July 22, 2016
Boris Johnson, who has just been named foreign minister of the United Kingdom by the new prime minister, once suggested that the Western countries give the Islamic Republic nuclear weapons to calm its fears.
In 2006, Johnson—then as now a Conservative member of parliament—published a commentary on his website in which he mulled over how to deal with Iran.
“If I am right in thinking that an Iranian bomb is not only inevitable, but also corresponds to the wishes of the people of Iran,” he wrote, “then perhaps we could turn this whole thing on its head.” Actually, polls show the Iranian public does not favor Iran having nuclear weapons.
Johnson said he was thinking of giving Iran nuclear weapons “in return for certain conditions: that the Iranian leadership stops raving about attacking Israel, for instance, and that progress is made towards democracy, and so on.”
Johnson acknowledged that the idea to help Iran acquire nuclear weapons was controversial—“faintly barmy,” he admitted—and said it’s “simply an idea I am running up the flagpole…. I suggest it only because we seem to be short of anything better.”
The commentary, dated October 12, 2006, is still posted on Johnson’s website. In it, Johnson muses: “If I were the member [of the Majlis] for Qom South,… I think I might genuinely and not unreasonably believe that the possession of a nuclear bomb, and the ability to deliver it over some distance, was the only sure-fire means of protecting my country, and my poor huddled constituents in Qom South, from the possibility of an attack by America.”
The premise behind his proposal was this: “The Iranians are one day going to possess a nuclear bomb; there is almost certainly nothing we can do about it.”
He said, “The Iranian public might feel grateful, and engaged, and not demonized. Would it mean the end of Israel, which has 200 warheads of its own? Of course not. The logic of mutually assured destruction still applies, and even the mullahs are not mad enough to take on a country [Israel] that could turn their desert into molten glass.”
