What Would an Israel-Iran Nuclear War Mean?
A commentary by Scott Ashley
Good News managing editor
Iran and Israel have exchanged threats and counter threats regularly
in recent years. The difference is that Iranian leaders threaten
Israel with total annihilation and Israel usually responds by saying
that it will take the necessary steps to stop Iran from developing
nuclear weapons—the existence of which would give Tehran the
means to destroy the Jewish nation.
This latest news emerged from
Shaul Mofaz, a former defense minister in the Israeli cabinet and
one of Prime Minister Ehud Olmert’s deputies. He is
privy to private defense plans in the Israeli government and is a participant
in the security cabinet. He clearly stated, "If Iran continues with
its programme for developing nuclear weapons, we will attack it" (The
Irish Times, June 7, 2008, emphasis added). He said these words to the
Hebrew daily Yediot Aharonot.
In December 2001, then-Iranian president
Hashemi Rafsanjani expressed the logic, as he saw it, of a nuclear
attack on Israel—that such an attack would
eliminate the Jewish state, but Israel in return could only temporarily
set back the Islamic world. He believed it would be worth starting
a war in which 15 million Muslims would die—since well over
a billion would remain—if
Israel would no longer exist.
But is such a calculation reasonable
or close to accurate?
Anthony Cordesman, former director of intelligence
assessment for the U.S. secretary of defense and currently a top
analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, offers
a different and profoundly disturbing view—that an Israel-Iran
nuclear war would devastate the region and the entire world economy.
He
believes that Israel, being a more advanced and organized society,
could conceivably survive a nuclear exchange while losing 200,000
to 800,000 citizens within 21 days, but Iran would face 16 to 28
million dead in the same time frame and no longer survive as an
organized society (United Press International, Nov. 22, 2007).
The
difference, he points out, is that Israel is presumed to have better
antimissile defenses and more warheads with vastly greater explosive
yields (up to 10 times as powerful) with far more accurate delivery
systems. He notes that the Iranian capital of Tehran, with its 15
million inhabitants packed into a basin surrounded by mountains,
is a "nearly ideal nuclear killing ground."
Israel,
Cordesman says, would need a "reserve strike capability to
ensure no other power can capitalize on an Iranian strike"—meaning
Israel would have to target such "key Arab neighbors" as
Syria and Egypt. While a Syrian attack on Israel with chemical and
biological weapons could kill another 800,000 Israelis, an Israeli
nuclear attack on Syria would kill up to 18 million and finish Syria
as a nation. A similar attack on Egypt would kill tens of millions
of Egyptians.
Other damage from such a war would include major population
centers in the region, the Suez Canal, ports, refineries and oil-producing
centers. While it would not be Armageddon for the human race, he
says, it would be for the global economy, marking the end of the
Oil Age, globalization and world economic growth and prosperity. "The
only way to win is not to play," he
concludes.
 The stakes are indeed high in the Middle East, and Bible
prophecy reveals that the region will see devastating warfare
that will shake the entire world to its core. To learn more, request,
download or read online our free booklet The
Middle East in Bible Prophecy.
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