Arms Race on the Gulf: Will it take Saudi nukes to deter Iranian nukes?
Do Israeli nuclear weapons in the Middle East exacerbate an already almost impossible situation? Does the potential of an Iranian nuclear weapons program change the geo-political reality in the region? For most everyone, the answer is yes. The Saudis want nuclear weapons and if they go down that path it is likely Egypt and other nations in the region will do the same. That is not conjecture. Both Syria and Iraq have attempted to initiate nuclear programs. The IAEA has publicly noted both Syria and Iran have misrepresented their nuclear ambitions and efforts.
Are the US and other western nations willing to offer these nations a defense pact treaty in exchange for abandoning their nuclear aims? What would that US guarantee look like? Will there be troops/advisers on the ground, an even greater and more sophisticated military presence in the region? How much intelligence will be shared and with whom?
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Last week, Prince Turki al-Faisal, formerly Saudi Arabia’s intelligence chief and ambassador to the United States, raised blood pressure levels when he suggested that his country would consider becoming a nuclear weapons state if it found itself between a nuclear-armed Iran and Israel. Such an outcome would be a severe setback to the Obama administration’s vision of working toward a world without nuclear weapons. With Iran’s nuclear program proceeding apace, will more nuclear weapons, owned by either the United States or Saudi Arabia, be required to deter a future Iranian nuclear capability?
The annex of the latest International Atomic Energy Agency report on Iran discussed the program’s military dimensions and was the agency’s most alarming yet. International sanctions and suspected covert action (such as the Stuxnet computer worm, the assassination of a few Iranian nuclear scientists, and mysterious explosions at Iranian military sites) have slowed but not stopped Iran’s progress. Absent the arrival of some heretofore missing and persuasive sanction, the United States and its partners in the region face the prospect of eventually having to deter and contain a nuclear-capable Iran.
A recent report from the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) discussed the price of deterring Iran, which the authors asserted would be more costly than many have appreciated and would require much more preparation than the United States and its partners have made thus far.
Among the difficulties is the inherently subjective nature of deterrence — which requires persuading adversaries to not do certain things, by threatening measures that U.S. planners estimate these adversaries would not tolerate. But these calculations depend on imprecise cross-cultural estimates of costs and benefits, where there is much room for misperception and miscalculation. In addition, Iran has created a diffuse structure of governing authority. This opaque arrangement, combined with Iran’s expertise with irregular warfare and covert action, gives Tehran a method for taking hostile action while avoiding the responsibility for doing so.
Prince Turki seemed to suggest that Saudi Arabia requires its own nuclear force to, at a minimum, deter a classic and existential Cold War-style nuclear ballistic missile threat to the kingdom. The acquisition of a Saudi nuclear deterrent would be highly destabilizing. Very short missile flight times within the region, combined with fragile early-warning and command-and-control systems, would create an extremely dangerous hair-trigger posture on all sides. The Saudi acquisition of a nuclear deterrent would also be a crushing blow to the prestige of the United States as a military ally and to the diminishing role President Barack Obama has sought for nuclear weapons.