My Letter in the Wall Street Journal

The Wall Street Journal published a letter to the editor from me on Sunday, September 2. It appears as if the Journal is no longer archiving letters to the editor online, so the full text of the letter appears below.

The letters to the editor page is the second-most widely read page of a newspaper after the front page. It is a great way to get your message across to readers, especially in a publication known for coming down on the other side of your issue of interest.

I encourage everyone to write letters to the editor on issues they care about - both local papers and national ones. You can read my suggested guidelines for writing a letter to the editor here.

Here's the text of my letter, which refers to an op-ed that had been published by the Wall Street Journal earlier that week:

Mr. Kozak certainly places a lot of faith in the idea that "rational actors" with their finger on the nuclear trigger will act rationally at all times, even under extreme stress during times of war. This dangerous assumption overlooks the fact that one irrational decision with nuclear weapons could set off a chain of events that could kill hundreds of millions of people around the world through nuclear famine.

Furthering the gap between nuclear "haves" and "have-nots" through military action, as Mr. Kozak not so subtly infers, will only increase the incentive for other countries to develop nuclear weapons quickly. Negotiations for a Middle East Weapons of Mass Destruction-Free Zone, which would include both Iran and Israel, are supposed to take place in the coming months. This is a sensible way to halt real and possible nuclear proliferation in this volatile region of the world.

Rick Wayman

Nuclear Age Peace Foundation

Santa Barbara, Calif.

Nuclear Iran Does Not Increase Stability: 8 Reasons

In the July issue of Foreign Affairs, international relations scholar and founder of neorealism, Kenneth Waltz, published a column not only defending nuclear deterrence theory, but also supporting the Iran obtaining a nuclear weapon (part of the column can be found on the website of USA Today). Waltz identifies three possible futures that could be had depending on the actions of Iran’s nuclear enrichment program. I find his analysis selective and the publishing of such opinions as legitimate in both the academic and mainstream press, without acknowledging the disastrous consequences that are possible in the case that his presumptions are false, to be reprehensible. I thus write this response.

One of the biggest issues with Waltz’s analysis is his complete dismissal of the incomprehensible dangers of nuclear weapons. He writes, “A palpable sense of crisis still looms,” and then dismisses it by saying, “It should not.”¹ In the words of Nuclear Age Peace Foundation president David Krieger, “fear is a healthy mechanism when one is confronted by something fearful.”² The Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs killed 200,000 initially and many more in the months and years after. The current warheads are much larger than those two, plus new reports discuss how the nuclear famine that would follow a limited nuclear exchange between Pakistan and India could kill over 1 billion human beings.³ Luckily for us, Mr. Waltz is not worried. He thinks, “A nuclear-armed Iran would probably be the best possible result of the standoff and the one most likely to restore stability to the Middle East.” I beg to differ.

Stuxnet...An Act of War Against Iran?

In 1935 102 cane toads were introduced in Eastern Australia as a tool to control the cane beetle, a local pest to sugar cane. Today there are over 200 million cane toads in Australia, which besides poisoning pets and humans as well as depleting native fauna has directly cost local governments hundreds of thousands of dollars to control, on top of the other economic losses caused by the introduced species. ¹

This is not a story about toads though. This is a story about a virus the United States introduced to the internet which could have much greater consequences than some toads down under. This is a story about the United States authorizing acts of war against Iran over the enrichment of nuclear fuel.