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Meeting the Iranian Nuclear Challenge

Oct 2004, Vol. 149, No. 5
By Roger Howard

The next American president is unlikely to be confronted with many issues more pressing and difficult than Iran’s nuclear programme. For in the course of the ongoing investigation of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), which began in 2002, it has become increasingly clear that this programme is most unlikely to be geared solely to the pursuit of civilian energy, as the Iranian authorities have always claimed, but aims instead to realize a nightmare vision that has long haunted many a Western imagination – a nuclear warhead held firmly in the hands of the mullahs.
With the issue looming increasingly large on the American foreign policy agenda, it is timely to ask searching questions about why the development of an Iranian nuclear device should really matter and how the outside world should respond. In the media, constant references are made to the fact that the Iranians already have sufficient missile capability to launch such a warhead at American forces in the Gulf and, before long, will in all likelihood also have the ability to target the cities of Israel and perhaps even southern Europe. But is such a capability the real reason why the Western world should watch Iranian nuclear development with concern? And is the threat of UN-imposed economic sanctions on an oil-dependent country, widely regarded as the most effective way of bringing the nuclear programme to heel, really the only way of meeting the Iranian challenge?