Monday, December 19, 2011

Containing and Deterring a Nuclear Iran

From The Heritage Foundation and AEI:

National Security






Containing and Deterring a Nuclear Iran



by Danielle Pletka, Thomas Donnelly, Maseh Zarif



American Enterprise Institute



December 06, 2011







The following are essential components of a coherent Iran containment policy: it should seek to block any Iranian expansion in the Persian Gulf region; to illuminate the problematic nature of the regime’s ambitions; to constrain and indeed to “induce a retraction” of Iranian influence, and to work toward a political—if not a physical—transformation of the Tehran regime. However, current US nuclear forces are not well prepared to provide deterrence against a nuclear Iran, and the deterrent value of US conventional supremacy is being undercut by continuous and well publicized reductions in defense spending, which has been marked, in recent years, by a growing number of terminations and cancellations of the very weapons most likely to provide a proximate danger in Tehran’s eyes.





URL: www.aei.org/files/2011/12/05/-containing-and-deterring-a-nuclear-iran_145258702168.pdf

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