In the early 1980's, Reagan administration officials and some defense analysts fretted that the expanding Soviet arsenal of nuclear missiles gave the USSR a "window of opportunity" to launch a devastating "first-strike" against the United States. But in a famous article titled, "Windows of Opportunity: Do States Jump Through Them?" Professor Richard Ned Lebow questioned that key premise behind the massive U.S. military buildup of the time.
Now as the United States wrestles with its least, worst option in the growing crisis with Iran, a new assumption seems largely unquestioned. A nuclear Tehran, Americans are assured by pundits, presidential candidates and politicians of both parties, would almost certainly use its news weapons against Israel, the U.S. or both. That Iran would be completely destroyed by the immediate and massive retaliation which would follow is left unsaid.
So, the question must be asked: do nations commit suicide?
For most participants in the American debate on the Iranian nuclear program, the unspoken answer appears to be yes. "We know without a shadow of a doubt Iran will take a nuclear weapon, they will use it to wipe our ally Israel off the face of the map," Michele Bachmann explained, "And they've stated that they will use it against the United States of America." Arguing that Iran has essentially "at war with us since 1979," Rick Santorum's message to Tehran is a simple one: "If you do not open up those facilities and close them down, we will close them down for you." While Mitt Romney boasted, "I won't let Iran get nukes," his advisers have been warning the U.S. must launch a pre-emptive attack on Iranian nuclear installation soon "before it's too late."
Writing in the Daily Beast, historian provocateur Niall Ferguson explained why a new Israeli Six Day war, this time against Iran, is so desirable:

We're supposed to believe that a revolutionary Shiite theocracy is overnight going to become a sober, calculating disciple of the realist school of diplomacy ... because it has finally acquired weapons of mass destruction? Presumably this would be in the same way that, if German scientists had developed an atomic bomb as quickly as the Manhattan Project, the Second World War would have ended with a negotiated settlement brokered by the League of Nations.

There is no shortage of problems with Ferguson's blinkered analogy. For starters, unlike Adolf Hitler in 1944, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Ayatollah Khamenei face a United States, France, Britain and Israel each armed with nuclear arsenals. But more important is the widespread belief that Iran simply cannot be deterred. Put another way, in Ferguson's telling the mullahs are A-OK with mutual assured destruction.
Writing in Foreign Policy, Matthew Duss branded that view "the Martyr State Myth." For the likes of Newt Gingrich ("It's impossible to deter them. What are you going to threaten?") and Alan Dershowitz (who labeled Iran "the world's first suicide nation"), the calls of Ahmadinejad and Khamenei to and to "'kill all Jews and annihilate Israel" must be viewed as a promise, not a threat. A promise, that is, because the Shiite eschatology of the return of the Twelfth Imam at the End Times supposedly makes the nuclear annihilation of Iran a consummation devoutly to be wished. (Left unmentioned, of course, is that many of the Republicans' evangelical allies believe "the United States must join Israel in a pre-emptive military strike against Iran to fulfill God's plan for both Israel and the West...a biblically prophesied end-time confrontation with Iran, which will lead to the Rapture, Tribulation, and Second Coming of Christ.") As Duss summed it up:

The "martyr state" myth is based upon two flawed assumptions. First, that the Islamic Republic of Iran has been uniquely willing to endure the deaths of its own citizens in order to achieve its policy goals. Second, that the Iranian Shiite regime's End Times theology actually induces it to trigger a conflagration.

As Duss notes, the 19080's conflict with Iraq that consumed over a million and half Iranian lives was started by Saddam Hussein, not by an "apocalyptic mission of destruction" in Tehran. As for Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's frequent references to the Mahdi, Duss pointed out:

[Ahmadinejad] was publicly rebuked by leading Iranian clerics, who told Ahmadinejad he "would be better off concentrating on Iran's social problems...than indulging in such mystical rhetoric." Iran's Etemad Melli newspaper quoted one of Ahmadinejad's critics as saying that, rather than obsessing over the return of the Hidden Imam, "Ahmadinejad would do better to worry about social problems like inflation."

Still, proponents of an Israeli and/or U.S. preemptive attack on Iran have a back-up argument. Even if Tehran would not use it atomic weapons to strike first, its Hezbollah proxies and Hamas allies might. As Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak put it:

"The countdown toward nuclear materials in the hands of terrorists will start, even if it takes half a generation."

"The possibility Iran might share nuclear weapons with one of the many terrorist organizations it supports," Steve Emerson argued in 2009, is such that "the free world dismisses such threats at its own peril."
But even in that nightmare scenario, the same doomsday nuclear calculus applies to Tehran. That is, if Hezbollah or Hamas were to use an atomic or radiological weapon provided by their Iranian patron, the return address for the American or Israeli nuclear response would be the same as if Tehran itself pulled the trigger itself. In 2008, then presidential candidate Hillary Clinton raised some eyebrows (including those of Senator Barack Obama) when she promised that Unites States would "totally obliterate" Iran in response to a nuclear attack on Israel. Whether originating from Tehran or the Bekaa Valley, there's little doubt that any nuclear terror attack would produce the same response from any American president, Obama included.
Here, the U.S. experience with Iraq is helpful. For all of the Bush administration's repeated (and repeatedly debunked) claims that Saddam Hussein had links to Al Qaeda, the evidence never materialized. And with good reason. Saddam may have given cash payments to the families of Palestinian suicide bombers, but giving WMD to Bin Laden's minions was another matter altogether. The response to an Al Qaeda attack on the U.S. would have been swift, with Baghdad on the receiving end. As it turned out, that happened anyway.
To be sure, the Iranian acquisition of nuclear weapons is a dangerous and destabilizing development. Even without resorting to its nuclear arsenal, Iran could theoretically blackmail American allies, such as Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, perhaps forcing the U.S. to extend its nuclear umbrella. Especially in the wake of the Arab Spring, a nuclear Iran could ignite an unpredictable and difficult to contain regional arms race, with the Saudis and Egyptians pressured to pursue their own nuclear programs. That's all the more reason for President Obama and America's European allies to continue to press Iran with the stick of sanctions. As the President put it on Sunday:

"I've been very clear that we're going to do everything we can to prevent Iran from getting a nuclear weapon, and creating an arms race, a nuclear arms race, in a volatile region."

Unfortunately, the growing bluster from Israel suggests the Netanyahu government may be trying to force Obama's hand. Despite current and past warnings from both the Israeli and American defense and intelligence communities, Prime Minister Netanyahu and Defense Minister Barak are talking up their ability to hit Iranian nuclear facilities and withstand the "manageable" retaliation sure to follow. That they make act soon - and without warning the United States as Israel did in 1967 - is the worry voiced by U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta. Then, Israeli and the American policymakers will have to answer the question famously posed by David Petraeus before the U.S. invasion of Iraq:

"Tell me how this ends."

Of course, the Israelis could just be posturing in order to pressure the international community to further tighten the noose of sanctions on Iran. But even if the Israelis alone launch a strike against Iran's nuclear sites, Tehran will almost certainly hit back against U.S. targets in the Straits of Hormuz, in the region, possibly in Europe and even potentially in the American homeland. As former Carter national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski suggested, the only thing worse than Iran with a nuclear weapon would be war. (Nevertheless, recent polls suggest the American people might have the stomach for conflict with Iran, even if their national security experts do not.)
But as dangerous and unsettling as a nuclear Tehran would be, Israelis and Americans alike need not fear an Iranian first strike. And that's not because history shows that nuclear countries become less - and not more - aggressive.
It's because nations do not commit suicide. Not even Iran.