Nuclear Iran

Mr. Goodwrench was right.

Yesterday R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr. opined [Preventing the Unthinkable] that Hezbollah, and fellow travelers, have made a terrible mistake in demonstrating that they have missiles, and will use them. Anyone with a brain, and who pays even a modicum of attention to global politics, knows where this is headed.   [Iran's] nuclear menace will be far graver than the nuclear match-up of the Cold War. The prospect of "mutual assured destruction" (MAD) restrained both sides from initiating a nuclear attack on the other during the Cold War. Such rationality, however, will not restrain the Iranians, driven as they are by dreams of martyrdom. In 1981 an Israeli aerial attack on Saddam Hussein's Osirak reactor eliminated his nuclear threat for the foreseeable future. It is argued that with the Iranians' nuclear facilities spread out among as many as 100 sites, most of them hardened, a similar attack is impossible. Edward Luttwak, a respected student of warfare modern and ancient, argued in the Wall Street Journal last February that "the odds are rather good" that our vastly superior aircraft and bunker-busting bombs could "demolish a few critical installations to delay [Iran's nuclear] program for years -- and perhaps longer because it would become harder or impossible for Iran to buy the materials it bought when its efforts [to build nuclear weapons] were still secret." Luttwak believes that we need only destroy a handful of the Iranians' nuclear sites because the route to nuclear weaponry devised by the Iranians "requires a number of different plants operating in series." They may be hardened, but he believes the Iranians have "not kept up with the performance of the latest penetration bombs." Thus the rational response to the nihilists in Hezbollah and Iran is clear. The popular term is to "defang" them. That will mean hitting Syria and Iran, and in the case of Iran the aerial attacks do not have to be very bloody. But Islamofascists with nukes is unthinkable. Like Mr. Goodwrench says in the commercials, ''Pay me now, or you'll be f***ed up so bad you'll wish you were dead.''