"There is a growing realization that the international community is failing to stop Iran from acquiring a uranium enrichment capability," said Mark Fitzpatrick, a senior fellow at the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London. "The U.S. government wouldn't accept it, but it's becoming a fait accompli. Can the next step — a nuclear weapon — be prevented? Chirac skipped over that question and cut to the chase in saying, 'We can live with a nuclear-armed Iran.'"
By Elaine Sciolino
PARIS — When President Jacques Chirac said this week he would not be overly worried if Iran obtained a nuclear weapon, he inadvertently said aloud what some policymakers and arms control experts have been whispering: that the world may have to learn to live with a nuclear Iran.
Chirac quickly retracted his words, and Elysee Palace reaffirmed France's commitment to preventing Iran from becoming a nuclear-weapons state. But in veering from the prepared script and letting the veil of caution fall, Chirac became the first Western leader to imply that containment of a nuclear Iran is preferable to other options, especially war.
"Jacques Chirac said things that many experts are saying around the world, even in the United States," Hubert Vedrine, foreign minister from 1997 to 2002, said on LCI television on Friday. "That is to say, that a country that possesses the bomb does not use it and automatically enters the system of deterrence and doesn't take absurd risks."
Under that thinking, if Iran has the bomb, it will be subject to the same classic doctrine of nuclear deterrence that restrained the nuclear powers during the Cold War.
"There is a growing realization that the international community is failing to stop Iran from acquiring a uranium enrichment capability," said Mark Fitzpatrick, a senior fellow at the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London. "The U.S. government wouldn't accept it, but it's becoming a fait accompli. Can the next step — a nuclear weapon — be prevented? Chirac skipped over that question and cut to the chase in saying, 'We can live with a nuclear-armed Iran.'"
The Bush administration has made stopping an Iranian bomb the object of an increasingly aggressive policy. So the administration is pressing reluctant European governments to curtail support for exports to Iran and to block transactions and freeze the assets of some Iranian companies.
Even inside the Bush administration, some officials have acknowledged over the past year that Iran eventually may develop a nuclear weapon — or at least the technology and components to assemble one quickly. In the United States, the view that the world might have to coexist with a nuclear Iran was laid out in an ambitious study by two government-financed scholars at the National Defense University in 2005.
"Can the United States live with a nuclear-armed Iran?" the report asked. "Despite its rhetoric, it may have no choice."
The report added that the costs of rolling back Iran's nuclear program "may be higher than the costs of deterring and containing a nuclear Iran."
