I heard on the radio the other day (NPR), that Iran is now only one year away from becoming capable of building nuclear weapons. That’s 12 months!!!
Some days I wake up not wanting to have anything to do with middle-east affairs, considering their choices as their own business whether good or bad.
…but other days I wake up thinking that it would be too big of a risk having Iran as a nuclear power, considering that it is too great of a threat to the common good of the world.
In the end, I wonder if by going to war with Iran to stop them from having nuclear capabilities would save more human lives than allowing them to be able to use those kinds of weapons.
To me, the focus should not be just one Iran. To me, the big nuclear-armed countries of the world (or at least some of them) need to come together and arrive at clear rule concerning new countries having, or having the capacity to have, weapons of mass destruction (WMD).
To me, the RULE should be this: No more countries may obtain WMDs or the technological capacity to develop WMD. Period. Also, little countries that already have WMDs must give them up. That means North Korea, Pakistan and Israel must surrender their nuclear weapons.
The CONSEQUENCE should be this: The big countries that already have WMDs will use all necessary force to de-WMD-ize any nation that refuses to comply with the above Rule. Necessary force could range from total economic isolation, to regime change, to total nuclear obliteration.
If little nations are allowed to get or keep nuclear bombs, sooner or later some person inside these governments will sell or give one of these bombs to bad guys, and these bad guys will use them to vaporize Washington, D.C., New York City, Los Angeles, Rome, etc.
So, we can either get serious now, or get serious later, after a world-altering tragedy has already happened.
This is all foreseeable.
The 9-11 attacks were totally foreseeable. Yet, our government sat on its hands and did not prepare for that possibility.
Several years before 9-11, the “X-Files” spin off “The Lone Gunmen” had an episode in which terrorist flew a jetliner into the World Trade Center in NYC. If Hollywood writers could foresee this, so could anyone else.
So, yet, we are going to have to move troops and ships into position to do a regime change in Iran. Maybe at the last minute they’ll surrender all their nuclear development site as a means to save their regime. But if not, then Iran will have a new government.
But we must not stop there. We must be sane and lay down the rule: No more nations can have WMDs, and little nations that already have them must surrender them. Period.