[BRIEF NOTE] What harm could there be in Iranian nuclear weapons?

[rfmcdonald]

optimussven has linked to an analysis by Karl Vick in the Washington Post ("Iran's Gray Area on Nuclear Arms") on Iran's nuclear weapons policy. Quoting a variety of Iranian scholar-politicians, Vick suggests that while Iran's government might well stockpile nuclear weapons in a defensive posture, Iranian nuclear weapons would not be used as part of a first strike, or as part of an attack on civilian populations. A variety of precedents exist for this question in Iran, after all.

Iranian scholars who argue against nuclear weapons point out that these questions are hardly abstract in Iran. The newly minted government faced severe, real-life tests after Saddam Hussein's troops invaded Iran in 1980. The Iraqi forces used chemical weapons on the battlefield; two decades later, badly wounded survivors still populate hospital wards in Iran.

When Iraq also launched rocket attacks on Tehran and other metropolitan areas, pressure for Tehran to retaliate was intense.

"In the eight-year war with Iraq, this was a very hot debate among all the Islamic teachers, because Iranian cities were being bombarded," said Kazem Mosavi Bojnoordi, who sat on the defense committee of Iran's parliament during part of the war. "The conclusion was that it's not allowed. Never during those eight years do we have one example of Iran bombarding cities."

Bojnoordi, now chief editor of Iran's Center for the Great Islamic Encyclopedia, recalled that after the first salvos from Iraq, a senior Iranian commander declared, "Now we will flatten Baghdad." The comment brought an immediate rebuke from Khomeini, whose fatwa closed the matter for the balance of the war.

Leaving aside the question of the reliability of these sources, though, a weaponized or weaponizing Iran could still inadvertantly precipitate a catastrophe. If anything has been demonstrated by the controversies provoked by Ahmedinejad's stupid, stupid remarks, it's that the motives of the Iranian government aren't obviously transparent. If this analysis is correct, it's taken a worryingly long amount of time for this argument about the basic war-making principles to make it into the public domain. People make mistakes; people can be slow; people's acts can have disproportionate consequences. Here's hoping that we'll be lucky.