True Costs of an Iranian Bomb
Western companies that do business in Israel must weigh the risk of a nuclear-armed Iran
You’re the CEO of IBM or Intel or Siemens or Nestlé or any one of the 500 other Western companies that have opened up operations in Israel, home to the developed world’s fastest-growing economy.
What do you do should Iran get the bomb? Do you continue to invest in Israel, on the hope that Iran doesn’t make good on its promise to wipe it off the map? And even if, from the safety of your head office in Europe or North America, you do decide that Israel’s business environment justifies the risk of continued investments, would your top executives agree to stay in or relocate to Israel, knowing that they would be putting their families at risk of perishing in the same mushroom cloud that could snuff out the tiny country?
This calculation is today being made not by Western CEOs as much as by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his minister of defence, who must weigh the consequences of allowing Iran to acquire a nuclear bomb. Even if Iran doesn’t explode a nuclear bomb on Tel Aviv, they believe, living under the shadow of that mushroom cloud represents an existential risk for Israel.