“Back then, in the heat of the Cold War, I could see it being interpreted differently.”

I am too young to remember the Cold War. Mostly, what my generation hears about nuclear weapons is that there are altogether too many of them sitting around, for no apparent reason. And some of us worry over Israel, and others of us don’t.

NPR’s Talk of the Nation had an interesting segment about nuclear war yesterday. You can read the transcript here. I’ve put part of it below.

The author being interviewed is Ron Rosenbaum, who has just written a book titled How the End Begins: The Road to Nuclear World War III. I haven’t read it.

I was hooked by this almost comically understated observation: “Well, sad to say, the Iranians have made constant statements about their desire to eradicate the state of Israel.”

The host, Mr. Neal Conan, noted that Israel has many more nuclear bombs than Iran. He asked why deterrence (threat of retaliation) would not work to prevent Iran from bombing Israel. Mr. Rosenbaum gave the following answer: 

Well, two reasons. One, Iran isn’t the only state in the region that is opposed to Israel that has nuclear weapons; Pakistan, we’ve only just learned. We thought they had 60 nuclear warheads. Now, they have more – it turns out they have more than a hundred. But also, there’s the question of whether Israel could survive at all just one or two nuclear heads. Israel has been called the one-bomb state. One large enough bomb would be enough to destroy it.

And so – and then there’s the other question, which is the deterioration of deterrence because of the ideology of suicidal martyrdom. In other words, one of the leading Iranian Ayatollahs, Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, said as far back as 2001 that he would welcome a nuclear exchange with Israel, because Iran might lose 15, 20 million people in that. But Israel would be totally wiped out. And there would still be a billion and half Muslims left on the planet.

So Israel can’t count on deterrence in light of suicidal martyrdom ideology. And they can’t rely, as we did during the Cold War, that their foe would be rational or fear death as a deterrent.