Who's Afraid of Big, Bad Iran?

Asks Dean Nelson:

Pop Quiz: Which Asian country recently said it should consider adopting a ‘first use’ nuclear strike policy against its regional enemy, refuses to sign the Non-Proliferation Treaty, and is playing a key role in driving a dangerous arms race?

Here’s a clue: It isn’t Iran, which has signed the NPT, and it isn’t China which has given strong support to disarmament proposals.

It is, in fact, India, the world’s largest democracy, which despite bringing the world closer to a nuclear confrontation than any other world power in recent years, has been feted for its position by our global policeman, the United States.

Earlier this week, the Times of India reported that India’s army chief General Deepak Kapoor had said the country needed a fresh debate on whether to keep its current ‘no-first strike’ policy after Pakistan revealed it has developed a plutonium capability.

India and Pakistan have been locked in a genuinely frightening nuclear arms race since India’s then prime minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee announced it had tested a hydrogen bomb in the Rajasthan desert in May 1998. The Pakistanis responded with their own test a few days later and the following year their conflict brought them to the precipice of nuclear war.

In The Clinton Tapes: Wrestling History with the President Taylor Branch reveals how the former US president was shocked at how casually Indian officials discussed the impact of an Asian Armageddon: “In private he (Clinton) disclosed Indian officials spoke of knowing roughly how many nuclear bombs the Pakistanis possessed, from which they calculated that a doomsday nuclear volley would kill 300 to 500 million Indians while annihilating all 120 million Pakistanis. The Indians would thus claim victory on the strength of several hundred million countrymen they figured would be left over.”

He describes Clinton sighing in despair and quotes him saying: “They really talk that way; we have bad relations with both of them.”

The United States no longer has bad relations with India, which it now regards as its strategic ally, even though New Delhi is no closer to signing the Non-Proliferation Treaty, and only a few weeks ago raised the stakes further by unveiling its first nuclear submarine.

As recently as 2002, Indian and Pakistani leaders threatened nuclear strikes against one another in a series of exchanges which caused an exodus of diplomats and their families from the two capitals. When General Musharraf warned India should not expect a conventional war, an Indian minister responded that India could “take a bomb or two or more but when we respond there will be no Pakistan.”

Despite the mercurial relationship between these two non-NPT nuclear states, it is Iran which most terrifies the West.

Unlike India, Pakistan, and Israel for that matter, Iran has actually signed the NPT, appears to have tiny amounts of enriched Uranium and has publicly denied it has any intention of developing nuclear weapons.

For what it’s worth, I don’t believe their claims, and I suspect Tehran is developing a nuclear weapon capability: Technical documents obtained by the International Atomic Energy Agency indicate a pattern of enrichment more consistent with developing weapons-grade Uranium.

My question is: should we be so scared?

Iran’s apparent desire for a nuclear weapon is rational: It was threatened with a military strike by the Bush administration and is regularly warned of the same by the Israelis. On either flank, in Iraq and Afghanistan, it sees chaos and decimation visited by the US and its allies on countries which were not strong enough to resist.

The lesson Tehran will take from India, Pakistan and Israel is that concealment of testing and possession of a nuclear weapon may be the only course to deter the raids America and Israel have threatened.

Our disproportionate fear of Tehran’s intentions appears to be based on an assessment that its leadership is unpredictable, and that the 15 to 20 years of instability which often follow nuclear testing before nuclear enemies develop confidence measures is too much for the world to bear.

Yet we have tolerated and even indulged Israel, Pakistan and India, despite the instability they have brought the world at moments of crisis over the past 12 years.

Viewed from the Islamic world, our hostility to Iran’s natural desire to protect its land and people will look like an assertion of might and a denial of equality.

India’s prime minister Manmohan Singh had it about right when he said the Non-Proliferation Treaty had been a failure because it perpetuated discrimination against developing countries.

“Global non-proliferation, to be successful, should be universal, comprehensive and non-discriminatory, and linked to the goal of complete nuclear disarmament,” he said.

He’s right, but does anyone believe that will ever happen?

Until then countries like Iran will do what they have to get to the only place they are likely to find any security: nuclear first base.

When they get there, as I’m sure they will, the power relationship in the Middle East will change profoundly, and Israel may find it can no longer threaten its neighbours so casually. Would that be so bad?