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

The reasons for Israel not to attack Iran are many: an international system for resolving threats without war which reserves 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, and the lack of evidence of an Iranian nuclear weapons program.

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. Iran knows that such an attack would cause Israel to utterly wipe out Iran with its own nuclear weapons, so no matter how aggressive its leaders were they would not wage such an attack. 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. It 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.

Re Iran's view that Israel should be wiped off the map: first Iran never said that it intended to do so; it was not a threat but a desire. Iranian President Ahmadinejad actually said that Israel should be wiped off the map - as the Soviet Union was - i.e. peacefully, due to actions of its own populace.

Ahmadinejad called on Israel and Palestine to unite to form a single country and for that united country not to be called Israel, thus no Israel on the map. Israeli politicians object to this proposal, but it is not a threat of another holocaust.

The portrayal of Iran as an aggressive country has been quite a feat. Iran has not attacked another country in well over a century. Its current 'threats' are those of retaliation.

The misinformation campaign about the Iranian 'nuclear weapons program' is going full blast. Iran has had a nuclear program since the 1950s. 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. The IAEA is now inspecting the Iranian program, including formerly secret parts.