Gulf Roundtable: Assessing the Iranian Nuclear Challenge

“In the case of Iran, to think that you will deal with the weapons system without dealing with the reason that they find that option attractive is a serious mistake,” said David Kay, a senior fellow at the Potomac Institute for Policy Studies and the former chief UN nuclear weapons inspector in Iraq. Kay said that states find nuclear weapons attractive because they advance political goals, but in confronting Iran, the United States has “not done very much in trying to understand the Iranian national security dilemma.” Kay offered his assessment during a Gulf Roundtable at CSIS on April 22, 2009.