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Time for a Clear Signal to Iran Barry Farber You couldn't call it universal water-cooler conversation because too many celebrities were doing too many crazy things, but the media was full of fear and fury. "We dare not let them develop the nuclear bomb," railed the president. And he was backed up by other presidents, prime ministers, and rulers. "They're irresponsible," rang the battlecry. "Too many countries have the bomb already." "Every new country that comes into possession of the nuclear bomb brings mankind that much closer to doomday. This must stop. We permit this development to go on only at our great peril." I remember it well. You may say, who needs memory? It's here and now. Wrong. The country I refer to that was threatening to develop the nuclear bomb was — France! The year was 1961. And the president was John F. Kennedy. Everybody feared the worst if France, considered not truly malevolent but flaky, were to develop the bomb. That was before India, Pakistan, Israel (still unofficial!), and China joined the nuclear fraternity. Is this recollection intended, then, to make us unfasten our seatbelt and sip a drink and allow Iran to join the club? Story Continues Below
I can see how it might be used in that manner. Part of the chatter after France successfully tested nuclear bombs in the South Pacific without global disaster ensuing was the marvelously absurd illusion that "having the bomb gives a country a balance, a maturity, a sense of responsibility that theretofore might have been lacking!" No such luck. The France of Charles DeGaulle may have been flaky in producing money that stayed intact (We love you still, Art Buckwald, who pointed out in the 1950s that French money was held together by more and more scotch tape until the French woke up one morning and found themselves spending nothing but scotch tape!). France may have been flaky as an ally against Nazi Germany, and they may have been flaky calculating restaurant bills for visiting Americans, making cigarettes that made you feel like you'd had your mouth over the exhaust pipe of a Greyhound bus and getting things right over the telephone, but compared to Iran today the French at their flakiest combined the best features of Mt. Rushmore and the Rock of Gibraltar. I clearly remember the dawn of the nuclear age. And this recollection allows me to salute an old acquaintance I've never had any other occasion to salute. In that August of 1945, when news of the first and then second atomic bomb over Hiroshima and Nagasaki quickly led to Japan's unconditional surrender, we mid-teenagers were sitting on the curb under a street light on Aberdeen Terrace in Greensboro, N.C. All of us were mariated with adolescent hatred of the Japanese. There's no wartime hatred more intense than the hatred of young boys not quite old enough to send into battle. And we were all jubilant at the development of this atom bomb thing. All, that is, except a slightly older boy, Bill Kampschmidt, who shook his head and said, "I don't know. I don't know. A bomb that can destroy an entire city. One bomb! I don't know. That bothers me." I was at least smart enough to know how breathtakingly different his opinion was from ours. I couldn't imagine his having any reservation about one bomb destroying a complete city, so long as that city were Japanese. I remember respecting him for stating his outrageous reservation at the "good news." Bill, whose last name I may have spelled too close to the original German, died too few years later, before the age of 20. I think he might have made a great elected official! Let's honor whoever it was who said, "To the young, death is but a distant rumor." "Nuclear proliferation" wasn't even a distant rumor to us young ones rejoicing over the sudden surrender of the despised Japanese. Those of us celebrating America's development of the A-bomb at that moment simply didn't care, thank you, to look or think beyond "victory over Japan." I'd give a week's pay if I could hear the answer I would have given right after the pair of bombs that ended World War II to anybody asking the question, "What about 50, 60, 70 years from now? What about when smaller countries that have no democratic tradition or any notion of fairness or decency get their hands on the nuclear bomb? Our victory over Japan sucked up one hundred percent of my mental broadband. And now, here we are. I say we've lucked out since France's acquisition of the nuclear bomb "over-proliferated" the planet. And it's now time to get up off that 1945 curbstone on Aberdeen Terrace in Greensboro, N.C. and face what we've failed to face ever since. Too far is far enough. Israel turned Saddam Hussein's atomic dreams into a smoking crater by reducing his (French-built) atomic bomb plant in Osirac, Iraq to a smoking crater in 1981. There are ways to communicate with Iran. Iran has a curious and interesting structure; something like a high school newspaper. The kids may write whatever they please, but the faculty decides what does and does not get published. "President" Ahmadinejad may threaten however he pleases. The mullahs and the over-mullah are in charge. It's time to tell them, "This is the last exit before the toll booth. If you don't cease, desist, stop, reverse, repent, and abandon all dreams and fantasies of becoming a nuclear power, the unashamed and unapologetic might of America, Israel, and who-knows-who-else will destroy as much of your sub-surface nuclear plant as we can reach and all of your surface conventional military. "And your Arab neighbors who pretend to be most outraged and on your side will secretly be most glad of it. "Look in the mirror, Iran. You deliberately made yourself the place where a neglectful indolent planet belatedly decides to draw the line." The great director Alfred Hitchcock told us, "If there's a gun in act one, it will go off in act three." It's time to let Iran know it's now second intermission. End it, Iran. Fold it now, or you're not going to get an act three!
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