I submit that the problem is less that of an Iranian bomb but rather that nuclear deterrence has lost much of its effectiveness. Back in the days of MAD, there was no doubt in anybody's mind that the men in the silos, the bombers and the SSBN's would launch on order and that an order was sure to come. Facing the imminent prospect of mutual annihilation there were no issues of national security that superceded the political will to survive so keeping the nuclear peace was easy.
However, in the post Cold-War world, nuclear forces are no longer on a hair trigger alert while probable targets are dependent upon whomever the percieved threat is in a nuclear crisis. More to the point, the political will is now lacking to kill millions of civilians or destroy entire cultures in reaction to a nuclear attack. Because that certainty is lacking, weapons proliferation and the threat of local use by despotisms like Iran and the DPRK are inevitable.
Since they have no fear of massive retaliation by Western nuclear forces they can sabre-rattle all they want, playing to their target audience as heros and encouraging tin-pot dictators elsewhere to join the nuclear club. This makes the situation worse as there are few direct consequences to acquiring atomic weapons. Standing up to sanctions and threats of limited conventional attacks represent nothing less than political propaganda victories for the faithful while uselessly polarizing third-parties and the domestic front in the West.
Nuclear weapons are first and foremost political weapons and what is needed is a carrot to deter proliferation in the first place. The Kim Jong Il's and the nuke crazy mullah's of the world need to know that should they actually decide to use their pathetic little weapons caches, their nation, culture and language would cease to exist. Their cities and places of worship would become sheets of green radioactive glass and their legacy would be as a footnote in the history of bad ideas.
This should be what decades of MAD taught the West, many of us grew up in the shadow of potential total destruction by the Bomb but the world changed and with it the threat. The key to dealing with these pissant bomb makers is to ensure that they live under the real threat of total destruction should they get out control. What is needed is a very public statement like JFK's over Cuba, that any nuclear attack on the USA or her Allies would result in massive nuclear response. Full Stop. Too bad any such declaration would be spun into war-mongering and be politically unacceptable.
Go ahead, build your bomb Iran but use it and be wiped out, completely and without mercy.
The mullah's are not stupid and are certainly rational by their own standards so it is doubtfull that they would actually pass nuclear weapons to non-governmental (read terrorist) factions and give up the control that comes with the Bomb. Deterrence with nation states is easy when they know the cost of any use is unbearable but they need to truly believe it or it cannot work.
Nobody wants a repeat of Hiroshima and Nagasaki but the mullah's and their ilk need to know clearly and unambiguously that the consequence of actually using their bombs would be the total and immediate destruction of all they hold dear.
Apologies for the wall of text.
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