Chris Matthews of MSNBC is the only person I've seen ask this question publicly, but I think it bears repeating, even as an academic argument: what right does the United States, the European Union or any other entity have to tell any country what it can or cannot have for its own defense, even if what they want are nuclear weapons?
Put another way, what if, in 1944, the world community had told the United States that it would not be permitted to complete the Manhattan project, because the development of nuclear weapons represented a threat to the rest of the world? What if Japan, for instance, had said it feared the U.S. would use such weapons against them? They would have been correct, as would the world had it said that the U.S. was a country they believed would use weapons of mass destruction if we had them.
Could the rest of the world have told the United States it had no right to develop the A-bomb? And today, if Iran believes, say, that Israel represents an existential threat to its government, because Israel has made threats in the past, has attacked its neighbors, and is continuing to attack the occupied Palestinian terrories, and so Iran feels it needs nuclear weapons in order to counter the military and nuclear threat it faces from the Israelis... why does the international community have the right to tell Iran no?
Because Iran signed the NPT? Can't it just withdraw?
Because Iran has gone to war with its neighbors? The neighbor was Iraq. And during the conflict, the U.S. sided with, and armed Saddam Hussein, even when his government used chemical weapons against the Iranians.
Because Iran would attack Israel? Israel already has probably more than a dozen nuclear bombs. Attacking it would be suicide, as would be attacking Europe. Besides, didn't MAD (mutually assured destruction) ultimately prevent war with the Soviets?
The U.S. nearly went to war with the Soviet Union only once -- in October 1962, and not over whether the Soviet Union would be allowed to develop nuclear weapons. They did so unfettered more than a decade before that date. It was over whether the USSR would be permitted to deploy those weapons just miles off the U.S. southern shore, in Cuba. We didn't stop the French or the British or the Israelis or even the North Koreans from developing the bomb. We did try and stop Muslim Pakistan and Hindu India, but to no avail. The Muslim world is surely asking the question of why not them. (Particularly in light of the fact that the U.S. government, or forces within it, once saw fit during the Reagan administration to sell dangerous armaments to the same Iranian mullahs we're now claiming represent a mortal threat to the world... and by the way, to the same Iran where U.S. embassy workers were held hostage for 444 days....)
I understand there is a general interest in preventing the spread of these weapons, which hold the potential of destroying humankind. I take the Einstein position that they should not exist at all (though as we now know Einstein urged FDR to get the bomb before the Nazis did...) But they do exist. And if we're not getting rid of ours, and Europe and Israel aren't getting rid of theirs, isn't it logical that other countries who feel threatened by nuclear neighbors are going to want it, as a point of sovereign national interest?
Just asking the question.
Update: TPM Cafe blogger Jeffrey Lewis in January posted a far more thorough analysis of the Iran-bomb question here.
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"[T]he practice of arbitrary imprisonments, have been, in all ages, the favorite and most formidable instruments of tyranny.' Alexander Hamilton, Federalist No. 84, August, 1788
