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that risk to an infinitesimal, irreducible minimum. But we should not exaggerate that risk out of all proportion.
    The word existential is frightening, but there is no reason it should take over our lives or the lives of any other nation. Many generations have lived, loved, and prospered under the distant specter of a nuclear threat. Few of them suffered for it, and most never noticed it at all. We should not—we cannot—ignore the dangers of a nuclear Iran or the challenges of containing it, but we must distinguish the real threats from the exaggerated.

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Making Containment Work
    M any Americans think containment is a defensive strategy. That is understandable, but incorrect. Although one aspect of containment’s purpose is the defensive aim of preventing the target country from expanding its power beyond its borders, the other is the offensive one of seeing a change of regime in the target country at some point in time. Even within the defensive piece of containment strategy, however, there can and should be offensive tactics. None of the many containment strategies that the United States has employed since the Second World War has been wholly defensive, although some have been more so than others.
    The archetypal American containment experience was, of course, the forty-six-year containment of the Soviet Union. This was the challenge for which George Kennan formulated the strategy, and many others, most notably Dean Acheson, Paul Nitze, Henry Kissinger, and Ronald Reagan, added important features. Nevertheless, as the great historian of the Cold War John Lewis Gaddis details in his seminal work Strategiesof Containment , at various points during the Cold War the United States employed different variations on the general theme of containment, some of which were more defensive in nature and others more offensive.
    During the 1970s era of détente, American policy was more focused on shoring up the defensive aspects of containment, whereas during the 1980s (partly in response to the tenor of American strategy in the prior decade) the United States focused more on the offensive aspects of containment. On the defensive side, the tactics consisted of nuclear deterrence itself, the conventional military preparations to block a Soviet invasion of either Europe or northeast Asia, information operations and covert programs to prevent the Soviets from subverting key Western countries, and the widespread effort to shore up governments friendly to the West (some of them unsavory) throughout the Third World. The offensive side of the containment of the USSR featured information operations to boost Eastern European unhappiness with the Soviet empire, economic sanctions to hinder Soviet growth and technological development, diplomatic moves to increase the number of threats that the USSR faced, and a widespread effort to undermine Soviet allies and client states in the Third World through both military and nonmilitary means.
    America’s containment campaigns against other countries featured some applications of the basic strategy that were more defensive in nature, and others more offensive. Our containment strategies toward North Korea after 1953 and Cuba after 1962 were more defense-oriented even than our approach to the Soviet Union itself. We put comprehensive sanctions in place against both, isolated them diplomatically as best we could, pushed back hard on Cuba’s allies in Latin America, and ensured that North Korea could not overrun the South, but otherwise left them alone. In contrast, America’s containment of the Sandinistas’ Nicaragua and Saddam’s Iraq entailed enormous pressure on both regimes. Against Nicaragua, the United States supported an insurgency effectively and overtly and considered direct military moves like mining its harbors. Against Iraq, the United States imposed comprehensive economic sanctions, an aggressive covert action program to overthrow Saddam, backedvarious