Anthony Cordesman, a former professor of national security studies at Georgetown University, and now a strategist at the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies (from which academe could learn a thing or two), has calculated the horrific consequences if Tehran gets the bomb and a nuclear exchange with Israel ensues.

Martin Walker of United Press International states that Cordesman’s analysis would mean

the end of Persian civilization, quite probably the end of Egyptian civilization, and the end of the Oil Age. This would also mean the end of globalization and the extraordinary accretions in world trade and growth and prosperity that are hauling hundreds of millions of Chinese and Indians and others out of poverty.

Sounds like must reading for emerging wealthy as well as Third World nations.

Dan Pipes comments:

If Cordesman’s projections are at all accurate, they directly contradict the [following] blithe assumptions of Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, the former Iranian president … :
If a day comes when the world of Islam is duly equipped with the arms Israel has in possession, the strategy of colonialism would face a stalemate because application of an atomic bomb would not leave anything in Israel but the same thing would just produce minor damages in the Muslim world. In other words, Rafsanjani was saying, an exchange would wipe out Israel’s smaller population but leave Iran functioning. But Cordesman draws precisely the opposite conclusion.

Must reading, don’t you think, for non-apocalyptic leaders in Iran?

A must read, in fact, for all the non-apocalyptic among us.