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believed to have as many as ten nuclear weapons. If it launched those weapons at Japan or South Korea’s largest cities, they would kill tens of millions of people and would cripple both nations. The “Hermit Kingdom” is a land so bizarre, so belligerent, so impenetrable, and so unpredictable that it makes Iran look like Canada by comparison. North Korea hurls all manner of threats at South Korea. During the spring 2013 crisis, Pyongyang repeatedly and luridly threatened to launch nuclear weapons at South Korea and the United States. 13 Earlier that year, a North Korean diplomat publicly threatened the South with “final destruction,” at the United Nations Conference on Disarmament, of all places. 14 In 2012, the official North Korean army Supreme Command issued a statement announcing to South Korea that it was about to “reduce all the rat-like groups [the government of South Korea] and the bases for provocations to ashes in three or four minutes, (or) in much shorter time, by unprecedented peculiar means and methods of our own style.” 15 In 2011, the North Korean military released an official statement threatening to turn South Korea’s Blue House—their equivalent of the White House—into a “sea of fire” if South Korean forces ever fired a single shot into North Korea’s territory. 16
    Israelis and Gulf Arabs sometimes respond that they are much smaller and therefore more vulnerable to nuclear obliteration than India and even South Korea (at least in population). But when it comes to nuclear weapons and existential threats, size does not matter. Pakistan has the ability to do to India what a nuclear Iran would have the ability to do to Israel. North Korea has the ability to do to South Korea what a nuclear Iran would have the ability to do to Saudi Arabia. And both Pakistan and North Korea have fought far more and threatened far more than Iran has toward either Israel or the GCC states.
    I am painfully and personally aware of the tragic history of the Jewish people and the many perils the state of Israel has had to endure. I have written extensively on the military history of the Middle East. I am a great proponent of the U.S.-Israel strategic relationship and have defended it, in print and out loud, and have been viciously attacked for doing so, both in public and behind my back. 17 I do not dismiss the fears of the Israeli people or the real security needs of their state. Yet that does not mean that Israel is somehow different from every other nation and that those experiences somehow should not apply to issues related to Israeli security—especially when they also entail enormous import for the security of the United States and other countries. Polls of Israeli public opinion show a huge majority of Israelis who do not share this exaggerated fear that Iran’s acquisition of nuclear weapons means their own annihilation. With nuclear weapons, the risk is always there, but we have to separate the risk from the reality.
    To counteract the hysteria with a bit of understatement, it is unquestionable that Iran’s acquisition of a nuclear capability would be a major adjustment for Israel and the Gulf states. It would cause a number of significant problems and threats. And technically, it would constitute an existential threat to all of them, just as the Soviet Union constituted an existential threat to the United States, Europe, and East Asia. Just as Pakistan constitutes an existential threat to India. Just as North Korea constitutes an existential threat to South Korea and Japan—the only country on earth to experience the horrors of atomic attack. Every nationthat lives under the existential threat of nuclear annihilation must work to ensure that that threat is never realized, and there are no guarantees in this world that they never will be. Containing a nuclear threat always entails some element of risk, and it must be pursued assiduously to reduce