Granted, I'm oversimplifying. But ultimate power lies in the hands of the Ayatollah Hamenei, who is an Islamic radical theocrat, and Ahmedinejad, who is a certified nutjob.
My faith that they will make their decisions in a responsible way is limited.
Despicable as Ahmadinejad is in many ways, he's far from a "nutjob". He's extremely intelligent with degrees in civil engineering and transportation engineering, and he rose to power by being an extremely skilled and canny politician. Doesn't mean he's a good person by any stretch of the imagination, but he's a far cry from the wacky religious dictator he often gets portrayed as in Western media.
But even an out and out theocrat like Ali Khamenei isn't in the same league as the kind you see with groups like the Taliban and other Wahhabist oriented sects.
And I wouldn't want nukes in the hands of Saudia Arabia either, for similar reasons.
So, what if I told you that the US had committed to
actively assisting Saudi Arabia in developing nuclear technology? And that Saudi Arabia
already possesses a number of CSS-2 (aka Dong Feng 3) missiles which are capable of carrying a nuclear payload?
And if you want to know which of those two countries having nuclear technology worries me more, well let's just say that last I checked there haven't been any Iranians flying commercial airliners into skyscrapers...
Since the fall of Iraq and the power of Russia, along with Egypt "sekling out" to the west, there has been an internal power struggle for leadership in the Muslim world. Iran has the become the front runner, spouting out populistic anti-west rhetoric. Destroying Israel would cement their place in Muslim public opinion.
The Muslim nations are not simply one big happy family. They're deeply divided by religious sect and ethnicity. Other than by conquest, Iran has no real chance of establishing dominance over the other nations in the region as they are neither Arab nor of the same sect of Islam.
Though it doesn't get talked about a great deal in the West, there are very real tensions that have always existed, and are presently growing between these different Muslim groups in the Middle East. (Saudi religious police have fairly recently even taken to
beating and detaining Shi'a Muslims making the pilgrimage to the Mecca.)
Iran has very real reasons, especially in regards to their national security, to make sure they don't fall behind the Arab nations in the region in regards nuclear technology that have nothing whatsoever to do with either Israel or any Western nation.
Hezbollah allegedly already has scud missles capable of carrying nuclear warheads. The distance from that and an "unaffiliated" group launching a "rogue" attack is too close for comfort.
Even assuming that's true, the only types of SCUDs capable of carrying a nuclear warhead (the R-11M & R-17 aka SCUD-A and SCUD-B) have extremely limited range and are wildly inaccurate, are only capable of carrying a maximum 50kt warhead, and were all manufactured in the 1950s and 1960s, later designs were longer range, but so much smaller they were no longer suited to carrying nuclear warheads. The more advanced of the two would be the equivalent of those SCUDs Saddam tossed around during the Gulf War, only Hezbollah would have even less ability to properly aim them. (It's also possible that they'd just have the North Korean knock-offs that were even less reliable and would be just as likely to blow up on the launch pad as to actually get off the ground.)
