America Abroad: Defusing Baghdad's Bomb

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For the 45 years that Europe has been largely at peace, the Middle East has been plunged into war at least nine times. Europe is living proof that the balance of terror works: with so many weapons of mass destruction in so many arsenals, a single bullet fired in anger could touch off Armageddon. Therefore the guns are silent. The Middle East has had the benefit of no such inhibition: there is too much terror and too little balance.

The focus of anxiety these days is Iraq. In the 1980s President Saddam Hussein used poison gas against not only Iran but also rebellious Iraqi Kurds. Last year he tested the Tammuz-1 ballistic missile, with a range of 1,240 miles. Four weeks ago, he was caught trying to smuggle into Iraq U.S.-made electrical devices for what Western experts are convinced is a project to build an atom bomb. Then, on April 2, Saddam vowed to "let our fire eat up half of Israel if it tries to wage anything against Iraq."

"Israel," replied Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir, "will also know how to defend itself in the future and defeat the evil designs of its enemies." What Shamir did not say, but what everyone knows, is that Israel already has its own nuclear warheads as well as its own missiles.

The fearful symmetry in that exchange of threats between Baghdad and Jerusalem is what mutual deterrence is all about. It echoes the tacit High Noon dialogue between Moscow and Washington in the worst days of the cold war.

But who is to deter Saddam from brandishing his fire at the nuclear have- nots in the region, if only to discourage them from rushing to become haves? The answer now is no one. The answer may eventually have to be the U.S.

W. Seth Carus of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy last week proposed that the U.S. extend some form of defense umbrella to cover Kuwait, whose territory Iraq claims, and Saudi Arabia, whose royal family is uneasy about Saddam's undisguised ambitions to dominate the region. Carus imagines the U.S. offering protection to these and other friendly countries within range of the Tammuz-1. The model might be the U.S. guarantee of South Korea's security against North Korea, which is also believed to be developing the Bomb.

This may be an idea whose time has not yet come, but it is worth thinking about. American Government officials shudder when they do so. They would prefer to rely on traditional diplomacy aimed at defusing regional tensions and restricting the proliferation of nuclear technology. The trouble is, the Iraqi weapons program is moving along much more briskly than the peace process. Some experts predict that Saddam will achieve his heart's desire within three years. When that happens, the U.S. President had better have something more to say than "Well, we tried."