Kissinger: World Faces Nightmarish Prospect

"The world is faced with the nightmarish prospect that nuclear weapons will become a standard part of national armament and wind up in terrorist hands," warns former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger.

Writing in Tuesday's Washington Post, Kissinger insisted that the current standoff about nuclear weapons between the United States and Iran and the United States and North Korea "is a nuclear test for diplomacy."

Observing that the negotiations on Korean and Iranian nuclear proliferation "mark a watershed," Kissinger wrote that a "failed diplomacy would leave us with a choice between the use of force or a world where restraint has been eroded by the inability or unwillingness of countries that have the most to lose to restrain defiant fanatics. One need only imagine what would have happened had any of the terrorist attacks on New York, Washington, London, Madrid, Istanbul or Bali involved even the crudest nuclear weapon."

Speaking of Iran, Kissinger wondered if the recent letter from Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to President Bush shouln't be looked at on "several levels" suggesting that it can be viewed as merely a ruse to obstruct U.N. Security Council deliberations on Iran's disregard of its obligations under the Non-Proliferation Treaty or a clever ploy to "get the radical part of the Iranian public used to dialogue with the United States."


"America's challenge" he wrote " is to define its own strategy and purposes regarding the most fateful issue confronting us today."

While the negotiations concerning North Korea seem more advanced, Kissinger wrote that in the case of Iran "there isn't even a formal agreement on what the objective is. Iran has refused to agree to international control over its uranium enrichment program, in the absence of which no control over a weapons program is meaningful."

The former Nixon secretary of state noted that formal negotiations up until now have been prevented by the memory of the hostage crisis, Iranian support of terrorist groups and the aggressive rhetoric of the Iranian president, writing that the Iranian president's letter fails to "remove these inhibitions."

Kissinger argued that if the United States is content to negotiate with North Korea as a member of a six-party forum, and with Iran in Baghdad over Iraqi security, it should be willing to work out an arrangement for a multilateral venue for nuclear talks with Tehran that would permit the United States to be a participant - "especially in light of what is at stake."

Failure to work out a diplomatic solution to the problem of Iran's development of nuclear weapons would have ominous consequences, he wrote, warning that "An indefinite continuation of the stalemate would amount to a de facto acquiescence by the international community in letting new entrants" into the nuclear club.


In Asia, he wrote it would spell the near-certain addition of South Korea and Japan to the club and in the Middle East, countries such as Turkey, Egypt and even Saudi Arabia could enter the field.

In such a world, he predicts, nuclear weapons would become "an indispensable status symbol" among "all significant industrial countries. Radical elements throughout the Islamic world and elsewhere would gain strength from the successful defiance of the major nuclear powers."

Kissinger wrote "Diplomacy needs a new impetus," and that "the United States and its negotiating partners need to agree on how much time is available for negotiations as a first step."

Noting that while it's agreed that North Korea is producing enough plutonium to make several nuclear weapons a year, estimates on how close Tehran is to producing its first nuclear weapon range from two to 10 years.

"Given the risks and stakes, this gap, he said, "needs to be narrowed.

The difference between multiparty negotiations and a preferred strategy of regime change, he wrote, "needs to be recognized. There are no governments in the world whose replacement by responsible regimes would contribute more to international peace and security than those governing Pyongyang and Tehran."

However, he warns that none of the current participants in negotiations or in future ones will support a policy "explicitly aiming for regime change."

Moreover, he explained that negotiations on nuclear disarmament will inevitably involve a quid pro quo of compensation in security and economic benefits in return for giving up nuclear weapons capabilities and is thus, incompatible with the concept of regime change, which he warns confuses the issue.

The United States, he insists, should oppose nuclear weapons in North Korea and Iran no matter what government of the two nations builds them.

Kissinger compared what he called "The diplomacy appropriate to 'denuclearization,'" to the containment policy that helped win the Cold War. "No preemptive challenge [should be made] to the external security of the adversary, but firm resistance to attempts to project its power abroad and reliance on domestic forces to bring about internal change [is essential]," he said.

It was, he recalled, "precisely such a nuanced policy that allowed President Reagan to invite Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev to a dialogue within weeks of labeling the Soviet Union as the evil empire.

"The issue before the nations involved is similar to what the world faced in 1938 and at the beginning of the Cold War: Whether to overcome fears and hesitancy about undertaking the difficult path demanded by necessity," he concluded, warning that "The failure of that test in 1938 produced a catastrophic war; the ability to master it in the immediate aftermath of World War II led to victory without war."