^#smrgSAHAF Checking Iran's Nuclear Ambitions -

I am amazed to see that this book has not yet been reviewed by anyone on Amazon. The Iranian nuclear threat is arguably the greatest one now facing the U.S. and the world. And in fact Henry Sokolski has prepared another book on this threat in which he will claim that the efforts to stop Iran either militarily or by simply talking through the framework of the IAEA are futile. In any case the dangers to the world of Iran's going nuclear are very great. One is the breakdown of all proliferation agreements, the racing of neighboring states Saudia Arabia, Iraq, Egypt , Syria and Turkey to acquire nuclear weapons. Secondly the danger of an oil- market gone wild. Iran with nuclear weapons will have a tremendous new blackmail lever. It can block transit lanes, tie up the Straits of Hormuz , blackmail the world. Thirdly, Iran is the largest exporter of terror in the world. With nuclear weapons its possibilities for doing damage, especially as it makes such skillful use of surrogates in carrying out terror attacks, increase enormously. As I understand it the authors of this book tend to believe that a military preempt on the part of the United States or Israel would be counterproductive. I do not know enough, and simply do not have the intelligence to be sure that they are right. But it seems to me given the very strong ideological anti- Western and anti-American base of the mullahs regime all the very clever tactical appeasing moves are not going to do very much. In addition Iran has China in its corner, and China is going to veto any formal UN action against it.So that even if US efforts at persuading Russia from helping Iran's nuclear program ( hithero unsuccessful) are successful, it will not fully deter Iran. This book provides an important background to the issue. But there have been serious new developments since its publication( For instance,Iran's missile program has according to Tehran Times of June 1, 2005 taken a giant leap forward and its Shihab 3 missile now can be solid- fuel operated, meaning there is less chance of preempting it) and is therefore to some degree already dated.