Sleepwalking With the Bomb by John C. Wohlstetter

play if Iran goes nuclear.
    The Two World Wars
    Asked once how a world war would start, German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck, who united Germany during his long late nineteenth-century tenure, is reputed to have quipped: “some damn fool thing in the Balkans.” On June 28, 1914, the assassination of the Austrian archduke Francis Ferdinand by Bosnian Serb ultranationalist Gavrilo Princip set in motion a series of events that in five weeks triggered the Great War.
    First, in Germany, France, and Russia, poisonous ultranationalist sentiments incited popular support for a war expected to last at most a few weeks. The same sentiments drove the conflict even after the calamtous carnage of the opening months alerted leaders to the monstrous destructive power at their command.
    Second, individual leaders—Winston Churchill notably excepted 17 —lacked meaningful understanding of the destructive power of emerging military technologies, especially the artillery barrage and machine-gun fire. The resulting futile sanguinary conflict was prolonged by the public’s desire to see revenge exacted from the enemy for inflicting mass casualties. Commanders shockingly indifferent to the fate of their subordinates sent them in endless charges across no-man’s-land moonscapes, unable to imagine anything beyond premodern notions of martial spirit to counter massive firepower.
    Third, and perhaps most significant of all, technologies of destruction had simply outrun technologies of command, communications, and control. Once troop trains left their home depots, those authorizing departure could not reverse their passage. Between the trenches messengers sprinted on foot or rode on horseback, as had been done for thousands of years. There were limited telegraph lines suitable for fixed installation for intermittent communications with battlefield commanders, and virtually no radio communications to allow true real-time communication.
    A fourth factor—the intense revulsion over war following the devastation of World War I—is also instructive for Western nations looking towards the Middle East today. The failure to control arms during battle led to attempts to control arms via diplomacy, and to an international organization, the League of Nations, charged with keeping peace. Those attempts were trampled under the jackboots of totalitarian Axis tyrants who armed for and ultimately started wars, while the memories of modern war’s grisly toll paralyzed the leaders of the free world.
    1962: The Cuban Missile Crisis
    The most worrisome problem posed by hostile states—Islamic or otherwise—is the mental state of their leaders and the fear that deterrence may not work against millenarian zealots. During the Cold War the Soviet leaders were, in the main, rational calculators. While ruthless adversaries, they were acutely cognizant of the potential consequences of starting a nuclear war. Even Joseph Stalin, paranoid mass murderer of tens of millions, confined his strategic goal to victory without fighting a war.
    Later Soviet leaders were similarly deterred. Leonid Brezhnev seriously considered a preemptive nuclear strike against China in 1969, when the two countries engaged in a series of bloody clashes along their Ussuri River border. At the time Russia’s arsenal vastly exceeded that of China, whose nascent program had produced perhaps 25 to 40 bombs. But Brezhnev decided to pass. Had Brezhnev struck China first, his chance to get a strategic arms pact with America would have evaporated. America’s immense arsenal troubled him more than China’s relatively puny one at the time. 18
    Once indeed the world did come to the very brink of a shooting nuclear war, during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Let us return to 1962, and see what context this story can give us to apply to Iran today. That August, U.S. reconnaissance planes discovered that Russian construction teams were placing intermediate-range ballistic missiles at bases in the Cuban countryside.