Dear Editor,
I was shocked to find a call for war against Iran in the 6 August (Hiroshima Day) letters column. That letter certainly showed the dangers of the media parroting misinformation and misleading information put out by parties with an agenda to pursue.

The reasons for Israel not to militarily attack Iran are many: an international system for resolving threats without war and reserving the right to authorize wars to the UN Security Council, the lack of a threat against Israel, an existing mechanism for inspecting the output of Iran's enrichment program, the lack of evidence of an Iranian nuclear weapons program, the probable Iranian military response and the economic fallout.

What is the perceived threat that would warrant what, under the Nuremburg principles, is the greatest war crime? It is that Iran may be able to produce a nuclear weapon in a few years and use that to attack a country which possesses over 200 nuclear weapons of its own. But such an attack would cause Israel to utterly wipe out Iran with its own nuclear weapons. Iran knows this, so no matter how aggressive its leaders were, they would not wage such an attack knowing what the consequences were. This is called deterrence. Deterrence kept the US and USSR from attacking each other. It kept China safe from US and Soviet attack. It now keeps India and Pakistan from major attacks on each other. Nuclear deterrence may be MAD, but it works.

Handing a nuclear weapon to a non-state actor would not let Iran off the hook. Not only would Iran be sure that Israel would wipe it out, but it would run a very high risk of the weapon being captured by foreign powers or end up being used against a different target. So Iran would still be deterred.

So let's address the misrepresentations and misleading information. The claim is made that Iran has repeatedly expressed the view that Israel should be wiped off the map. Two points should be noted, the more minor one being that Iran never said that it intended to do so, meaning it was not a threat to take action, but the expression of a desire. The misinformation about this claim is that it is a truncated version of what Iranian President Ahmadinejad said. What he said is that Israel should be wiped off the map as the Soviet Union was i.e., peacefully. The USSR was wiped off the map due to actions of its own populace. Around the same time East Germany, Czechoslovakia and South Yemen were also peacefully 'wiped off the map'. Ahmadinejad has called on Israel and Palestine to unite to form a single country and for that united country not to be called Palestine. This would result in Israel being 'wiped off the map'. Israeli politicians may object to this proposal, but it is not a military threat or a threat of another holocaust.

The portrayal of Iran as an aggressive country has been quite a feat by the mass media. Iran has not attacked another country in well over a century. It has fought back against countries which have attacked it. Iraq attacked Iran in the 1980s and Iran fought back. Iran's current 'threats' are those of retaliation; if it is attacked by the US on behalf of Israel or by Israel with the support of the US, it will retaliate against both powers. It's a cute trick to convert a commitment to retaliate into a 'threat'.

But what about the Iranian nuclear weapons program? The misinformation campaign is going full blast there, as well. The Iranians have had a nuclear program since the time of the Shah. There was concern in the 1970s that the Shah would attempt to build nuclear weapons and after his overthrow that the new government would. The Iranian government, considering Israel's 1981 bombing of an Iraqi reactor under construction, hid its nuclear program in multiple underground sites. Having a nuclear program secret from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) was a violation of Iran's commitments under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (of which it is a signatory). The IAEA is now inspecting the Iranian program, including formerly secret parts.