Sunday, October 25, 2009
Let Iran continue its nuclear program
From the RoundTable blog
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Paul Zweifel
Zweifel, of Radford, is a university distinguished professor emeritus of physics and nuclear engineering at Virginia Tech.
Although I have not worked in the weapons field for many years, I feel that my past experience there is enough to give me a reasonable idea of what is going on in Iran, vis-a-vis its nuclear programs. It is indeed possible that Iran might soon be able to construct a limited number of nuclear weapons (perhaps one a year beginning a few years in the future). But is this any cause for alarm? What could Iran hope to do with such a small number of fission (kiloton) weapons?
One presumes it might want to attack Israel, but the same principle that kept the United States and the USSR from wiping each other out during the Cold War (Mutually Assured Destruction or MAD) is certainly operative here. Israel is well-equipped with a nuclear arsenal that, according to Wikpedia, may number several hundred fusion (megaton) bombs. Even if Israel has only fission weapons, it would still be able to wipe Iran off the face of the map in a so-called second strike.
The Iranian arsenal, while capable of inflicting serious harm on Israel, will certainly, for many years, be incapable of inflicting enough first-strike damage to prevent such retaliation.
Articles in several sources have stressed the fact that Israel lacks the strategic capability to put the Iranian nuclear facilities out of commission. This is probably true, but misses the point of MAD, which worked so well during the Cold War.
Israel, or whatever other country against which Iran might decide to launch a nuclear attack, must be prepared to retaliate forcefully against Iranian population centers, or better, adopt the more humane Carter/Brown strategy of retaliation against the Iranian political leadership and its military facilities. And this must be announced to the world, since only the fear of prompt retaliation can prevent a first strike.
I say we should let Iran continue with its nuclear program; perhaps, after all, it really is intended only for power production. Let's just be hard-nosed about retaliation. Similar remarks apply to North Korea, and its, I claim, unusable nuclear arsenal. If these fascist dictatorships want to waste their precious resources in developing and building weapons that can never be used, why not let them?
Is there some hidden agenda behind the concerted efforts of the U.S., France and Germany to quash the Iranian nuclear program? Certainly President Obama and his advisers (his cabinet includes a Nobel laureate in physics) are fully aware of the fact that any Iranian nuclear weapon would be unusable. MAD, a classic example of Nash equilibrium, is something that all scientists can understand.
Let's hope that the agenda is not to create an excuse for invading Iran, or even imposing sanctions so draconian that Iran would have no option but to respond militarily, presumably through terrorism. The threat of Iran's heightened support of terrorism is a much more serious danger to world peace in general and to the U.S. in particular than is its possession of a limited number of unusable fission bombs. Other more serious threats include, inter alia, global warming, overpopulation (and related worldwide unemployment) and lack of universal health care, including the third world. That is where the U.S. would be better off in concentrating its efforts.
