Sleepwalking With the Bomb (13 page)

Slow communications made matters worse. Both sides sent signals over broadcast television, sacrificing privacy for celerity. The Russian ambassador in Washington sent telegrams via Western Union, complete with pick-up via bicycle messenger. Informed by this potentially catastrophic infirmity, the superpowers established the Washington-Moscow Hot Line in 1963.

The Cuban Missile Crisis ended without millions perishing because at crucial moments Kennedy and Khrushchev chose caution. On October 24, three days before the crisis ended, Russian ships sailed away from the American “quarantine” line, avoiding what could have been a catastrophic confrontation at sea. As Secretary of State Dean Rusk said upon hearing the news, “We were eyeball to eyeball and the other fellow just blinked.” In reality, Khrushchev had ordered the missile-carrying ships to turn back a day earlier, and only a few minor ships had proceeded to the quarantine line. But newspapers printed and broadcasters printed the legend.

T
HE DANGER
in the twenty-first century Mideast with a nuclear-armed Iran would be vastly greater than that posed by Cuba and the USSR in 1962 for four reasons:

1. Greater vulnerability of geographically small states to nuclear strikes.

2. Inability to absorb a blow and retaliate due to short warning times.

3. A near-complete lack of rapid communication channels.

4. Leaders who have no experience in managing nuclear crises, and thus may either overestimate their chances of success with a surprise attack, or in extreme cases may succumb to an apocalyptic impulse to bring about the end of days.

Vulnerability.
In the 1950s and early 1960s, the two superpowers faced each other with strategic forces that were primarily above ground and small in number. But missiles were not nearly accurate enough then to threaten them, and bombers alone could not ensure success. Furthermore, their vast size and widely dispersed populations made only a large-area attack capable of ending national life.

Today, missiles are frighteningly accurate, but the Gulf states cannot yet build such weapons. If one of them had a nuclear bomb, it would have to use military aircraft as a delivery system. (The advanced jets that the Gulf states purchase from the United States can carry nuclear bombs.) Such planes are vulnerable to a first strike. Given far fewer military installations and few cities with populations above 100,000 in the tiny kingdoms of the Gulf, countries could face devastation beyond recovery if caught in a surprise salvo of Hiroshima-sized bombs.

Short Warning Times.
A Russian ICBM, launched from the Ural Mountains and hurtling through space at four miles per second, will travel the roughly 6,000 miles to America’s Atlantic coast in about 30 minutes. With flight distances between potential targets in the Mid-east often less than 1,000 miles, a high-speed jet can cover the distance in little more time than an ICBM can traverse oceans. Factor in missiles that fly at “merely” several times the speed of sound; in some cases, times from launch to impact within the Mideast would be less than 10 minutes. Iran has solid-fuel rockets, which use a gel fuel that (unlike liquid rocket fuel) is highly stable. Once loaded it can sit indefinitely and launch quickly.

Nor are jets the only Gulf state assets. In 1986 China sold 36 CSS-2 intermediate-range ballistic missiles to the Saudis. With a one metric-ton conventional warhead and 1,750-mile range they can easily reach Iran. But the Saudis may elect to purchase nuclear warheads for the CSS-2, or try to buy newer, more accurate models complete with nuclear warheads.

Communications Confusion.
Between Washington and Moscow in 1962 there was only one functioning private communications channel, commercial telegraphy. Imagine a Mideast with a nuclear Iran, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Turkey, Egypt, and Israel. With six nations there are 64 possible two-way interactions, with all the attendant prospects for misunderstandings during a crisis. Israel has used hot-line telephonic communications with adversaries, including the Palestinians, with mixed results.
If with a single channel results are mixed, how will the result be with many diplomatic channels, and only hours—perhaps minutes—to Mideast Armageddon?
Add in that these countries do not trust each other, making communication problematic at best. Assurance that a single unintended missile launch was in fact accidental may easily fail to convince a nervous target’s leaders.

Less Stable Leaders.
Perhaps the most important personality of the 1962 crisis, one whose impulse control was, to put it charitably, weak, was Fidel Castro. He was flush with his improbable revolutionary triumph and seething with rage at the United States—rage that stemmed partly from ideological Marxist fervor and partly from the efforts of the Kennedy administration to get rid of him. Fidel wanted the Russians to incinerate the United States and was willing to sacrifice his 6 million subjects in a nuclear holocaust.

It is today’s Islamic version of Castro who should worry us the most. Religious messianism and secular militarism can be as lethal as romantic revolutionary fervor. Both partake of the “monstrous self-confidence” that Henry Kissinger saw as characterizing the “true revolutionary.”
¹⁹

The region’s combination of religious zealotry and nuclear capability offers a clear recipe for accidental nuclear war. Fidel’s reckless abandon may well be the augury of nuclear wars to come.

One Iranian Castro candidate is, of course, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. He has infamously said that Israel should be wiped off the map. And consider a 2001 statement by former Iranian president Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, still in 2012 a major Iranian power broker, as to nuclear war against Israel:

If a day comes when the world of Islam is duly equipped with the arms Israel has in possession, the strategy of colonialism would face a stalemate because application of an atomic bomb would not leave any thing in Israel but the same thing would just produce damages in the Muslim world.

This comes from an Iranian leader often called by Western analysts a moderate. Rafsanjani has also been quoted as saying in 2001 that if Iran lost 15 million people in a nuclear exchange with Israel but killed 5 million Israelis, Iran would survive but Israel would be extinguished.

As for Israel, though it has been a nuclear power (albeit undeclared) for over 40 years, its status has not ignited a Mideast arms race. When Israel took out the North Korea–supplied nuclear plant in Iran-backed Syria in September 2007, the silence that followed in the Mideast was deafening. American diplomatic cable traffic published online by WikiLeaks showed repeated expression of intense anxiety by America’s Arab allies, who fear a nuclear Iran, not a nuclear Israel.

These problems of a century ago menace the Middle East today. Many statesmen and much of the public seem to think nuclear conflict is unlikely because they assume traditional Cold War deterrence will again prevail. But dangers are growing as time passes, especially as regional instability worsens.

L
ET US
be clear about in whose hands a Mideast bomb would be. When the Ayatollah Khomeini took power in Iran in 1979, Western analysts were unaware that Khomenei had published a collection of speeches, under the title
Islamic Government,
because the volume was then available only in Persian and Arabic editions. According to the great historian Bernard Lewis, the book “made it very clear who he was and what his aims were; and the popular idea that this was going to mean the establishment of a liberal, open, modern society in place of the reactionary Shah was utter nonsense.”

Hailed as Imam (“priest”), Khomeini openly declared an intention to go back 1,400 years to the days of the Prophet—first in Iran and, ultimately all over the world. He imposed a political version of Twelver Shi’ism (the apocalyptic mainstream of the Shia faith; Twelvers await a child imam, who disappeared circa 873 and who will return and bring Judgment Day to the world).

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. R
EVOLUTIONARY 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.