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the plight of its regional allies, we cannot allow their fears to overwhelm our interests and experience. Some Israelis in public and some Gulf Arabs in private can hit hysterical heights of panic when it comes to the “existential threat” they face from a nuclear Iran. They see this fear as requiring that anything and everything possible be done to prevent it.
    Is a nuclear Iran an “existential” threat to Israel and the GCC states? Technically speaking, yes. Given the small size of the populations of Israel and the GCC states and their heavy concentration in just a few cities, once Iran has an arsenal of five to ten weapons that it can deliver against any of those countries, it will have a theoretical capability to wipe outanywhere from 20 to 90 percent of their populations. That sounds terrifying, and it should.
    Yet the reality is far more mundane. Since the advent of the nuclear era, a great many countries have lived, and even thrived, under an existential threat. For forty years, the United States feared a Soviet nuclear attack that would have incinerated our nation. People built bomb shelters in their backyards. Schoolchildren were taught to “duck and cover” under their desks. Buildings in cities across the country boasted signs designating them as fallout shelters. Yet, the country survived. In fact, we did quite well. We still live with such an existential threat: Russia retains about 2,500 nuclear weapons that could end our existence.
    The Western European nations shared this threat during the Cold War, perhaps even more than we did, because the thousands of tactical nuclear weapons deployed on either side of the Iron Curtain made a local nuclear exchange somewhat more likely than a homeland exchange between superpowers. Yet under that shadow Western Europe developed into one of the most prosperous and peaceful lands history has ever known. Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore, and the other Asian “tigers” faced (and still face) existential threats from both Russia and China, but their economic performance and cultural development outstripped that of even Europe and the United States. The existential threat of nuclear obliteration did not frighten off investment, cause mass emigration, or distort domestic policies (although it monopolized foreign policies).
    India has been locked in a vicious struggle with Pakistan since the violent birth of the two nations in 1947. Since then, they have fought four wars and experienced any number of crises. Although most Indians want to see an end to the conflict and have Pakistan leave them alone, much of Pakistan’s elite remains obsessed with India—scheming to get back all of Kashmir, seeing Indian plots behind every problem in Pakistan, fearing Indian attack, and launching repeated attacks against India for various convoluted reasons. Pakistan is overrun with terrorists and violent extremists,its economy and social systems are in shambles, and it is waging guerrilla wars in Afghanistan and Kashmir. Many analysts fear that the state is on the brink of collapse. 11 Pakistan also possesses something on the order of one hundred nuclear weapons aimed at India and has continued to attack India and provoke nuclear crises with New Delhi even after it crossed the nuclear threshold sometime between 1985 and 1990. 12 If Pakistan launched those hundred nuclear weapons at India’s fifty to one hundred largest urban areas, tens of millions of people would die, and India would effectively cease to exist as a functional nation. India has every reason to fear a Pakistani launch either stemming from escalation out of a crisis or as a result of the implosion of the tenuous Pakistani state, yet India has survived. And it too has thrived, posting phenomenal rates of economic growth and achieving something of a high-tech miracle.
    North Korea first obtained nuclear weapons in the 1990s, although it did not test until 2006. Today it is