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The Dangers of Nuclear Bombast

US President Donald Trump has refused to recertify the 2015 Iran nuclear deal, an agreement that he once predicted would "lead to a nuclear holocaust." Unfortunately, by creating more perverse incentives for hostile regimes to pursue nuclear armaments at all costs, Trump has made the nightmare scenario he fears even more likely.

MADRID – In the summer of 2012, the international relations theorist Kenneth N. Waltz published an article titled “Why Iran Should Get the Bomb,” in which he argued that a nuclear-armed Iran would reestablish a desirable balance of power in the Middle East, by acting as a counterweight to Israel.

Later that year, Waltz also argued that the strategy of combining sanctions with diplomacy was unlikely to dissuade Iran from developing its nuclear capacity. “Short of using military force,” he wrote in Foreign Affairs in September 2012, “it is difficult to imagine how Iran could be prevented from acquiring nuclear weapons if it is determined to do so.”

Waltz was wrong in two ways. First, by defending nuclear weapons as a source of regional or global stability, he profoundly underestimated the danger that they could fall into the hands of terrorists or be used because of a miscalculation.

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