Context

Jonathan Schell has been studying and writing about nuclear arms and and policy for over three decades. That's why you would be well informed about the Iran nuclear weapons "crisis" if you read Thinking the Unthinkable.

You will know attacking Iran is a harebrained, reckless, destructive and self-destructive policy that will be a fiasco, folly and unworkable.

Far from providing a solution to a proliferation problem, war with Iran would almost certainly precipitate an immediate proliferation catastrophe. President Obama has articulated his nightmare that a nuclear-armed Iran would touch off a chaotic nuclear arms race in the Middle East. Yet a military strike would likely trigger an Iranian crash program to build the bomb (just as Israel’s 1981 strike goaded Saddam Hussein to do likewise, as the world discovered after the US invasion of 1991). Why would other countries in the Middle East wait for Iran to succeed? In other words, disarmament war, in Iran or elsewhere, is likely to bring on the very result it is meant to prevent.

Given these realities, the only serious military policy would be the overthrow of the Iranian government and long-term occupation of the country, which alone could produce a more lasting result. Regime change is the necessary corollary to any disarmament war worthy of the name. But merely to mention such a harebrained, reckless, destructive and self-destructive idea as an American occupation of Iran, especially in the aftermath of the Iraq fiasco, is immediately to reject it. What is even more certain is that folly of this kind, unworkable even in a single case, can never provide the basis for the kind of global nonproliferation policy that the world so badly needs.

I could not agree more.