate weapon, they are the minority.

“a major reason so few technologically capable countries have actually sought to build the weapons, contrary to decades of hand-wringing prognostication, is that most have found them, on examination, to be a substantial and even ridiculous misdirection of funds, effort, and scientific talent.”

History, he argues, makes it abundantly clear that, even in the most incendiary moments in international politics, even without the constraint of “mutually assured destruction”,  the world’s stockpile of nukes has achieved little but gather dust.

“…possessors of the weapons [have not] really been able to find much military use for them in actual armed conflicts. They were of no help to the United States in Korea, Vietnam, or Iraq; to the Soviet Union in Afghanistan; to France in Algeria; to Britain in the Falklands; to Israel in Lebanon and Gaza; or to China in dealing with its once-impudent neighbor Vietnam.

But even if Bolton’s argument is accepted over Mueller’s, one question remains unanswered: if Iran does indeed have a hidden network of undeclared bomb-making factories… where exactly should Israel drop that nuke?

This entry was posted on October 28, 2009 at 9:53 AM and is filed under Iran / Israel War. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. You can comment below, or link to this permanent URL from your own site.