Unthinkable (14 page)

Nevertheless, Iran's neighbors might decide to take unhelpful, even dangerous, actions themselves to try to preclude the possibility that Iran could engage in nuclear blackmail against them. Some might decide to accede to Iranian wishes on a whole variety of issues to placate Tehran (a phenomenon known as “bandwagoning”). Other regional states may try to balance against a nuclear Iran, and in so doing might take provocative or even dangerous actions that could embroil them or other countries—such as the United States—in unintended crises with a nuclear Iran. Some of these countries may be so fearful of what they perceive as the potential for Iran to coerce them with nuclear weapons that they may decide to acquire a nuclear arsenal of their own.

The internal upheavals that began in 2011 across the Arab world have affected every aspect of Middle Eastern politics. The threat from Iran is no exception. The events of this Arab Awakening, or “Arab Spring,” are likely to produce two contradictory trends related to the threat from a nuclear Iran.

The Arab Spring has engendered tremendous instability that Iran has tried to exploit, making its acquisition of a nuclear weapons capability even more frightening to the states of the region. Since the Second World War, the Middle East has rarely been described as “tranquil.” It is perpetually on the brink of chaos. Yet the tectonic shifts since 2011 have made the Middle East's past appear serene by comparison. In many ways, nothing could be better for Iran. The Iranians have done what they could to ratchet up the unrest and topple conservative, anti-Iranian (and to some extent, pro-American) regimes in hopes of reshuffling the regional balance.
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Whether cheering from the sidelines in Egypt and Libya, or providing substantive assistance to oppositionists in places such as Yemen and Bahrain, the Iranians consistently have been on the side of greater
turmoil.
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To the extent that a nuclear Iran is even more inclined to support terrorism, subversion, civil wars, and insurgencies than in the past, the Arab Spring will create far more opportunities for doing so.

However, over the longer term, the political transformations that began in 2011 could have an important palliative effect on this same problem. If these changes produce more stable, legitimate, and pluralistic Arab political systems, such states are likely to be less sensitive to Iranian mischief-making and less vulnerable to Tehran overall. The threat from Tehran is the threat of subversion, not the threat of conventional attack. Legitimate new democracies should be far less susceptible to this method of attack because they tend to have fewer cracks for Iran to exploit than illegitimate and repressive autocracies. Consequently, the political turmoil of the Arab Spring could make the danger from a nuclear Iran worse in the short term, but over the longer term could dampen Iran's threat to the region.

The world will not end the day after Iran detonates a nuclear warhead, or acquires the wherewithal to break out of the NPT. There is little reason to indulge our worst fears when it comes to the Iranian nuclear threat. There is no reason to believe that Iran will use nuclear weapons unprovoked when it gets them, or that they will turn them over to terrorists.

Since Hiroshima, people have worried that a country would behave in a reckless fashion after it acquired nuclear weapons. Mao's China was the first, understandably given Mao's inexplicable and self-destructive behavior. Yet China did not go off on an atomic binge after it crossed the nuclear threshold in 1964. North Korea was another. For years, experts, politicians, and pundits all feared that North Korea would use nuclear weapons after it acquired them. The North was prone to aggressive behavior, at times so bizarre as to lead many to suspect Pyongyang's collective sanity—like trying to kill the president of South Korea, and hijacking or blowing up South Korean airliners.
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Indeed, if there was one country
that everyone feared would use nuclear weapons if it acquired them, far more than Iran, it was North Korea. North Korea probably acquired a nuclear device in the 1990s, tested one in 2006, and in 2009 announced that it had nuclear weapons. And yet, the world has not ended. Nor has Pyongyang used these weapons despite frequent claims that it would. If North Korea can defy these apocalyptic fears, we should have greater confidence that Iran will, too.

That said, it would be Pollyannaish to believe that Iran would behave better—more restrained, less aggressive—than it does now. Contrary to Professor Waltz's claims, the pattern of states that have acquired nuclear weapons is that their behavior does not change once they cross that threshold. The United States, Russia, China, India, Britain, France, and North Korea behaved pretty much the same before they developed nuclear weapons as they did after, no better and no worse. Israel may have become marginally less aggressive after it acquired a nuclear capability, but that shift came at the same time as a number of other important shifts such as the Arabs' realization after the Six-Day War that they could not destroy Israel by conventional military means. Those other factors may better explain Israel's modestly greater restraint. Pakistan, in contrast, became significantly more aggressive and reckless after it acquired nuclear weapons.

This pattern suggests that Iran's international actions are unlikely to improve after it crosses the nuclear threshold. For more than thirty years, Iran has backed a vast array of terrorists, separatists, insurgents, nihilists, and revolutionaries. It has rarely missed a chance to inflict harm on the United States and our allies in the region, and when it has, it typically passed up the opportunity only for fear of suffering much worse from an American response, a caution that might well be removed if Iran believes that a nuclear deterrent has rendered it immune.

Whether Iran's motives have been defensive or offensive is irrelevant. Experts on Iran argue over this question incessantly, but what will matter with a nuclear Iran is
how
they behave, not why. Whether Iran is lashing out in response to perceived threats from the United States, or in pursuit
of an ideological agenda or hegemonic aspirations, all that matters is the act itself. If they behave as they have in the past, as seems most likely, that will be a source of considerable problems. If they keep supporting all manner of violent extremists, waging unconventional warfare, attempting to destabilize regional governments, and otherwise trying to overturn the regional status quo, the United States and its allies will have to react. And our reactions will provoke crises, retaliation, and conflict regardless of Tehran's motives.

A
nuclear Iran would pose an additional threat to American interests: the threat of further nuclear proliferation. A great many of Iran's neighbors fear that once Iran acquires nuclear weapons it will pursue an aggressive foreign policy. Consequently, if or when Tehran crosses the nuclear threshold, other Middle Eastern states may seek nuclear weapons of their own to deter an Iranian attack, covert or overt. Those outside the region considering whether to acquire nuclear weapons might even draw the lesson from the Iranian case that the penalties for developing a nuclear weapon would be less than they feared.

Since the Second World War, the United States has had an interest in limiting the number of countries with nuclear arsenals because proliferation increases the number of potentially dangerous states with unquestionably dangerous weapons. However, we have been famously inconsistent in applying that principle. The United States has been willing to accept a half dozen or more countries—including Britain, France, and
India—acquiring nuclear weapons because Washington did not see them as dangerous. In contrast, the United States actually tried to dissuade Israel from going down the nuclear path.
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One of the strongest justifications for toppling Saddam Husayn's regime was that he was a dangerous, aggressive, and hard-to-deter leader, and was (mistakenly) believed to be close to acquiring nuclear weapons. Moreover, because others saw him as dangerous, Saddam's acquisition of nuclear weapons would have been a major spur to further proliferation.

The country most likely to follow Iran down the nuclear rabbit hole is Saudi Arabia.
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Since before the Iranian Revolution, Riyadh has been a rival of Tehran. Since then, and since the fall of Saddam Husayn, the Saudis have seen themselves as Iran's principal opponent. Saudi Arabia is the leader of the Arab world, particularly as it confronts Persian Iran. As the home of Mecca and Medina, Saudi Arabia is also the champion of the Sunni world against Iran, the great Shi'i power. Of equal importance, the Saudi royal family, the Al Sa'ud, are (with some notable exceptions) fearful of change—especially violent change—worrying that it will destroy their enviable existence. The behavior of the Saudis stands in contrast to Iran's determination to undermine or overthrow the status quo. Across the region and beyond, the Saudis back one group while the Iranians back its rival, regardless of the venue: Lebanon, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, the Palestinian territories, Afghanistan, Bahrain, and points beyond.

The Saudis may exaggerate Iran's capability to hurt them, but they are not necessarily wrong about Tehran's malign intent. The Iranians have tried to overthrow the Al Sa'ud before. In 1981, 1982, 1986, and most notably in 1987, Iran sent agents to the Hajj in Mecca to start riots meant to provoke an all-out revolution in the Kingdom. The 1987 incident resulted in the deaths of more than four hundred people, including eighty-five Saudi police.
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In 1987, in the midst of the Iran-Iraq War, the Iranians attempted to mount a major naval operation to destroy Saudi oil
facilities in the Gulf, which was only aborted by the unexpected intervention of the U.S. Navy.
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Tehran created a Saudi version of Hizballah in the 1990s, which it used to attack the Khobar Towers housing complex in Dhahran—an attack that killed nineteen American military personnel and injured 372 others. In 2011, as noted earlier, Tehran apparently tried to kill the Saudi ambassador to Washington.

Iranian subversive efforts are frightening to the Saudis because Shi'a constitute about 10–15 percent of the Saudi population. Saudi Sunnis practice a fundamentalist version of Islam that has little sympathy for Shi'ism—typically branding the Shi'a as heretics. Consequently, the Saudi Shi'i community is the target of both persecution and prejudice. This persecution has made Saudi Arabia's Shi'i population prone to protest and revolt, and receptive to Iranian support. Worse still for Riyadh, the Saudi Shi'i population is overwhelmingly concentrated in the Kingdom's Eastern Province (ash-Sharqiyya, literally “the east” in Arabic), where Saudi oil production is concentrated. The Shi'i have an outsized presence in Saudi Aramco, the world-class organization that runs the Kingdom's gigantic oil industry. In 2012, a computer virus infected thirty thousand Aramco computers. The Saudis are convinced that the virus was made in Iran and introduced into the Aramco system by a Shi'i employee. The damage was limited, but it terrified the Saudis—and the global oil market, reliant as it is on the Kingdom's exports.
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The Saudis also seem to have a straightforward way to acquire nuclear weaponry. Throughout the 1970s and '80s, Riyadh bankrolled the Pakistani nuclear program and Saudi financing was critical to Islamabad's success. No one believes that the Saudis did that selflessly.
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When I worked as a Persian Gulf military analyst for the CIA, we used to say informally that somewhere in the basement of Pakistan's Kahuta nuclear plant there is a nuclear weapon that has stenciled on its side,
PROPERTY OF THE KINGDOM OF SAUDI ARABIA.
There have been periodic reports of a nuclear agreement between Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, most notably in 2003.
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Whether that is true or not, whether the Saudis have some claim on specific Pakistani nuclear weapons, is known only to the highest levels
of the Pakistani and Saudi governments. However, there should be no question that the Kingdom's support for the Pakistani program gives Riyadh some claim on Pakistan. The Saudis may be able to take delivery of a weapon long promised by the Pakistanis. They might be able to buy one, providing Islamabad with needed capital in return for one or more weapons.
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Given Saudi oil wealth, Riyadh might even be able to buy a bomb elsewhere, such as North Korea, if the Pakistanis demur.

Consequently, Saudi Arabia is the most likely candidate to acquire nuclear weapons if Iran does.
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In private, Saudi officials have repeatedly warned American officials and former officials (including this author) that if Iran crosses the nuclear threshold, Saudi Arabia will follow—and nothing will stop them.
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They will not live in a world where Iran has a nuclear weapon and they do not. Prince Turki al-Faisal, the former Saudi intelligence chief, has gone so far as to repeat that warning in public.
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In 2011, Turki announced, “It is in our interest that Iran does not develop a nuclear weapon, for its doing so would compel Saudi Arabia, whose foreign relations are now so fully measured and well assessed, to pursue policies that could lead to untold and possibly dramatic consequences.”
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