I don't believe that the day Iran gets a nuclear device they will try and nuke New York. I do think Iran is a dangerous and destabilizing force in the entire region and that nukes will increase that by several orders of magnitude. If Iran was to send troops across the Turkmenistan border today to "protect" people of Iranian decent in that area we could kick them in the teeth and send them home. If they had nukes we would wring our hands and threaten sanctions.

What if we starting seeing Iranian troops in Lebanon? Are we going to risk going to war with a nuclear power over Lebanon? If they decided to hit our fleet in the gulf would we actually nuke Tehran? I don't think we would kill four or five million people to punish their leadership for taking out some of our ships.

If we believe that non-proliferation of nuclear weapons is a long term priority then we really need to draw the line somewhere. We should never have allowed NK to develop nukes and we could still pay a very dear price for that mistake but stopping them would have cost millions of lives and the capital of an allied nation. The argument that we should let one rogue nation have nukes because we couldn’t stop another and they haven’t blown anyone up yet is not a very sound argument.

If you did a pro con list for dealing with the fallout of another war in an Islamic nation and dealing with the fallout of a nuclear armed Middle East I think it would be an unbalanced list.