The behavior of rogue states as in particular Saddam’s Iraq, present day Iran and North Korea, reminds me of the behavior of criminals and criminal gangs.

The difference is only in the scope of their weaponry. Criminal gangs seek, and obtain weapons they can use to intimidate the general population, and rivals.

The policy of the civilized world with respect to nuclear weapons is like the policy of denying guns to everyone, in order to prevent gun violence.

When that policy is rigorously applied, the only gun owners (outside the government) are criminals. Anti-gun laws despite their appeal to lovers of peace, have their main effect of vastly increasing the influence of criminals on society, and encouraging the development of criminal gangs.

The same phenomenon, we are learning, occurs with states, and nuclear weapons. The present policy of our government is to attempt to convince rogue states to eschew the development of nuclear weapons. Those states however see great advantage to developing them. They can use them to blackmail their neighbors and threaten them. They see them as a way to aggrandize their own power, Why should they give them up?
We claim we will defend our allies against them, but our claims are dubious. If they threaten a neighbor with a nuclear attack, will we really nuke them in response? Our role is like that of the police in the criminal world. Its response to intimidation is generally too late to do any good.

Suppose however, we changed our policy and offered those who are potentially threatened by the rogue states having nuclear weapons, with such weapons of their own, in massive numbers, all aimed at the rogue states. There would have to be some safeguards to prevent use against others, and supply could be limited to functioning democracies. Such a policy would, if it could be implemented, would reduce the incentive to go nuclear to a negative, and could conceivably replace the prospect of intimidating neighbors with the prospect of being intimidated by them, and deriving no obvious benefit from their own development other than the ability to annihilate themselves and take some others with them.

Thus if North Korea was informed that if they did not give up their program we would give Japan and South Korea each a few hundred nuclear weapons to be aimed at them, they might be more inclined to given their program up. If we instead continue to give them benefits in return for promises to do things in the future, which promises are always violated. we encourage their bad behavior.

North Korea is a special case because its citizens are isolated from the world and have no influence at all on the government. Iran, is a different story. Its citizens might object to living under the fear of total destruction at the whim of the governments of Azerbaijan, Turkey, Israel, and perhaps other nations.

The fact is that success of Iran’s nuclear program would inevitably lead to a situation in which hundred’s of nuclear weapons and means of delivering them would be aimed at Iranian targets. The balance of nuclear terror between the Soviet Union and the United States was pretty scary. Is that what Iran is seeking for itself?

Why not make that fact explicit to the Iranian government today?