When Iran Goes Nuclear

[darrels joy]

When Iran Goes Nuclear



David Wood

Columnist


Posted:
04/26/10


Almost no one outside of South Asia noticed this week when India fired some 90 artillery rounds across the border into Pakistan. No injuries were reported in the 30-minute "unprovoked'' barrage, according to Pakistani news reports.

But for anyone thinking about the perils of a nuclear-armed Iran, the little disturbance at Shakargarh, in the hotly disputed Kashmir border region between nuclear-armed Pakistan and nuclear-armed India, was a jolting reminder of how fragile is the web of luck, happenstance and good intention that so far has kept the world from thermonuclear war.

The White House now is struggling to find a strategy to prevent Iran from building its own nuclear weapons arsenal. Economic sanctions, which the United States first imposed on Iran in 1979, haven't worked. Crippling sanctions -- a blockade of Iran's oil ports -- likely would start a war as the Iranian regime fought for life. Standing U.S. policy for years has been to refuse to rule out a military strike, yet President Barack Obama's top advisers acknowledge than an attack would be ineffective, and a long war unthinkable.

Faced with these grim options, some have begun to wonder if a nuclear-armed Iran would really be so bad. Think again.

When Indian rocket launchers wrecked two Pakistani tank brigades at Shakargarh in 1971, neither India nor Pakistan had nuclear weapons. Good thing: Pakistan's military was shattered and the nation humiliated. It had lost half its territory (the new nation of Bangladesh) and India held 90,000 Pakistani prisoners of war.

Now, Pakistan and India have nuclear arsenals estimated to contain 70 to 90 warheads on each side.

This week's artillery attack at Shakargarh is meaningless, perhaps. But just days ago Pakistan unleashed a mock attack on India, a massive rehearsal of its war plan for a preemptive strike against its larger neighbor. It was the largest such exercise in 21 years and an impressive show. But in any conventional war, Pakistan would get clobbered by India's far larger armed forces, which often rehearse their own massive preemptive strike across the border.
That is why "any future conflict between these two states will escalate to a nuclear exchange,'' said John McCreary, formerly a top intelligence analyst for the Pentagon's Joint Chiefs of Staff. "Pakistan must use its nuclear missile force to survive an Indian conventional attack.''

Transfer this scenario to the Persian Gulf and it gets uglier. Iran with nuclear weapons and long-range missiles on one side, Israel with nuclear weapons and a high-tech strike force on the other. Iran with a declared intention of obliterating Israel; Israel with the declared goal of survival. Each side, like Pakistan and India, engaging in low-level or proxy terrorist harassment.

President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran has declared that "Israel must be wiped off the map.'' The Israelis have not been shy about using force either. "I don't think the Iranians, even if they got the bomb, are going to drop it immediately on some neighbor,'' Defense Minister Ehud Barak of Israel said recently. "They fully understand what might follow. They are radicals, but not total 'Meshugenah,' '' he explained, using the Yiddish word for "crazy."

Barak, a former Israeli prime minister, was referring to the potential punishing power of the combined military power of Israel and the United States, including the nuclear arsenals of both countries. That deterrent force, according to conventional thinking, is what kept the United States and the Soviet Union at a standoff for five decades of Cold War.

Can the same theory be safely relied upon in the Middle East, to deter a nuclear-armed Iran from pushing its way around?

Is it possible, Sen. John McCain asked the other day, that "the old rules of two-dimensional deterrence'' can be "applied to a volatile region with multiple nuclear powers and possibly less rational actors?'' Probably not, he answered himself at a hearing of the Senate Armed Services Committee: "We should have no illusions about the catastrophic consequences of Iran developing a nuclear weapons capability."

Oddly enough, McCain was seconded by William J. Burns, an under secretary of state who testified that a nuclear-armed Iran "would be catastrophic. . . . I don't think anyone should underestimate what is at stake.''

Relying on traditional deterrence against a nuclear-armed Iran would be a mistake -- that is the cautionary conclusion of a two-year study at the U.S. Army War College's Strategic Studies Institute. It saw three problems with trying to deter Iran:

- The regime is split into factions, making it difficult to know whether to deal with clerics or civilians like Ahmadinejad, the military or the ultra-hard-line paramilitary Revolutionary Guards.

- Rather than threatening to launch a nuclear attack, a nuclear Iran would likely be more aggressive in backing terrorist attacks or even minor conventional or very low-level nuclear operations against U.S. interests in the region -- nuclear sea mines along the Persian Gulf's oil routes, for example. Such operations would complicate U.S. decisions about whether a nuclear response would be justified.

- Domestic political instability could affect how Iran's leaders play their nuclear weapons card, making it difficult to predict how they would react in a crisis.

The West's recent experience with Iran suggests that working with its rulers to build a stable practice of deterrence would be more confounding than was dealing with the Kremlin in the 1960s and 1970s. The awkward grappling with each other over Iran's nuclear program and potential sanctions is a case in point (imagine trying to negotiate with Tehran in a crisis over a hotline, if one existed).

"Iranian leaders tend to believe that the best defense is a good offense, and under strain are prone to lash out rather than to moderate their policies or yield to external demands,'' writes Suzanne Maloney, an Iran expert at the Brookings Institution's Saban Center for Middle East policy.

"For Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, and even more so for the younger generation hardliners who surround Ahmadinejad, there is no middle ground for dealing with Washington or the West. In their view, any act of compromise would merely initiate a perilous process of intensifying pressure intended to eliminate the Islamic Republic,'' she explained.

So much for cooperation, even of the suspicious and grudging sort that long characterized U.S.-Soviet exchanges.

If deterrence failed, the United States maintains a powerful nuclear force that could, if required, pulverize any potential nuclear aggressor.

But the trick with nuclear-armed opponents, as former Defense Secretary James Schlesinger pointed out last year, is to stop a potential aggressor before the trouble starts, not to retaliate afterward. That requires a constant and patient engagement with allies and foes, not just making sporadic threats.

Unfortunately, Schlesinger said last year, that skill has eroded badly.

This "larger purpose of our nuclear forces, our nuclear deterrent, has sometimes been neglected within the Department of Defense as a whole,'' Schlesinger told Pentagon reporters.

As chairman of a blue-ribbon panel that spent a year examining U.S. nuclear deterrence, Schlesinger said he had found that expertise in the art of nuclear deterrence had faded since the end of the Cold War two decades ago. (Schlesinger's panel was formed after several earlier incidents in which the U.S. Air Force lost track of several of its nuclear weapons.)

"The services, as we discovered, have tended to understate the unique aspects of deterrence, and . . . failed to fully recognize the psychological and political consequences of our deterrent forces,'' Schlesinger said.

Bottom line, he added: "Interest in deterrence at the highest levels of DOD [Department of Defense] has diminished.''

In the year since then, the Pentagon has scrambled to revamp its deterrence theory and practice, codified in the Nuclear Posture Review released last month.

The impact of what the White House says is a strengthened deterrence will be clear enough as India and Pakistan continue to elbow and jostle each other.


And, as Iran moves toward acquiring its own nuclear force, in the Persian Gulf.

http://www.politicsdaily.com/2010/04...-goes-nuclear/