I don’t normally wade into politics on this blog, and certainly not Middle East politics. Then again, I occasionally discuss issues of war and weapons, because certainly these are important to the future of our civilization. Anyway, this caught my attention in Obama’s state of the union speech:

Our diplomacy is at work with respect to Iran, where, for the first time in a decade, we’ve halted the progress of its nuclear program and reduced its stockpile of nuclear material. Between now and this spring, we have a chance to negotiate a comprehensive agreement that prevents a nuclear-armed Iran; secures America and our allies – including Israel; while avoiding yet another Middle East conflict.

In other news stories, I have heard him give a 50% chance of a deal with Iran. Around 10 years ago, Iran supposedly proposed a “grand bargain“, in which they would give up any attempts to acquire nuclear weapons, and make peace with Israel, in return for normalized relations with the United States. (Have a look at the various original documents posted with the 2007 New York Times column in the link above, some of which supposedly came directly from the Iranian government at the time.)

Today, we have a much messier situation with a series of loosely related civil wars involving three or four ambiguous sides, and it is not clear whether a deal like this would actually result in more political stability for the region overall. But it certainly would be a nuclear proliferation victory, de-escalating tensions between Iran and Israel, and between Iran and Saudi Arabia, which is rumored to have a small nuclear arsenal on order from Pakistan. From the BBC in 2013:

Saudi Arabia has invested in Pakistani nuclear weapons projects, and believes it could obtain atomic bombs at will, a variety of sources have told BBC Newsnight.

Even scarier than a nuclear conflict between state actors would be if irrational extremists were to gain control of a nuclear arsenal in any one of these countries. When so many people are suffering and dying already, it seems a little selfish to worry about the impacts on those of us in relatively peaceful countries outside the region. But a nuclear winter caused by even a relatively contained nuclear exchange there would be no laughing matter for anyone on Earth. From Scientific American in 2009:

Because as other nations continue to acquire nuclear weapons, smaller, regional nuclear wars could create a similar global catastrophe. New analyses reveal that a conflict between India and Pakistan, for example, in which 100 nuclear bombs were dropped on cities and industrial areas, only 0.4 percent of the world’s more than 25,000 warheads would produce enough smoke to cripple global agriculture. A regional war could cause widespread loss of life even in countries far away from the conflict.