NEW YORK CITY – We are all screwed if Iran gets a nuke. And we may be just as screwed if the United States attacks Iran to keep Tehran from getting that nuke.

Okay, I'm paraphrasing a bit. But that's the core of the message from America's top military officer, who reiterated today his canyon-deep reservations about any military solution to the Iranian nuclear crisis. Sure, U.S. strikes might set back Tehran's atomic weapons program – for a while. But the "unintended consequences" of a hit on Iran's nuclear facilities could easily outweigh the benefits of that delay, Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Admiral Mike Mullen told a forum at Columbia University.

"Iran getting a nuclear weapon would be incredibly destabilizing. Attacking them would also create the same kind of outcome," Mullen said. "In an area that's so unstable right now, we just don't need more of that."

At Columbia, Mullen also pushed back on a New York Times report that the Obama administration essentially had no strategy for dealing with Iran if Tehran got to the threshold of building a nuke – without quite going over.

"What the mainstream of that article talked about… is that we have no policy and that the implication is that we're not working on it. I assure you, this is as complex a problem as there is in our country. And we have expended extraordinary amounts of time and effort to figure that out – to get that right," Mullen said. "This has a focus. The focus of the President of the United States. I am his principal military adviser, and it has from the moment I have spent any time with him – even before he has sworn in," Mullen said.

But the admiral didn't detail what strategy all that time and all that focus had generated.

"It has been worked and it continues to be worked," Mullen added. "If there was an easy answer, we would've picked it off the shelf."

Analysts have speculated that Iran might respond with terror strikes or naval blockades in the Persian Gulf if its nuclear facilities came under attack. Mullen declined to speculate what the results of a strike might be, except to say: they would probably be unexpected, and they would probably be bad.

"From my perspective," Mullen added, "the last option is to strike."

But simply accepting Iran as a nuclear state won't work either, Mullen added. Again: it's the unintended consequences.

"I worry about Iran achieving a nuclear weapons capability. There are those that say, 'C'mon Mullen, get over that. They're gonna get it. Let's deal with that.' Well, dealing with it has [results] that I don't think we've all thought through. I worry other countries in the region will then seek -– actually, I *know *they will seek – nuclear weapons as well. And the spiral headed in that direction is a very bad outcome," Mullen said.

When it comes to a nuclear Iran, none of the outcomes look very good.

[Photo: Specialist Chad J. McNeeley]

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