Unthinkable (13 page)

In recent years, Iranian fears of two other powers—Israel and Pakistan—have also increased. Tehran may desire nuclear weapons to deter them as well. For most of its existence, the Islamic Republic hated Israel but saw little reason to fear an Israeli attack. Iran's pursuit of a nuclear weapons capability, however, has perversely drawn them into a security dilemma with Israel. Today, an attack by Israel is now a real fear, and so Iran can add that to its list of reasons for wanting to acquire
a nuclear deterrent.
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Likewise, Iran has rarely concerned itself with Pakistan. However, Islamabad's nuclear tests in 1998 clearly rattled the Iranian leadership, with numerous Iranian newspapers depicting the event as the advent of a “Sunni Bomb.”
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Moreover, Iran has increasingly come into conflict with Pakistan over the drug smuggling and terrorist operations being conducted by the Baluch population that spans their common border.

At some level, we can understand why Iran would want a nuclear deterrent. Even taking into account only those times when foreign powers
did
invade or interfere in Iran's internal affairs and setting aside those Iran has imagined, exaggerated, or brought upon itself, its history might make a nuclear shield desirable. We may even theorize that Iran's acquisition of nuclear weapons could be positive because it would create a balance of nuclear power between Israel and Iran, America and Iran, Pakistan and Iran, and so on. Alternatively, we might hope that once Iran acquires nuclear weapons it will feel safe, and therefore will not need to act against its neighbors, the United States, and other countries. This case has been argued by Professor Kenneth Waltz, one of the great figures of academic international relations theory. Waltz also believed that nations that have acquired nuclear weapons become more restrained and less aggressive.
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In his words, “With nuclear weapons, it's been proven without exception that whoever gets nuclear weapons behaves with caution and moderation.”
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Although this book is not the place for a full rebuttal of Waltz's simplistic claims, it is worth making a few points before returning to the specifics of Iran.
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First, Waltz made numerous historical assertions that were at best disputable if not incorrect. For example, while a strong argument can be made that Israel has shown restraint on a number of important occasions since it is rumored to have acquired a nuclear arsenal in the 1960s, this statement is relative and Israel has still acted aggressively
on numerous occasions since then.
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During the 1973 October War, Israel opted not to preempt the opening Arab attack, and in 1991 Israel refrained from retaliating against Iraq for launching forty-two modified Scud missiles at Israel. Of course, both of these (and many other examples of Israeli restraint) were primarily a response to American pressure. However, Israel's sense that it could fall back on its nuclear capability if all else failed probably did play a role as well.
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Yet Israel has conducted major military operations at least nine times since then and more limited strikes on countless occasions; hardly a history of “restraint.”
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North Korea was already prone to rash attacks on the South before it acquired nuclear weapons in 2006–2009. Nevertheless, its shelling of South Korean positions in November 2010 (“one of the heaviest attacks on its neighbor since the Korean War ended in 1953”), its sinking of a South Korean warship in March 2010, and the nuclear crisis it initiated with Seoul and Washington in 2013 do not speak to more cautious behavior.
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At most, one could argue that Pyongyang has been no more aggressive after acquiring nuclear weapons than it was before getting them.

Another example that contradicts Waltz's optimism, one of far greater relevance to Iran, is Pakistan. Waltz asserted that Pakistan became more restrained and less bellicose after it tested its nuclear weapons in 1998.
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History demonstrates the opposite. The Pakistanis were not necessarily cautious before they acquired nuclear weapons—their role in both the 1965 and 1971 Indo-Pakistani wars testifies to that. However, since acquiring nuclear weapons, Islamabad's behavior has become outright reckless. Pakistan acquired nuclear weapons for defensive purposes—to balance the Indian nuclear arsenal and deter an Indian attack on Pakistan, conventional or nuclear. Once Islamabad had done so, and had proven to the world that it had them in 1998, however, its perception of its strategic situation changed. The Pakistanis concluded that their nuclear shield was so effective that they were safe from the threat of Indian conventional or nuclear use under any circumstances. India would never risk Pakistani nuclear retaliation or escalation from conventional to nuclear conflict. Consequently, the Pakistanis concluded that their nuclear parity with
India opened up the unconventional warfare spectrum to them, with no danger that India would respond to Pakistani covert action. Accordingly, Pakistan sent several thousand intelligence agents into Kashmir to mount sabotage operations, assassinations, and other disruptive attacks. Then, in 1999, Pakistani paramilitary units infiltrated Kashmir and ultimately occupied the Kargil region on the Indian side of the Line of Control. This encroachment enraged New Delhi, which responded with a major military operation to retake the lost terrain and a two-month conflict that resulted in about one thousand killed on both sides. This clash provoked a wider crisis between the two sides that brought them dangerously close to a nuclear exchange.
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Indeed, even after a nuclear war over Kargil was averted, Pakistan has continued to wage unconventional attacks on India, most notably planning and supporting the horrific, coordinated attacks by Pakistani terrorists in Mumbai that killed 164 people and wounded another 308 in 2008. This event nearly provoked an Indian conventional attack on Pakistan, which was only averted by the intercession of the United States and other great powers.
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Then there's China. In 1964, China tested its first atomic bomb. That same year, Chairman Mao Zedong demanded that the Soviet Union return land that he claimed the Russians had stolen from China decades, if not centuries, earlier. Both sides began building up military forces along their border, and the rhetoric on both sides heated up. Many feared war between them. In 1969, Mao launched several attacks by Chinese troops against Soviet forces along the Sino-Soviet border, probably intended both to convince Moscow not to attack and to galvanize domestic support for the regime amid the chaos of Mao's “Cultural Revolution.” According to Colin Kahl, an exceptionally able former defense official, “Mao was probably confident that China's recently acquired nuclear capabilities would limit the resulting conflict.”
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Indeed, in August of that year, after some of the largest and most dangerous battles between Chinese and Russian forces, the Soviet government felt out the Nixon administration on how the United States would react to a preemptive Soviet strike on the Chinese nuclear arsenal.
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Ultimately, Soviet conventional and nuclear superiority
convinced Mao that he had to back down, but for many months, expert observers, including Chinese government officials, feared a major war between the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China.
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Another example is Iran's western neighbor. Postwar tapes of Saddam Husayn's conversations with his inner circle reveal that he too saw the possession of a nuclear arsenal as enabling aggression, and a key element of his desire to get them.
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As two experts on the captured tapes and documents from Saddam's regime concluded, “Although Saddam did believe that a nuclear capability would provide protection against attack by enemies such as Israel and Iran, the theme he returned to again and again . . . was essentially offensive and coercive in nature . . . his attraction to nuclear weapons . . . revolved around fundamentally revisionist objectives.”
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In one conversation, Saddam explained that he needed a nuclear weapon so that Iraq and Syria (and possibly other Arab states) could go to war against Israel. He argued that an Iraqi nuclear arsenal would deter Israel from using its own, and this would allow Iraqi and Syrian forces to wear down Israel in a yearlong war of attrition that Saddam expected to win at the cost of fifty thousand Arab casualties.
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There is nothing radical about fearing that Tehran would see a nuclear arsenal as useful not just to deter an attack on Iran, but to enable aggression by Iran.

The greatest fear conjured by a nuclear Iran stems from the danger that Tehran will feel safe and secure. But the fear is that that sense of security will not engender greater restraint as Professor Waltz believed. It will convince Iran's leaders that they can pursue their goals of overturning the regional status quo, overthrowing unfriendly governments, and assisting violent extremist groups without fear that the United States, Israel, or anyone else would dare to stop them.
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Since the dawn of the nuclear era, states have worried that nuclear-armed adversaries would attempt to coerce them into doing things that they never would have done otherwise or face atomic annihilation. In his classic
work on deterrence and compellence from 1966,
Arms and Influence
, Thomas Schelling theorized that countries armed with nuclear weapons might coerce other states—possibly even including other states possessing nuclear weapons.
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The empirical evidence has tended in the opposite direction. Cold War studies concluded that in practice it was hard to find instances where countries acted purely and unambiguously based on fear of nuclear threats.
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There have been occasions when a state with nuclear weapons compelled another to do something, but it was rarely clear that the nuclear trump card was the key to that outcome. In 1946, Harry Truman convinced Joseph Stalin to withdraw Soviet troops from northern Iran by ostentatiously alerting five American divisions in Europe for immediate deployment to Iran. How much was Stalin's decision to withdraw governed by fear of the American nuclear arsenal (for which he had no match at that time) and how much by fear of a conventional war with the United States? We do not know, but the Soviets did not begin to withdraw until after Truman alerted those divisions.
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President Eisenhower obliquely threatened to introduce nuclear weapons into the Korean War in 1953 if China did not agree to end the conflict, and the Chinese did agree to do so. How much was it Ike's threat, and how much sheer exhaustion from the stalemated fighting? Again, it is impossible to know, but most historians seem to think that the former made it palatable for Beijing to accept the latter.
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Throughout the Cold War, Finland tempered its foreign policy so as not to offend the neighboring Soviet Union, but Finland did so even before Moscow acquired nuclear weapons. It was fear of a Red Army invasion, not nuclear annihilation, that shaped Helsinki's course.
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In contrast, we can point to other cases where a nuclear power attempted to coerce a non-nuclear state to do something and failed. One need look no further than the subject of this book for one example. The United States (and Britain, France, and Israel) have all been trying to compel Iran to halt its nuclear program—and Israel has been making explicit military threats as part of this effort—since at least 2002. All have failed. The list of other examples of nuclear-armed states failing to coerce
non-nuclear states short of war (and in some cases, failing even then) goes on and on: Russia failed to compel Yugoslavia to abandon its pursuit of an independent foreign policy in the 1960s, China failed to compel Vietnam to halt its invasion of Cambodia in the 1970s, Britain failed to compel Argentina to withdraw from the Falklands in the 1980s, the United States failed to compel Saddam Husayn to withdraw from Kuwait in the 1990s, and Washington also failed to compel Iran to stop supporting violent extremist groups killing Americans in Iraq and Afghanistan in the 2000s. After India tested a nuclear weapon in 1998, Indian national security advisor Shivshankar Menon tried to justify having done so by claiming that on at least three occasions before the nuclear test, New Delhi had been subjected to blackmail threats by other nuclear powers—all of which India ignored, he boasted.
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Thus, while this problem would seem like an obvious corollary to the danger that Iran would see a nuclear weapons capability as enabling aggression at lower levels of warfare, the historical record demonstrates that the risk of nuclear blackmail is slight.
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Unfortunately, much of the region does not see it that way. Officials and elites from Qatar, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Jordan, and even Saudi Arabia fear that if Iran acquires a nuclear arsenal, it will use it to force far-reaching concessions. As one Gulf official put it, “What happens after Iran gets a nuclear bomb? The next day they will tell the king of Bahrain to hand over power to the [Shi'a-dominated] opposition. They will tell Qatar to send the American Air Force home. And they will tell King Abdallah [of Saudi Arabia], ‘This is how much oil you may pump and this is what the price of oil will now be.' ”
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Such fears are common across the region, especially from Arab officials and elites.
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Unfortunately, such perceptions can take on a certain reality, especially in the Middle East. The fear that Iran will be in a position to coerce neighboring states once it acquires a nuclear weapons capability cannot be dismissed by the United States as unfounded. History indicates that were Iran ever to try nuclear blackmail, it would probably fail. The Iranians will be hard-pressed to make good on any threat to employ a nuclear
weapon if the target country refuses, as doing so would rally the international community against them.