Deterrence Instability: Hizbullah's Fuse to Iran's Bomb

Gerald M. Steinberg, The Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs analyzes Europe's vain hope that a nuclear Iran will be a responsible nuclear power:

In private conversations, many Europeans are increasingly ready to admit the obvious - that without credible threats, Iran will not end its pursuit of nuclear weapons. They then argue that this is not disastrous, and that Iran will, of necessity, act as a responsible nuclear power in order to avoid catastrophic destruction. They point to the history of the U.S. and the Soviet Union as an example of successful deterrence...

[The author argues] this regime could trigger confrontations and crises that could quickly escalate out of control. The Iranian religious leaders who make the key decisions via the Expediency Council have very limited knowledge of and contact with the outside world, and have close links with terror groups such as Hizballah, Hamas, and Islamic Jihad. ...

In the terminology of international relations theory, Iran is a revisionist state, uninterested in preserving the status quo but, rather, seeking to expand and use its capabilities to alter the international and regional political framework. The regime's extreme Islamic ideology and declarations of unmitigated hostility are seen as posing an existential threat to Israel. In 2001, then-President Rafsanjani called the establishment of Israel the "worst event in history," and declared, "In due time the Islamic world will have a military nuclear device, and then the strategy of the West would reach a dead end, since one bomb is enough to destroy all Israel."7 Similarly, Iran's supreme leader Ayatollah Khamenei declared "that the cancerous tumor called Israel must be uprooted."8 This obsession is also reflected in highly anti-Semitic programs on Iranian television, as well as the transfer of shiploads of missiles, explosives, and weapons to Palestinian terror groups. ...

the isolation of Iran's leaders, the fog that surrounds its decision-making structures, the absence of direct channels of communication, and its radical, religious-based, revisionist objectives will make the development of stable deterrence extremely difficult. ...

The author points out that for strategic deterrence to work there must be direct communication links between Iran and its enemies to quickly resolve any misinterpretations of each others actions. Iran has no such communication with its chief enemies, the US and Israel. Thus the likelihood of a nuclear catastrophe is high.