Jerry Slater has a smart piece in the Buffalo News saying that we can deter a nuclear-armed Iran but that deterrence is not the answer, disarmament is. Slater has a supple grasp on history. Some excerpts:
Suppose… that nothing can force
or induce Iran to change its policies, and within a few years it begins
producing nuclear weapons and missiles to deliver them? The task would
then be to deter Iran from ever using them, or giving them to
uncontrollable terrorists. There is no reason to doubt the
effectiveness of deterrence, meaning the implied or even explicit
threat of massive nuclear retaliation if Iran or terrorist groups
allied with it ever used nuclear weapons against Israel or the United
States.
So far, deterrence has worked throughout the post-World
War II nuclear age. No state has dared to use its nuclear weapons even
against non-nuclear states, let alone against states that can retaliate
in kind. Nonetheless, deterrence is a very bad way to continue to run
the world. Aside from the greatly magnified difficulties of maintaining
a stable deterrence system in a world of increasing numbers of nuclear
states as well as, possibly, nuclear terrorist groups, we now know that
even the relatively stable and simple two-state U. S.-Soviet mutual
deterrence system came perilously close to breaking down on several
occasions during the Cold War — during the Cuban missile crisis for
sure, but also because of several hair-raising accidents,
miscalculations and misunderstandings of radar, communications and
other data.
Since deterrence can fail in many different ways,
the only true solution to the problem of nuclear weapons is to get rid
of them. It used to be thought that only woolly-headed liberals
believed that global nuclear disarmament was a good idea or even
possible, but Ronald Reagan began the process of changing all that in
the mid- 1980s when he called for the abolishment of all nuclear
weapons, which he considered to be “totally irrational, totally
inhumane [and] possibly destructive of life on earth and civilization.”
four pillars of the establishment — George Shultz, Henry Kissinger,
William Perry and Sam Nunn (two former secretaries of state, a former
secretary of defense and the former chairman of the Senate Armed
Services Committee) — have been writing, lecturing and lobbying on the
need for the United States to take the lead in pressing for global
nuclear disarmament.
