The answer to that question is yes, if the circumstances were appropriate. The United Nations recently convened a commission, headed by the former foreign affairs minister of Australia, to give an interpretation of article 51 of the UN Charter, which gives every nation the inherent right of self-defence, in the context of nuclear attacks and nuclear terrorism. The commission unanimously came to the conclusion that the right of self-defence includes the right of pre-emptive self-defence.
They distinguished between pre-emption and prevention. Pre-emption means the ability to attack, to stop something that's relatively imminent, or short term. They said that for that, you don't even need the approval of the UN Security Council. They distinguished that from prevention, or the longer term. They said that prevention is also appropriate in the nuclear age. You don't have to allow your enemies to threaten you, and you can take preventive action, but to do that, you need to go through certain steps. You need to try to get the United Nations to act. You need to try, if that doesn't work, to get multilateral organizations--NATO and others--to act. Individual preventive action should come as a last resort.
I think that's what Israel did in 1981 with the Osirak reactor. They sent their emissary, now the President of Israel, to France to try to persuade France to stop helping Iraq get nuclear. He failed. They went to the United Nations and that failed. There was a very brief window of opportunity before the nuclear reactor got hot, and it was during that window of opportunity that Israel acted and destroyed the nuclear reactor and set back the program at least 10 years. Tragically, there was one casualty, somebody who wasn't supposed to be there on a late Sunday afternoon.
Israel was condemned for that by the United Nations Security Council unanimously, with the support of the United States. Nine years later, the United States essentially apologized and thanked Israel for having taken that action, because had they not taken that action, Iraq would still be in Kuwait today. Saddam Hussein would still be the dictator of Iraq today. The world benefited enormously from Israel's pre-emptive action against Iraq.
I hope it doesn't come to that. This will be a much harder military action. And I hope there are sanctions and others that can stop Iraq and Iran in the same way as Libya was stopped. The military option can't be taken off the table and would be justified, if it had to be resorted to, as a matter of law.