President Bush has suggested an Iran with nukes could bring on World War III.

WASHINGTON – A hostile country led by anti-American ideologues appears close to developing its first nuclear weapon and, as a U.S. election approaches, the president and his advisers debate a preemptive military strike. Newspaper columnists demand action to stop the nuclear peril.The country was China, the year was 1963 and the president was Lyndon Johnson.

Now it is Iran that is said to be bent on acquiring nuclear arms and President Bush who has declared that “unacceptable.” Some U.S. officials and outside commentators are again pushing for a preemptive attack.

But the White House and its partisans may be inflating the dangers of a nuclear-armed Iran, say experts on the Persian Gulf and nuclear deterrence. While there are dangers, they acknowledge, Iran appears to want a nuclear weapon for the same reason other countries do: to protect itself.

Bush, by contrast, has suggested that a nuclear-armed Iran could bring about World War III. The president and his top aides, along with hawkish commentators, have suggested that Iran might launch a first strike on Israel or the United States, or hand nuclear weapons to terrorist groups Tehran supports.

There is “only one terrible choice, which is either to bomb those [Iranian nuclear] facilities and retard their program or even cut it off altogether, or allow them to go nuclear,” Norman Podhoretz, a foreign policy adviser to GOP presidential candidate Rudy Giuliani, said last month.