Louis Rene Beres is a nuclear strategist and professor of International Law. In today's Christian Science Monitor Beres calls for preemptive action against Iranian nuclear weapons development

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"Unless there is a timely defensive first strike at pertinent elements of Iran's expanding nuclear infrastructures, it will acquire nuclear weapons. The consequences would be intolerable and unprecedented.

"A nuclear Iran would not resemble any other nuclear power. There could be no stable "balance of terror" involving that Islamic Republic. Unlike nuclear threats of the cold war, which were governed by mutual assumptions of rationality and mutual assured destruction, a world with a nuclear-armed Iran could explode at any moment."