Unthinkable (68 page)

16.
 Pollack,
The Persian Puzzle
, pp. 147–48.

17.
 Clarke,
Against All Enemies
, pp. 103–105; Pollack,
The Persian Puzzle
, pp. 273–75.

18.
 See David E. Sanger,
Confront and Conceal: Obama's Secret Wars and Surprising Use of American Power
(New York: Crown, 2012).

19.
 Blight et al.,
Becoming Enemies
, pp. 98–123.

20.
 International Crisis Group, “Dealing with Iran's Nuclear Program,” October 27, 2003, pp. 11–15; Ray Takeyh, “Iranian Options: Pragmatic Mullas and America's Interests,”
National Interest
, Fall 2003, pp. 49–56; Ray Takeyh, “Iran's Nuclear Calculations,”
World Policy Journal
, Summer 2003, pp. 21–26.

21.
 Dalia Dassa Kaye, Alireza Nader, and Parisa Roshan,
Israel and Iran: A Dangerous Rivalry
(Santa Monica, Calif.: RAND, 2011), pp. 57–77.

22.
 Takeyh,
Hidden Iran
, p. 144; Ward,
Immortal
, p. 320.

23.
 Kenneth N. Waltz, “Why Iran Should Get the Bomb,”
Foreign Affairs
91, No. 4 (July/August 2012).

24.
 Scott Sagan, Kenneth Waltz, and Richard K. Betts, “A Nuclear Iran: Promoting Stability or Courting Disaster?”
Journal of International Affairs
60, No. 2 (Spring/Summer 2007): 137.

25.
 For others who have provided more fulsome rebuttals of Waltz's arguments, see Colin Kahl, “One Step Too Far,”
Foreign Affairs
91, No. 5 (September/October 2012): 157–61; Emily Landau, “When Neorealism Meets the Middle East: Iran's Pursuit of Nuclear Weapons in (Regional) Context,”
Strategic Assessment
15. No. 3 (October 2012): 27–38; and the various responses of Scott Sagan in his extended debate with Waltz in Sagan, Waltz, and Betts. “A Nuclear Iran: Promoting Stability or Courting Disaster?” and Scott D. Sagan and Kenneth N. Waltz,
The Spread of Nuclear Weapons: A Debate Renewed
, 2nd ed. (New York: Norton, 2002).

26.
 Avner Cohen, the great historian of the Israeli nuclear program, believes that Israel first acquired nuclear weapons in 1966. See Avner Cohen,
Israel and the Bomb
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), pp. 99–174. According to declassified documents, the U.S. intelligence community believed that Israel possessed a nuclear arsenal by
at least
1974. On this, see Special National Intelligence Estimate (SNIE), “Prospects for Further Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons,” September 4, 1974, available at
http://www.gwu.edu/%7Ensarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB181/sa08.pdf
, downloaded January 16, 2008.

27.
 Warren Bass,
Support Any Friend: Kennedy's Middle East and the Making of the U.S.-Israel Alliance
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003); Abraham Ben-Tzvi,
Decade of Transition: Eisenhower, Kennedy, and the Origins of the American-Israeli Alliance
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1998); Mordechai Gazit, “The Genesis of the US-Israeli Military-Strategic Relationship and the Dimona Issue,”
Journal of Contemporary History
35, No. 3 (July 2000): 413–22; Lipson, “American Support for Israel: History, Sources, Limits,” pp. 129–42; Douglas Little, “The Making of a Special Relationship: The United States and Israel, 1957–68,”
International Journal of
Middle East Studies
25, No. 4 (November 1993): 563–85; Kenneth Organski,
The $36 Billion Bargain: Strategy and Politics in U.S. Assistance to Israel
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1990); Kenneth M. Pollack,
A Path Out of the Desert: A Grand Strategy for America in the Middle East
(New York: Random House, 2008), pp. 34–40; Steven L. Spiegel,
The Other Arab-Israel Conflict: Making America's Middle East Policy from Truman to Reagan
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985).

28.
 The nine major military operations since then that I am counting here are the Six-Day War, the War of Attrition, the October War, Operation Litani in 1978, the Israeli Invasion of Lebanon, Operation Accountability in 1993, Operation Grapes of Wrath in 1996, the 2006 Lebanon War, and Operation Cast Lead in 2009.

29.
 Jack Kim and Lee Jae-Won, “North Korea Shells South in Fiercest Attack in Decades,” Reuters, November 23, 2010; “ ‘North Korean Torpedo' Sank South's Navy Ship—Report,” BBC, May 20, 2010, available at
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/10129703
.

30.
 Waltz, “Why Iran Should Get the Bomb,” p. 4.

31.
 P. R. Chari, “Nuclear Restraint, Nuclear Risk Reduction, and the Security-Insecurity Paradox in South Asia,” in Michael Krepon and Chris Gagne, eds.,
The Stability-Instability Paradox: Nuclear Weapons and Brinksmanship in South Asia
(Washington, D.C.: Stimson Center, 2001); S. Paul Kapur, “Ten Years of Instability in a Nuclear South Asia,”
International Security,
No. 33 (Fall 2008): 72; Benjamin S. Lambeth,
Airpower at 18,000': The Indian Air Force in the Kargil War
(Washington, D.C.: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2012), pp. 7, 39; Bruce O. Riedel,
Deadly Embrace: Pakistan, America, and the Future of the Global Jihad
(Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 2011), pp. 45–47, 115–16. Lambeth notes that Pakistan's thinking was not necessarily incorrect as the Indian Army and Air Force handcuffed themselves in a wide variety of ways that hurt their retaking of the captured terrain, because India's political and military leadership were terrified of the potential for escalation with Pakistan. See Lambeth,
Airpower at 18,000',
pp. 12–13, 17, 25–26.

32.
 Riedel,
Deadly Embrace
, pp. 114–17; Eric Schmitt, Somni Sengupta, and Jane Perlez, “U.S. and India See Link to Militants in Pakistan,”
New York Times,
December 2, 2008.

33.
 Colin Kahl, “One Step Too Far,”
Foreign Affairs
91, No. 5 (September/October 2012): 159.

34.
 See the declassified document, U.S. State Department Memorandum of Conversation, “US Reaction to Soviet Destruction of CPR [Chinese People's Republic] Nuclear Capability; Significance of Latest Sino-Soviet
Border Clash, etc.,” August 18, 1969, Secret/Sensitive, National Archives, SN 67–69, Def 12 Chicom, available at
http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB49/sino.sov.10.pdf
.

35.
 See the declassified document, State Department cable 143440 to U.S. Consulate Hong Kong, August 25, 1969, Secret, Exdis, National Archives, SN 67–69, Pol Chicom-US, available at
http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB49/sino.sov.13.pdf
.

36.
 Amatzia Baram, “Deterrence Lessons from Iraq,”
Foreign Affairs
91, No. 4 (July/August 2012): 80.

37.
 Hal Brands and David Palkki, “Saddam, Israel and the Bomb: Nuclear Alarmism Justified?”
International Security
36, No. 1 (Summer 2011): 136.

38.
 Kevin M. Woods, David D. Palkki, and Mark E. Stout, eds.,
The Saddam Tapes: The Inner Workings of a Tyrant's Regime 1978–2001
(Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2011), pp. 222–24.

39.
 See for instance, Michael Eisenstadt, “Living with a Nuclear Iran?”
Survival
41, No. 3 (Autumn 1999): 124–48; Colin H. Kahl, Melissa G. Dalton, and Matthew Irvine, “Risk and Rivalry: Iran, Israel and the Bomb,” Center for a New American Security, June 2012, pp. 19–23; Clifton Sherrill, “Why Iran Wants the Bomb and What It Means for U.S. Policy,”
Nonproliferation Review
19, No. 1 (March 2012): 40.

40.
 Thomas C. Schelling,
Arms and Influence
(New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1966).

41.
 For scholarly work on this point, see Richard K. Betts,
Nuclear Blackmail and Nuclear Balance
(Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 1987); Robert Jervis, Richard Ned Lebow, and Janice Gross Stein,
Psychology and Deterrence
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985).

42.
 On the 1946 Iran crisis, see James A. Bill,
The Eagle and the Lion: The Tragedy of American-Iranian Relations
(New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1988), pp. 31–35; Pollack,
The Persian Puzzle
, pp. 44–48; Natalia I. Yegorova, “The ‘Iran Crisis' of 1945–46: A View from the Russian Archives,” Cold War International History Project, Working Paper No. 15, Washington, D.C., May 1996.

43.
 Edward Friedman, “Nuclear Blackmail and the end of the Korean War,”
Modern China
1, No. 1 (January 1975): 75–91. For historical assessments of the Chinese decision to agree to an armistice in 1953, see Clay Blair,
The Forgotten War: America in Korea 1950–53
, 2nd ed. (Annapolis, Md.: Naval Institute Press, 2003), pp. 859–976, esp. 771–972; T. R. Fehrenbach,
This Kind of War: A Study in Unpreparedness
(New York: Macmillan, 1963), pp. 641–50; Max Hastings,
The Korean War
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 1987), pp. 317–20; Edwin Hoyt,
The Day the Chinese Attacked: Korea, 1950
(New York: McGraw-Hill, 1990), p. 216.

44.
 For an excellent discussion of Finland's experience and motivations, see the declassified CIA study, “ ‘Finlandization' in Action: Helsinki's Experience with Moscow,” Central Intelligence Agency, August 1972, available at
http://www.foia.cia.gov/CPE/ESAU/esau-55.pdf
.

45.
 See “India Subjected to Nuclear Blackmail Before 1998 Pokhran Tests: NSA Shivshankar Menon,”
Times of India
, August 21, 2012. Of course, Menon's boast begs the question of why India needed a nuclear arsenal if these attempts to coerce it had failed when it
didn't
have one.

46.
 For additional scholarly work making this point, see Betts,
Nuclear Blackmail and Nuclear Balance
; Jervis, Lebow, and Stein,
Psychology and Deterrence
.

47.
 Author's interview with senior Arab government official, September 2011.

48.
 Arab publics often have a more complex view of the Iranian nuclear arsenal, simultaneously fearing it and evincing some degree of support for it because it is something that both Israel and the United States oppose. For instance, in his 2010 and 2011 polls of Arab public opinion, Shibley Telhami found that a majority of Arabs saw Iran's acquisition of nuclear weapons as being a negative development for the region, but nonetheless, similar-sized majorities believed that Iran should not be stopped from pursuing its nuclear program. See Shibley Telhami, “The 2011 Annual Arab Public Opinion Survey,” Brookings Institution, November 21, 2011, available at
http://www.brookings.edu/~/media/research/files/reports/2011/11/21%20arab%20public%20opinion%20telhami/1121_arab_public_opinion.pdf
.

49.
 See Maloney, “Iran,” in Pollack et al.,
The Arab Awakening
, pp. 258–67.

50.
 With the obvious exception that proves the rule, Syria, where the unrest has threatened Iran's sole remaining ally in the region.

51.
 For a good overview of North Korea's various aggressive actions since the Korean War, see Dick K. Nanto, “North Korea: Chronology of Provocations, 1950–2003,” Congressional Research Service, RL30004, March 18, 2003.

1.
 Warren Bass,
Support Any Friend: Kennedy's Middle East and the Making of the U.S.-Israel Alliance
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003); Avner Cohen,
Israel and the Bomb
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), pp. 99–174; Mordechai Gazit, “The Genesis of the US-Israeli Military-
Strategic Relationship and the Dimona Issue,”
Journal of Contemporary History
35, No. 3 (July 2000): 413–22.

2.
 For an even stronger assessment of the disincentives Saudi Arabia would face to acquiring nuclear weapons, see Colin H. Kahl, Melissa G. Dalton, and Matthew Irvine, “Atomic Kingdom: If Iran Builds the Bomb, Will Saudi Arabia Be Next?” Center for a New American Security, February 2013, esp. pp. 32–34, 39.

3.
 On all of these incidents, see Martin Kramer, “Khomeini's Messengers in Mecca,” in Martin Kramer,
Arab Awakening and Islamic Revival
(New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction, 1996), pp. 161–87.

4.
 David Crist,
The Twilight War: The Secret History of America's Thirty-Year Conflict with Iran
(New York: Penguin Press, 2012), pp. 300–310.

5.
 Lolita C. Baldor, “US Blaming Iran for Persian Gulf Cyberattacks,” Associated Press, October 12, 2012; Siobhan Gorman and Julian Barnes, “Iran Blamed for Cyberattacks,”
Wall Street Journal
, October 13–14, 2012, p. A1; Thom Shanker and David E. Sanger, “U.S. Suspects Iran Was Behind Wave of Cyberattacks,”
New York Times
, October 13, 2012.

6.
 On the Saudi-Pakistani relationship, see Yoel Guzansky, “Saudi Arabia's Nuclear Options,” in Emily B. Landau and Anat Kurz, eds.,
Arms Control Dilemmas: Focus on the Middle East
(Tel Aviv: Institute for National Security Studies, 2012), pp. 75–82.

7.
 Arnaud de Borchgrave, “Pakistan, Saudi Arabia in Secret Nuke Pact: Islamabad Trades Weapons Technology for Oil,”
Washington Times
, October 22, 2003.

8.
 On Saudi-Pakistani nuclear cooperation, see Bruce O. Riedel, “Saudi Arabia: Nervously Watching Pakistan,” Brookings Institution, January 28, 2008, available at
http://www.brookings.edu/research/opinions/2008/01/28-saudi-arabia-riedel
.