A new essay in Foreign Affairs urges the administration to “take out” Iran’s nuclear program. Bizarrely, the authors present the massive imbalance between the Israeli nuclear arsenal and whatever small arsenal Iran might one day build to insist that Iran must not be allowed to have such weapons:

From the very start, the nuclear balance between these two antagonists would be unstable. Because of the significant disparity in the sizes of their respective arsenals (Iran would have a handful of warheads compared to Israel’s estimated 100-200), both sides would have huge incentives to strike first in the event of a crisis.

That makes absolutely no sense. Neither side would have any incentive, much less huge ones, to escalate a crisis into a nuclear war. Israel has no reason to start a nuclear war in which it would be widely perceived as the militarily superior aggressor. Try to imagine the international consequences for Israel if its government launched a large-scale nuclear first strike on another country. The political and economic costs to Israel would be staggering. Iran obviously has no incentive to launch a first strike, because it would then be annihilated by the overwhelming retaliation from Israel’s much larger arsenal. As Robert Farley argues, the Iranian regime is not going to pursue a policy of national suicide:

While Iran undoubtedly exerts a negative influence in the region, it has not in any way indicated that it plans to undertake national suicide. To bully its neighbors or to provide an umbrella over Hezbollah, Iran would have to credibly threaten the use of nuclear weapons, which means — given overwhelming Israeli and American nuclear superiority — that it would have to credibly threaten national suicide. The phrase is self-contradictory, and as Jeffrey Goldberg has pointed out, even the Israelis don’t believe that Iran will use nuclear weapons against Israel.

Farley makes a good case that fears of Iranian regional domination and a regional arms race are both exaggerated.

On the other side, Edelman, Krepinevich, and Montgomery have presented an especially bad case for attacking Iran. Hawkish alarmists often make exaggerated and unfounded claims, but they usually try to avoid making transparently ridiculous ones. The same alarmist claims about Iran have been made for almost as long as there has been a revolutionary government in Iran. Joseph Cirincione explains:

What’s significant actually is that there isn’t that much currently going on, almost all this work is pre-2003. It’s all old data. It all came from that laptop you referred to, the laptop of death, that was disclosed in 2004. There’s suspicions of some work and there’s evidence of some work still going on, particularly computer modelling, but there doesn’t seem to be any evidence of a crash program to build a warhead. That’s what’s so significant.

P.S. Ali Gharib notes that one of the essay’s authors, Eric Edelman, is a Romney campaign adviser.