Nuclear Weapons Programs Are About Regime Survival

By Dilip Hiro
TomDispatch.com

Sunday 10 June 2007

The Iranian bomb in a MAD world.

For countries - small, middling, or great - acquiring nuclear weapons is all about the most basic requirement: the survival of the regime or nation. Joining the "nuclear club" has proved an effective strategy for survival. The possession of city-busting, potentially planet-ending weaponry threatens to bring about a MAD - the Cold War acronym for "Mutually Assured Destruction" - world. While the "madness" of this strategy is apparent, a rarely mentioned aspect of today's geopolitics is that acquiring nuclear arms has proven a logical step for a regime to take when its survival is at stake.

The United States and the Soviet Union, the superpowers of the Cold War, stacked up nuclear weapons by the thousands as "deterrents," well aware that the use of even a tiny fraction of them would annihilate the planet many times over. The doctrine worked, maintaining a precarious peace until the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991.