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Negotiations over Iran’s nuclear program resume in Turkey this weekend, attended by delegates from the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council plus Germany. Not much is likely to happen.

The big obstacle is this: The Iranians want a pocketful of nuclear weapons. Or, more to the point: The Iranians have always aspired to be the major power in their region. Several of the region’s powers—Israel, Pakistan, and India—have nukes, so Iran wants some too.

(…)Even so, it’s extremely unlikely that a nuclear-armed Iran would one day, out of the blue, start dropping bombs or firing missiles at Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. For one thing, whatever the status of Iran’s nuclear-enrichment program, they are probably years away from turning an explosive device into a weapon, miniaturizing it to fit inside a warhead, and installing the warhead on top of a missile heavy enough to deliver it over a long distance with accuracy.

For another thing, Israel is believed to possess up to 200 nuclear weapons. It’s a reasonable guess that they are dispersed, heavily protected, some of them mobile, perhaps at sea, and connected to redundant command-control networks so that, even if the capital is destroyed, the surviving weapons can still be launched. In other words, if Iran lobs some nukes at Israel, Israel can be counted on to blow Iran to smithereens. The Iranian leaders surely know this: They may sponsor suicide bombers, but they’re not suicidal themselves.

Some have inferred from this argument that an Iranian bomb is nothing to worry about. This inference is wrong, for several reasons. First, nuclear weapons are good not just for deterring but also for brandishing. They can provide cover for conventional aggression or intimidation. For instance, if Saddam Hussein had possessed some nukes before invading Kuwait, it’s unlikely that President George H.W. Bush and Secretary of State James Baker could have assembled or sustained the vast coalition that pushed Iraq’s army out of Kuwait. Or, during that same war, when Baker declared that a chemical or biological attack on Israel would be treated the same way as a nuclear attack against the United States, his threat might have been less credible if Saddam had had his own nukes to bargain with.

Similarly, a nuclear-armed Iran may push or condone the more militant factions within Hezbollah and other proxies to step up their aggression and take greater risks.

Second, the United States and the Soviet Union were able to maintain a “balance of terror” for several decades of Cold War tensions, without pushing the button, in part because both sides learned—and applied—the lessons of deterrence as they went along. They put missiles in blast-hardened silos and untargetable submarines. They set up early-warning radars and a hotline for managing crises. They installed coded locks (“permissive action links” or PALs) on their missiles, to minimize the chance that some loony general might launch a first-strike on his own. There is no assurance that the Iranians will do any of these things with their arsenal.

Third, there is the matter of geography. Moscow and Washington are 5,000 miles apart. If they were 900 miles apart (as Tehran and Jerusalem are), there probably would have been a nuclear war at some point in the last 50 years. It takes a half hour for an ICBM to fly from Moscow to Washington; that’s just barely enough time for the president to decide what to do if a blip on the radar screen suggests an attack is underway. It takes about five minutes for a short-range missile to fly from Tehran to Israel. That’s probably not enough time.

(…)The bad news is that, for the Iranians to give up such a high-profile trump card, they need to get something in return—a suspension of sanctions, a guarantee of security, something that’s tangible and valuable. Is there some deal—even hypothetically—that is, at once, worthwhile to the Iranians and acceptable to the Israelis? That’s the key question; it’s hard to envision such a thing.

Fred Kaplan is Slate’s “War Stories” columnist and a senior Schwartz fellow at the New America Foundation.

The above article was published in slate.com on April 12th, 2012 (6:14 p.m. ET).

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