U.S. strikes on Iran might bring surrender. But they could also start a nuclear war.
Former Defense Secretary Robert Gates warned in 2012 that an attack on Iran “would make a nuclear-armed Iran inevitable. They would just bury the program deeper and make it more covert.” Yes, we could damage the nuclear facilities, but what happens then? “The results of an American or Israeli military strike on Iran could, in my view, prove catastrophic, haunting us for generations in that part of the world,” he added.
Gates, the defense secretary under both Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama, was not alone. There is a reason that the United States has not gone to war with Iran before. The overwhelming consensus of military and intelligence officials and experts has been that doing so would be a disaster.It is worth remembering that the nuclear risks do not just stem from Iran.
“President George W. Bush’s administration concluded that a military strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities would be a bad idea — and would only make it harder to prevent Iran from going nuclear in the future,” former CIA Director Michael Hayden said, also in 2012.
“After you’ve dropped those bombs on those hardened facilities, what happens next?” former Central Command chief Anthony Zinni asked in 2009. There could be catastrophic economic, political and military consequences on a global scale. The nuclear consequences alone should terrify us.
It is possible that U.S. strikes on Iran’s nuclear sites, coupled with Israel’s sustained bombing of Iranian political and economic targets, could cause the Iranian government to collapse, or agree to President Donald Trump’s demand for “unconditional surrender.”
But it is more likely that Iran could race to build nuclear weapons. It could produce enough uranium for the cores of 10 bombs in a matter of days. It is unknown how long it would then take to turn the uranium into metal, shape it into weapons and then assemble it into one or more devices.
