The threat made by North Korean leader Kim Jong Un to attack his southern neighbor and the declaration of the most totalitarian regime in the world that it would not give up its nuclear arsenal under any circumstances, reminded me of what I heard last summer at the offices of the National Diplomatic Academy in Seoul. “At this very moment, as we sit here sipping tea, 22,000 missiles are directed at us”, said professor In Nam-Sik, one of the senior fellows at the institute, in a leisurely manner. And he added with equanimity: “One missile strike from the North on Seoul will result in up to half a-million bodies."

The recurring contention of senior officials in Seoul that the radical regime in the North took advantage of the long years of barren diplomacy in order to become a nuclear power is reminiscent of a prevailing claim in Israel that the ayatollahs in Iran are following in the footsteps of the communists in Pyongyang. This view holds that the endless diplomatic contacts and the overly permissive sanctions are hastening the Iranian nuclear program toward the point-of-no-return. Thus, as is the case with South Korea, Israel will be forced to risk an attack on a nuclear state or to live in the shadow of a permanent nuclear threat from a neighbor motivated by ideological and almost irrational considerations. 

In her article entitled “Ideology and Nuclear Deterrence: The Case of Iran," Helit Barel ponders the difference between Iran and other regimes with nuclear capabilities, strong ideological characteristics and a potential for irrational behavior. Barel, who has been researching Iran’s nuclear policy for years, published an article in 2007 within the framework of the “Nuclear Scholars Initiative” at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), an important Washington think tank. Does, in fact, the case of a nuclear bomb in the service of revolutionary Islamic ideology create a new challenge, significantly different from the North Korean, Chinese or Soviet bombs? What significance is there to deterrence against use of the bomb when it is in the hands of a regime that places less value on human life than we do? In this context, Barel reminds us that during the war against Iraq, the Iranian regime dispatched hundreds of thousands of volunteers to get blown up on minefields. Add that to the messianic belief that the return of the Mahdi (a guide sent by God to redeem the world, similar to the Messiah in Judaism, A.E.) will be hastened by an all-out war in which up to 80% of the world’s population could be annihilated; add the concept of the “shaheed” which stresses the centrality of life after death and, top it all off with the declaration of the spiritual leader who brought about the 1979 Islamic revolution in Iran, the Ayatollah Khamenei, that there are only two options — death or victory and that both, in fact, constitute victory. The inevitable conclusion is the inability to predict the adversary’s behavior and the Iranian bomb becomes a game of Russian roulette. 

But before we arm the Israeli Air Force planes and send them to Bushar, a memory refresher might be in order with Barel’s examination of nuclear policies adopted by other totalitarian regimes. Thus, for example, Chinese leaders inquired of their colleagues in Moscow whether half the world’s population need to die in order to achieve global communist domination or whether a third going over to the other side would suffice. Barel quotes a Chinese general who said in 1950 that the United States could, in fact, bomb China and wreak heavy destruction, “but even if five million are killed, it will not result in defeat.” As is the case in North Korea, hunger and a wretched life expectancy did not rob Mao Zedong of any sleep. An additional example: a document compiled in 1950 at the White House’s National Security Council said, inter alia, that the Kremlin was ruled by zealots and that the Soviet Union was “animated by a new fanatic faith, antithetical to our own, and seeks to impose its absolute authority over the rest of the world”.