10 November 2009: Middle East Bulletin
What is the status of the Iranian nuclear program?
Iran has learned to enrich uranium well enough to develop a small nuclear weapons program. It has stockpiled enough low-enriched uranium (LEU), which if further enriched—and that’s a big if—would be sufficient for at least one and a half bombs’ worth. At Natanz Iran is producing more LEU at a rate that would give it two bombs’ worth by February, at the latest. The smaller enrichment plant that was revealed near Qom may have been intended as part of a parallel clandestine effort that probably includes other still-secret facilities. Meanwhile Iran is constructing a research reactor at Arak that will be ideal for producing weapons-grade plutonium when it comes on-line, maybe in 2013. So, Iran’s nuclear program presents a challenge in various ways.
What is the worst- and best-case scenario in terms of the Iranian nuclear program for the international community and for the region?
The best solution would be if Iran followed the mandate of the Security Council, as expressed in five resolutions to date, and suspended the enrichment activity as well as construction of the plutonium-producing reactor while the parties negotiated a long-term solution under which
Iran would not resume these activities of concern until the world was satisfied that its intentions were peaceful.
Iran cannot use the enriched uranium for its civilian nuclear program for several years in any case, because it doesn’t have a fuel fabrication plant that is certified to produce the fuel. That’s a little known fact that Iran omits when it insists that it is producing enriched uranium only for peaceful purposes.
However, Iran shows absolutely no sign of abiding by the Security Council mandate and suspending enrichment, much less stopping it altogether, which is the ideal outcome. It’s very clear Iran is not going to give up enrichment. Maybe it would suspend some of its activity, but it’s not going to end it all together.
I think a more possible best-case outcome is one in which Iran accepts limitations on its program that would include shipping most of its low-enriched uranium to another country, so that it would never have a weapon’s worth on hand that it could quickly re-enrich to produce a weapon. If it got this LEU back in the form of fuel for its reactors, it would be a win-win outcome. Any solution would also require a level of inspections intrusive enough to give the international community confidence that Iran was not producing highly enriched uranium in a clandestine facility, like the one that was revealed at Qom. This means, at a minimum, Iranian acceptance of the IAEA Additional Protocol and adherence to IAEA rules about advance notification of new facilities. Transparency and limitations on its program are the best we can hope for.
You also asked what the worst scenario would be. In one way, it’s if Iran builds a nuclear weapon. But the real worst case would be if there’s a war to prevent Iran from building a nuclear weapon, and then it goes ahead and does so anyway, possibly in as much time or earlier than it would have in the first place.
You mentioned shipping the low-enriched uranium outside of Iran. There was a negotiation that reached that kind of a proposed agreement. How did that negotiation happen?
The tentative agreement that was reached in the meeting in Geneva on the first of October and further elaborated in discussions in Vienna later in the month would not have been a solution to the problem, but it would have put in place an important principle and precedent, whereby Iran would be sending its low-enriched uranium product out of the country for further processing and getting it back in the form of fuel. That was only a one-off deal for fuel for the Tehran Research Reactor. If that tentative deal had been agreed to by Iran’s leadership, however, it would have put in place a very helpful confidence-building measure that could have been built upon. It doesn’t look like it’s going to be accepted, though, by Iran’s leadership.
The genesis of the deal was an Iranian gambit of asking for replacement fuel for the Tehran Research Reactor, which may run out at the end of next year. Iran probably anticipated that no country would sell it the fuel because of all the sanctions it is under, and so it would claim an excuse to go ahead and enrich up to the 19.75 percent level that is required for this particular fuel. Iran right now enriches to about 3.5 percent. This would give it an excuse to go higher and once you get up to almost 20 percent, it doesn’t take much more effort to go the rest of the way to 90-plus percent for weapons-grade uranium. So, it was a ploy on Iran’s part, and I think the United States was very clever in calling Iran’s bluff and saying, ‘okay, we’ll arrange to have the fuel sent to you, but only by using your LEU. So, send most of your stockpile to Russia for further enrichment, and then to France for production of the fuel for the Tehran Research Reactor’—because France is one of only two or three countries that is certified to produce such fuel. It was a big gamble, for the United States, for France, and for Russia. I think it was admirable that they took the gamble and they put the onus on Iran to see whether it would be willing to accept this. As we’re seeing now it looks like they’re not.
And why do you think they’ve pulled back?
It’s not clear whether Iran was serious back on the first of October when it agreed tentatively to the deal. I don’t think its negotiators would have agreed to it if they didn’t have some support back in Tehran. But that support may have just come from one sector of what is a very fractious leadership where everyone is jockeying for power and trying to deny each other the big prize. The big prize is the United States. And even people who were seen as so-called moderates opposed it, including Moussavi, the presidential candidate supported by reformers, and Larijani, the leader of the parliament who is sometimes described as a pragmatic conservative. It’s ironic because Larijani was the one who, when he was nuclear negotiator, at least twice tried to reach some deal with the West, and both times had the rug pulled out from under him by Ahmadinejad and his hard-line supporters. No one in Tehran wants his political rivals to get credit for striking a deal with the United States. The deeply fractured political elite in Iran can’t get its act together. But it may also be that Iran was never serious about the deal to begin with.
Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei said yesterday that negotiating with the United States would be naive and perverted. How does that fit into the fractured landscape and what do you think that means for future negotiations?
Khamenei’s statement is really unhelpful. It reflects his deep distrust of the United States. He has said repeatedly in the past that any negotiation with the United States was treacherous because ‘if you give them an inch, they’ll take a mile’—that they’ll never cease demanding more concessions. He’s been very distrustful, but he must have given his tacit approval for the negotiators to have come up with this deal in the first place in Geneva. He is a very cautious man, however, and seeing the various factions rise up against the deal he has now cast his vote with the naysayers. I think this makes it much harder for Iran to agree to this deal, or to any deal that would provide a way out. This deal is very good for Iran, because it gives an implicit acceptance of their uranium enrichment program, which is something they’ve been saying for many years is the most important thing that they want. They get that out of this deal, but now they can’t take yes for an answer. They just can’t bring themselves to strike a deal with the ‘Great Satan,’ the United States.
Should they fully turn down this proposal, what options are left for the United States?
Iran is not going to fully, flatly turn it down. Iran’s typical negotiating style is never to say no and not to say yes, either, but to offer counterproposals that they know are non-starters, that are deal breakers. But by pretending to make a serious counteroffer, they try to put the onus on the other party. So, they’re not going to say no, but effectively, they are saying no by the conditions they are putting on the deal that would obviate any advantages of reducing their stockpile of accumulated LEU.
What’s going to happen now is that we’re going to return to the sanctions route. The United States and its allies will be putting increased pressure on the Iranian economy through financial sanctions. These will not necessarily be through the Security Council, but individual states can use their financial leverage to put pressure on the Iranian economy in various sectors such as transportation, insurance, banking, and so on. I don’t know that this additional pressure will have any more impact than sanctions to date have had in terms of changing Iran’s strategic calculations. I expect the Iranians will continue on their obstinate course of ignoring the Security Council, so we are going to be in for a protracted period of a kind of cold war, with sanctions increasingly harming the Iranian economy, but not sinking it to the point that Iran calls ‘uncle.’
I think Iran will realize that if it crosses certain lines that make it obvious that it is going for a nuclear weapon, then this would be a trigger for military action against it. I don’t think they will take that action. But the problem will be that meanwhile, they will be accumulating a stockpile of enriched uranium that Israel, in particular, won’t be able to abide by. Because the more LEU Iran accumulates, the closer it would be to bringing that up to HEU and making weapons out of it in a break-out scenario. And Israel won’t be able to abide by Iran getting that close. But how close would it have to be before Israel would take action? Nobody knows; probably Israel doesn’t know itself. It’s going to have to make some judgments probably next year as Iran’s stockpile crosses the two-weapons-worth line.
The 2007 U.S. National Intelligence Estimate [NIE] suggested that Iran had stopped working towards building a nuclear weapon, but there’s disagreement about that among other intelligence agencies.
It’s interesting that the British, the French, the Germans and the Israelis have all come out publicly to express their disagreement with the conclusion that Iran had continued to suspend its work on weapons development. I think most of them shared the conclusion that Iran took some step in 2003, but they don’t agree that Iran continued to suspend. The revelation that the facility at Qom is for the purpose of uranium enrichment, which Iran itself acknowledged, adds further doubt to the NIE conclusion that Iran had stopped work on a weapons program. I expect that the U.S. intelligence agencies will be re-scrubbing all the evidence and will be reassessing their judgments, which of course they would be doing anyway.
What are the implications if the other intelligence agencies are correct?
If the other intelligence agencies are correct that Iran had not stopped its weapons development work, the implications are probably that Iran today is closer to having a break-out capability than the world at large realizes. If Iran had been continuing to work on weapons design, it means that the period of time that it would take Iran to actually manufacture a weapon is shorter than would otherwise be the case. How short a time that is, is very hard to say. The amount of time and what it takes to produce a weapon is classified information and assessments about how far Iran got in its design work are also classified. I estimate that it might be as short as a year. And if Iran had done more work than is generally assumed to be the case, maybe it’s less than a year. Maybe it’s as little as six months.
So, what would be the effect of Iran breaking out of the NPT?
If Iran broke out of the NPT, I think it would face immediate military action. The effect would be war. It would start out as strikes on its nuclear facilities and any place where there was a presumption that it was working on the weapons, and where it had stored LEU and stored uranium hexafluoride. Iran would respond in some way and I think it would escalate from there.
But if the military action did not take out Iran’s burgeoning weapon, and if Iran actually acquired a weapon, I think the impact would be disastrous. It would have a devastating impact on the global non-proliferation regime by demonstrating that the concerted efforts of the Security Council, the IAEA governors and the NPT itself would have been proven ineffective in stopping a concerted proliferator.
If Iran acquires a nuclear weapon, I highly doubt it would be used purposely. Iran’s leadership would know that using a weapon would be suicidal. But there are various scenarios in which a weapon might be used—a mistake, or a miscalculation or it might fall into the wrong hands. I could easily image a scenario in which elements of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps, who have ongoing arms-supply relationships with groups that utilize terror, would be willing to transfer a nuclear weapon or fissile material that could be used in a dirty bomb to a group that would not so easily be deterred from using it. These are not the only worrisome scenarios.
One of the implications of Iran becoming a nuclear weapons state is that it wouldn’t end there. The likelihood is that one or more of Iran’s other neighbors would feel compelled to re-examine their defensive requirements and maybe seek their own nuclear weapons options. I’m not saying that that’s inevitable, but it certainly would increase the chances of a nuclear proliferation cascade. I think there are many other deleterious impacts of Iran having a nuclear weapon including the blackmail capability it would give Iran and the ability to employ hegemonic designs in the region to push its weight around with the assumption that having a nuclear weapon would protect it from retaliation. I believe it would be wrong in that regard, but I think that we could expect that a nuclear-armed Iran would be even more willing to promote instability in the region. And that’s one of the reasons that Israel could not abide by it.
If you were to advise President Obama on what to do next, what would you suggest?
I would continue to look for ways in which Iran could be persuaded to send its LEU out of the country. The United States has been very patient with Iran, giving it time to reply even though it looks like the reply is negative, which Iran has not yet said in a written response. There may be other ways in which Iran could be persuaded, but I don’t think that the United States needs to offer any further incentives to Iran. Enough incentives have been tabled. I would advise that if Iran continues to reject this very attractive offer, that the United States has to work with its allies to ratchet up the pressure while continuing an engagement strategy and keeping alive the incentives that have been offered so that Iran’s choice remains very vivid and becomes even more vivid as the sanctions bite harder. Ultimately, if Iran is not dissuaded, I think that containment and deterrence can work to prevent Iran from actually building a nuclear weapon. Deterrence worked during the Cold War to prevent much more powerful adversaries from using nuclear weapons. In this case, deterrence would have to mean not just not using a nuclear weapon but not producing a nuclear weapon, and I think Iran could be so deterred.
