The historic nuclear diplomacy taking place in Vienna’s elegant Coburg Palace has roots in a gritty war between Iran and Iraq that ended more than a quarter of a century ago. Iran suffered more than a hundred and fifty thousand dead between 1980 and 1988. In Tehran, it’s called the Sacred Defense. In the final stages, U.S. aid to Iraq contributed to Iran’s decision to pursue nuclear capability—the very program that six world powers are now negotiating to contain.
.. Iraq also used U.S. intelligence to unleash chemical weapons against the Iranians in Faw. U.N. weapons inspectors documented Iraq’s repeated use of both mustard gas and nerve agents between 1983 and 1988. Washington opted to ignore it.
Friedman: A Good Bad Deal?
When you signal to the guy on the other side of the table that you’re not willing to either blow him up or blow him off — to get up and walk away — you reduce yourself to just an equal and get the best bad deal nonviolence can buy.
.. After beginning the negotiations by insisting that the Tehran regime relinquish all its suspect enrichment facilities and cease all its nuclear activities relevant to making a bomb, the Obama administration has ended by permitting Iran to keep virtually all of those facilities and continue some of those activities.”
How did this happen? “Part of the explanation may lie in Barack Obama’s personal faith in the transformative power of exposure to the global economy.”
Why Aren’t We Asking Iran for More?
Last January, on a visit to Beirut, Lebanon, Javad Zarif, the Iranian foreign minister, laid a wreath of white flowers on the tomb of Imad Mughniyeh. Mughniyeh was a senior leader of Hezbollah, the Lebanese militant group, and perhaps the most murderous terrorist leader in the world outside of Al Qaeda. In 2008, he was assassinated by agents from the C.I.A. and Mossad in a secret operation in Damascus.
Among the attacks that Mughniyeh helped execute were the bombings of the U.S. Embassy and Marine barracks in Beirut, in 1983, which killed three hundred and sixty-two people; the suicide bombings of the Israeli Embassy and the Jewish Community Center in Buenos Aires, in 1994, which killed a hundred and fourteen; and the truck bombing of Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia, in 1996, which killed nineteen pilots with the U.S. Air Force.
Why would Zarif, Iran’s point man in the nuclear negotiations with the United States, pay homage to a Hezbollah terrorist?
Why did the US and USSR have tens of thousands of nuclear weapons when only a few hundred would’ve been enough to destroy the other country?
Now, let’s assume the Soviets fired first, aiming to take out all of our nuclear weapons. Nuke the airfields, nuke the silos, nuke the army bases, naval bases, surface fleets, centrifuges, everything. They’re dropping 6 nukes for every 1 target in your country too. If you’re firing first, do you really want your enemy to be able to fire back at all? Of course not. If the Soviets do it right, they should be able to take out, say, 90% of the US nuclear stockpile before it can be used. This is bad, because then the US is out of the fight.
So now the US needs to ensure that 10% of its nuclear stockpile is >1,800 in order to have a chance of retaliating against the Soviets if they fired first.