Open Letter to President Trump Urging Him to Prevent an Iranian Nuclear Arsenal

Dear Mr. President,

You are about to make a decision for which you will be remembered by history. Your legacy will either be as a world leader who saved, or failed to save, many lives. The decision concerns Iran's intention to develop a nuclear arsenal. There can be no reasonable doubt that Iran's mullahs are determined to obtain nuclear weapons, despite their assurances to the contrary. Nor can Israel, which is the intended target of an Iranian bomb, be expected to rely on deterrence or containment. Iran must be prevented from achieving their dangerous goal.

Obviously it would be better if the mullahs could be stopped by negotiation rather than military action. Previous negotiations resulted in a terrible deal under President Barack Obama. You yourself understood that under the Obama deal, Iran would almost certainly have obtained a nuclear arsenal, and so you quite correctly withdrew from the agreement. Now there are rumors that your administration is working on a "better" deal – longer and stronger. But unless your deal includes the complete and total destruction of all Iranian nuclear facilities, there will be no guarantee that its scientists could not surreptitiously use civilian nuclear infrastructure to build military weaponry. The only deal that would prevent this catastrophe would be one modeled on the agreement made with Libya made back in 2003. That deal completely dismantled Libya's nuclear facilities and made it impossible for them to weaponize nuclear energy infrastructure. Anything short of that will create an unacceptable risk.

We urge you to use your incredible negotiating skills to achieve the goal that you have set out: namely a 100% certainty that Iran will never get a nuclear bomb. You should give the mullahs a short period of time to dismantle and destroy, subject to American inspection, their entire nuclear program. If they refuse or fail to do so, the military option should be deployed.

Nearly a century ago, the British and French governments faced a similar decision with Germany, and they failed, costing tens of millions of lives.

A military attack on Germany in the mid-1930s, when its war machine was still weak, might have saved many of these lives. Here is what Reich Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels wrote in his memoir:

"In 1933 a French premier ought to have said (and if I had been the French premier, I would have said it): 'The new Reich chancellor is the man who wrote Mein Kampf, which says this and that. This man cannot be tolerated in our vicinity. Either he disappears or we March!' But they didn't do it. They left us alone and let us slip through the risky zone, and we were able to sail around all dangerous reefs. And when we were done, and well armed, better than they, then they started the war!"

The rest is tragic history. Germany built up its armed forces without countermeasures by its intended enemies, conquered most of Western Europe and killed millions of people. Most of those deaths could certainly have been avoided had Great Britain and France engaged in preventive military action before Germany became "well armed" and capable of inflicting so much damage on the world.

At the moment in history when Great Britain and France could have prevented the horrendous harm done by Nazi Germany, there was no way of knowing in advance the extent of what Adolf Hitler would do.

Yes, Hitler wrote Mein Kampf, but many would-be conquerors do not follow through on their threats. (Recall the threat of the Soviet Union's Premier Nikita Khrushchev to "bury" the United States, yet he backed away from a nuclear confrontation over Cuba.)

There was no way of predicting, with any degree of certainty that Hitler would turn his belligerent rhetoric into military invasions of Poland, Europe and then the Soviet Union -- and ultimately the Holocaust. It was, as it always is, a question of cost-benefit probabilities. This was a classic case of a false negative: implicitly predicting that Hitler would not do what, in fact, he did, and failing to take action in an effort to prevent it. If France and Great Britain had accurately predicted Hitler's actual harm correctly, they would almost certainly have taken preventive military action even if the cost were high – because it would never have been nearly as high as it turned out to be in the absence of such action.

But history is blind to the predictive future. Had Great Britain and France engaged in preventive military action in the 1930s that resulted in the deaths of, say, 15,000 British and French soldiers and civilians, the leaders who undertook such a military campaign would have been condemned as warmongers, because no one would ever know how many deaths they prevented by the sacrifice of those 15,000 lives. Ignorance of the hypothetical future is often the reason for failure to act in the present. That is the dilemma of failing to take preventive military action.

Mr. President, we are once again at a decisive decision point. And you are the decider. We urge you to do the right thing: take the necessary actions that will assure, with absolute certainty, that Iran will never obtain a nuclear arsenal, even if the only way to secure that certainly ends up being through military action.

Alan M. Dershowitz is the Felix Frankfurter Professor of Law, Emeritus at Harvard Law School, and the author most recently of The Preventive State, and War Against the Jews: How to End Hamas Barbarism, and Get Trump: The Threat to Civil Liberties, Due Process, and Our Constitutional Rule of Law. He is the Jack Roth Charitable Foundation Fellow at Gatestone Institute, and is also the host of "The Dershow" podcast.

Andrew Stein is an American Democratic politician who served on the New York City Council and was its last president, and as Manhattan Borough President.