In the 1980s and 1990s Iran was the world’s leading sponsor of global terrorism. Indeed, Iran’s Islamist regime had a role in the planning and logistical support behind the September 11, 2001 attacks, according to findings of fact made by a federal district judge in New York in a lawsuit filed against al-Qaeda. Iran also midwifed Hezbollah (Party of God), which took root in Lebanon, aided by the secular fascist Syrian regime. Hezbollah carried out the October 1983 truck-bomb attack that killed 241 Marine peacekeepers, the worst single-day loss for the Marines since the closing battles of World War II. It also launched a six-week war against Israel in 2006, firing thousands of rockets into northern Israel and virtually paralyzing one-third of the Jewish state’s population.
Followers of Khomeini’s creed include the current leader of Iran, Supreme Guide Ali Khamenei, and Iran’s President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad—who speaks of an apocalyptic Judgment Day. Of course Iran is just part of a broader global resurgence in Islamism. Among Islamist countries, Pakistan has achieved nuclear weapons status. Now Iran stands at the front of the Islamist queue, with potentially fateful consequences for global stability.
Compounding the problem of Iran’s radical Shi’ism is a parallel resurgence of militant Sunni Islam. Eighty-five percent of the world’s 1.4 billion Muslims are Sunnis—including most of the Muslims the West considers allies. Yet the Sunni turning point in 1979 was little noticed in the West. Fundamentalists that year seized Saudi Arabia’s Great Mosque of Mecca and demanded that the Saudi regime return to a more fundamentalist creed. The Saudi rulers had to summon French commandos in order to retake the symbolic heart of Islam. Paradoxically, the agenda of those vanquished became the agenda of Saudi Arabia in the Muslim world. The back story to this episode was to prove of fateful significance after 1979.
By 1979 Saudi Arabia’s rulers—members of the al-Saud family—were living lavish lives and cavorting with other jet setters. Resentments among fundamentalists grew, and led in time to the seizure of the Great Mosque. The fundamentalists—members of the Wahhabi movement who were mostly Bedouin students and ex-National Guard, following a charismatic Wahhabi zealot—could be dislodged only if the most senior Wahhabi clerics gave consent to the al-Saud to storm the immense Great Mosque, something the Prophet had specifically prohibited. The clerics gave their consent, but for a fateful price: the al-Saud would fund with petrodollars the global spread of militant Sunni Islam. Then they would be permitted to live with one foot, so to speak, in the modern world and the other in the world of Islamic piety. Thereafter Saudi money spread the militant Wahhabist creed to mosques and madrassas (religious schools) around the world.
The radical Sunni creed in Saudi Arabia and the militant Shia theocracy in Iran are ingredients for a Mideast arms race. If Iran crosses the nuclear weapons threshold, the Gulf states will not start a 25-year development program. Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and Qatar will simply call Pakistan and ask how many atomic bombs the Pakistanis will part with for how many petrodollars. Saudi Arabia reportedly has already done this. Cash-strapped Pakistan can easily afford to sell part of its arsenal or make A-bombs to order.
With their Pakistani bombs and their American bombers, the parties would be armed fully, without the extended learning curve that taught the United States and the former Soviet Union how to safeguard their weapons from unauthorized use or surprise attack. The oft-decried immense size of these countries’ arsenals also helped wean them from a dangerous “use it or lose it” attitude. Countries who might lose their whole arsenal in a single attack are much more likely to use that arsenal upon warning of an attack—a “launch on warning” posture. (If the “warning” was really a flock of geese on the radar screen, the bomb thus launched would be an unintended first strike.) Countries that strike back before the full extent of an attack is known (in strategic parlance, a “launch under attack” posture), could vastly overreact and thus precipitate a full-blown conflict after an initial accidental launch.
In his history of the Strategic Air Command, 15 Minutes, L. Douglas Keeney recounts the November 24, 1961 “Black Forest” incident. Upon an alarm signaling that a Soviet first strike was underway, a full-blown Strategic Air Command alert was triggered, with well over 500 bombers and almost 400 tankers sitting on the runway. The alert was cancelled when the alarm signal was traced to a faulty component in a microwave radio tower in Black Forest, Colorado.
The U.S. and USSR had one luxury denied small states: the ability to absorb a small or medium strike and survive, albeit greatly and permanently diminished. Even a small-scale attack can extinguish tiny statelets like those in the Persian Gulf. Unlike the United States, Russia, and other large states, whose huge territories and vast, dispersed populations make only a large-area attack capable of ending national life, a few well-placed nuclear bombs could virtually extinguish the national life of a small country.
Nuclear crises arise suddenly, take novel forms, and impose immense stress on leaders, with little margin for error. With survival at stake, the temptation to strike first could well prove irresistible. Revolutionary powers are more likely than others to take gambles that generate crises. In 1962 the Soviet Union was avowedly revolutionary, seeking world domination. Its deployment of nuclear missiles in Cuba brought the world to the brink of nuclear war. Its demise was essential to end the revolutionary threat posed by Communism. The demise of the revolutionary Islamist regime in Iran, and its replacement by a moderate government, is the only way to defuse the growing confrontation in the Mideast. REVOLUTIONARY POWERS CANNOT BE CONTAINED; THEY MUST BE DEFEATED. If this Third Lesson of nuclear of nuclear-age history is ignored, the consequences could be devastating.
6.
NORTH KOREA: NUCLEAR HOSTAGE TAKING
It was already one in the morning; the rain pattered dismally against the panes, and my candle was nearly burnt out, when, by the glimmer of the half-extinguished light, I saw the dull yellow eye of the creature open.
THE CONTRASTING FATES OF IRAQ, LIBYA, AND NORTH KOREA ILLUSTRATE how nuclear weapons can determine whether a dictatorship survives despite adverse international pressure. Saddam’s nuclear program was not complete in 1991, when the Gulf War coalition moved to eject his forces from Kuwait. Had Saddam been able to threaten Turkey and Saudi Arabia with nuclear attack, neither country would likely have permitted coalition forces to launch military action from its soil.
On the eve of the coalition’s March 2003 invasion of Iraq, Libyan dictator Muammar Qaddafi agreed to surrender his WMD arsenal, including nuclear materials. He feared that after Saddam Hussein’s regime was toppled for failure to comply with UN WMD resolutions, Libya would be next in line. In 2011, with Qaddafi bereft of nuclear materials, NATO and the Arab League were willing to support Libyan rebels, and Qaddafi found himself on history’s ash heap.
This was in stark contrast to the reaction of outside powers when, in 2006, North Korea detonated its first nuclear device. The reaction has been mostly the serial offering of bribes, in what has been the vain hope that Pyongyang would in return surrender its nuclear arsenal. Preventive military options are now off the table.
These cases collectively offer the Fourth Lesson of nuclear-age history: NUCLEAR WEAPONS GIVE NATIONS A “DYING STING” CAPABILITY THAT VIRTUALLY PRECLUDES PREEMPTIVE ACTION AND CONFERS NEAR-TOTAL SURVIVAL INSURANCE.