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Iran’s confrontation with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) over its nuclear program is moving, though slowly, towards some sort of crisis point. The decision to “report” (but not “refer”) Iran to the United Nations Security Council, taken by the major powers and about to be implemented at presstime, actually gives Iran until an IAEA meeting in March to reach some arrangement that will avoid the possibility of sanctions of some sort. The Russian proposal — an offer to process uranium for Iran, returning it to Iran while assuring that it is not enriched to weapons grade — is one compromise that has been proposed.
Although the real negotiator on nuclear matters is the head of Iran’s National Security Council, ‘Ali Larijani, the public statements of President Mahmud Ahmadinejad have drawn much attention. It seems clear that Ahmadinejad (though not himself involved in the nuclear negotiations) is seeking to make the issue one on which Iran can appeal to the non-Western world in the name of other states who resent what many see as a double standard in proliferation: the existing nuclear states are allowed to retain nuclear weapons, and to deny them to everyone else. In the Middle East, it is impossible to discuss the nuclear ambitions of regional states without having to hear about the hypocrisy of allowing Israel to maintain a nuclear arsenal (though “allowing” is not exactly an appropriate word when dealing with a nuclear-armed state) while denying that privilege to others.
Hundreds of thousands of words, studies, and reports have already been devoted to the Iranian issue and how to deal with it. This Dossier seeks to examine some of the possible options available and their risks, providing an overview of a situation in which military force may not be practically applicable.
On June 7, 1981, the Israeli Air Force attacked Iraq’s Osirak reactor (also known as Tammuz) at the al-Tuwaitha nuclear research center near Baghdad. That attack, widely denounced at the time, has become a model pointed to by many as a possible means of dealing with the Iranian nuclear program.
Although the Israeli strike certainly set back Iraq’s nuclear ambitions by destroying its reactor, it did not end those ambitions. Once international inspectors arrived in the wake of the 1991 war with Iraq, it was discovered that, having shifted emphasis from plutonium production (the supposed intent of Osirak) to uranium enrichment, Iraq had come much further in its pursuit of a nuclear weapon than foreign intelligence sources had imagined. Osirak may have delayed development by several years (and thus, arguably, allowed Iraq to be defeated in a conventional war over Kuwait, which would have been less likely had it had nuclear arms), but it did not deter Baghdad from its program.
There are those who have urged either the United States or Israel to “take out” Iran’s nuclear program in the way that Israel took out Osirak in 1981. But a quarter century later, the situation is not really analagous. Iran’s nuclear program is not limited to a single research center. Although the Uranium Conversion Facility at the Esfahan Nuclear Technology Center is perhaps the greatest cause for concern, the Pilot Fuel Enrichment Plant and the partly-underground Fuel Enrichment Plant at Natanz are also a critical target, known to have been designed with hardened, underground facilities. There are a number of other key research cites, including a research reactor in Tehran, the longstanding reactor under construction at Bushehr, and many research facilities. The Natanz site was not declared to the IAEA until after its existence had been revealed by Iranian exile groups, and it is by no means unlikely that there are other secret sites, perhaps underground. All of Iran’s “special weapons facilities” — nuclear related research as well as chemical and biological centers — number in the dozens.
Any look at options in dealing with Iran’s program must take into account the dispersed nature of the facilities and the difficulty of being certain of success.
Is Iran Really Working on a Weapon?
To be fair, one needs to acknowledge at the beginning that Iranian leaders continue to insist that their nuclear program is peaceful, is not aimed at developing a nuclear weapon, and in fact that several Iranian figures have argued that Islam forbids the use of nuclear weapons. Given the fact that the United States failed to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, is it possible that Iran is not trying to develop a nuclear weapon?
Iran’s record is not reassuring. The fact that several key nuclear facilities were developed and built without declaring them to the IAEA under the Non-Proliferation Treaty (of which Iran is a signatory) suggests that the program was clandestine; if Iran’s program is genuinely peaceful and legitimate under the NPT, why did it not declare all its sites until 2003? An IAEA report has also spoken of plans which showed how to form enriched uranium into hemispheres, a technology that would seem to have only one practical use: an implosion weapon.
The fact that “peaceful” nuclear research facilities have been used in weapons development in the past also is not reassuring. Israel never signed the NPT, and therefore has never had to open up its reactors to inspectors. Pakistan pursued a clandestine effort that led to development of weapons, and North Korea famously pledged cooperation with the West while covertly developing its weapons capability. Although Iran insists that it is solely interested in electrical generation, there are questions about why it has so determinedly concentrated on creating a complete fuel cycle, with uranium enrichment as a major goal, and with reports that it is also seeking to produce plutonium.
If Iran is not seeking to develop a weapon, it has behaved rather as if it it would if it were doing so. Admittedly, Iraq also behaved as if it had a great deal to hide from weapons inspectors, and perhaps Iran is just safeguarding its sovereignty, not hiding a bomb in the basement.
On the other hand, there have been semi-public debates in the Iranian press about the right to acquire nuclear weapons, and there is little doubt that the issue is actually popular with the Iranian public, something that can be said of few other policies of the clerical regime. Even many Iranian exiles in the West, opponents of the present regime, reflexively defend Iran’s right to nuclear research. It has become an issue of nationalist pride, and the regime has recognized that it can use that issue to strengthen its support at home.
Diplomatic Options: Can They Work?
Possible military options will be discussed in greater detail momentarily. It is clear that in this case even the United States, despite its eagerness to use preemption in Iraq in 2003, prefers a diplomatic solution to a military one. If Iran’s goals really are peaceful uses of nuclear power, it is hard to see why a proposed compromise (such as the Russian proposal) might not work. If Iran is genuinely concealing a weapons program, diplomacy may only give it time to perfect a weapon.
One problem is that once a country reaches a certain technological level and possesses a workable weapon design, the only obstacle to developing a weapon is acquisition of fissionable materials. Iran certainly has the technological base and apparently has acquired much technology from Pakistan’s A.Q. Khan and perhaps from other sources, presumably giving it a workable bomb design. That means that the acquisition of plutonium or highly enriched uranium is the only thing standing between it and actual construction of a weapon.
Once a country reaches that “point of no return,” it is relatively easy for it to develop a weapon clandestinely, as was done by Israel, Pakistan, South Africa and North Korea. Of those countries only South Africa eventually renounced nuclear weapons, dismantling the four devices it admitted to having constructed. (Ukraine, Belarus and Kazakhstan also renounced nuclear weapons which they had inherited from the Soviet Union and transferred them to Russian territory.) But no one doubts that South Africa could build bombs again if it chose to do so, and even if North Korea at some point agrees to give up its nuclear program, few would rest comfortably without at least a suspicion that it still had a bomb in the basement. Israel has made ambiguity about its weapons a fundamental element of its policy (though that policy is itself being questioned by some Israeli strategists in the age of proliferation). In short, after a certain point, even if Iran says it has given up any desire for a weapon, there can be little confidence that it cannot build one somewhere if it continues to maintain a certain level of secrecy over its facilities and drag its feet on IAEA inspections.
So, though diplomatic negotiations might lead to an Iranian agreement to, say, abandon its uranium enrichment program in exchange for Russian enrichment of uranium for Iran, there would always be a suspicion that undeclared sites remained and that somewhere, Iran was either producing or aquiring fissionable materials.
Sanctions?
Short of a diplomatic solution, the obvious other non-military choice is sanctions. Sanctions did not change Iraqi policies despite more than a decade of application; in the present oil market, attempts to bar Iranian oil and natural gas from the market would lead to higher prices and probably would meet with resistance from Russia and China in the UN, and there would certainly be much leakage. Lesser sanctions would likely have little effect: Iran will not back down over a ban on pistachios. Yet sanctions may be the only real choice absent a suitable military option, and it seems likely that some sort of sanctions will be tried at some point, assuming Iran does not cut a deal.
Is There a Military Option?
The Iranian nuclear problem is a real quandary for Western non-proliferation policy (as is the North Korean case). In the case of North Korea, the fact that the country claims to already possess a few weapons makes a military strike almost impossible (added to the fact that Seoul is located so close to the demilitarized zone). In the Iranian case, military action might be possible before Iran obtains a weapon, but such action is constrained by the realities of the situation.
An Israeli strike is virtually out of the question, though Israeli Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz and others have periodically issued warnings. Iran’s sites are mostly inland, in the Tehran-Esfahan area, and at the extreme range of Israeli fighter-bombers; in-flight refueling would be essential. But an Israeli strike would have to fly across Iraqi or Saudi airspace, and even if they could do so with impunity, in the Iraqi case the United States would be seen as being in collusion. (Talk of submarine-launched cruise missiles fired from the Gulf raises multiple problems as well. Such weapons, used with conventional warheads, probably would not be enough to do the job; Israel is less than likely to reveal its submarine capabilities in this instance, since they probably constitute its nuclear second-strike capability.)
As for a US strike, certainly the US has the capabilities, in Iraq, in Afghanistan, or from carriers in the Gulf or Mediterranean, but given the dispersal and hardened, underground facilities a single, one-shot strike like Israel’s in 1981 is not sufficient. A sustained bombing campaign would be required, and even then, it could not guarantee that all the secret facilities have been discovered or that the bombing would destroy them.
There are those, however, who say that the danger is great enough to justify a sustained bombing campaign, even if it only sets Iran’s program back by five or ten years. That would give more time for a regime change that might mean that an eventually nuclear Iran would no longer be a rogue in international affairs.
The problem with this argument is that it assumes that Iran would endure a sustained bombing campaign without striking back elsewhere. In fact, Iran is in a particularly strong position because of its ability to strike back. Radical Iraqi Shi‘ite leader Muqtada al-Sadr has already pledged that his Mahdi Army would defend Iran if it were attacked; the threat that Iran could provoke a revolt in the Shi‘ite regions of Iraq is not to be dismissed lightly. The present Iraq government’s largest constituent party is the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), which operated from Iran before the fall of Saddam Hussein.
Besides the threat to Iraq, Iran can cause major problems in Lebanon through its client Hizbullah, and Iran also has the potential for threatening tanker traffic through the Strait of Hormuz, as it did late in the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s. A sustained bombing campaign therefore 1) might not do the job, 2) could provoke responses which would be unacceptably costly in Iraq or in the Gulf.
As for the idea that, since one cannot do it with a bombing campaign, one should simply invade and change the regime as was done in Iraq seems particularly naive, though the argument has been heard. Is an Army (presumably American) going to ascend the Zagros mountains and invade the huge Iranian plateau with an insurgency still raging at its back in Iraq? Is the already overstretched US Army capable of occupying a country far bigger and more populous than Iraq, a country that can only be entered through a mountain barrier? The commitment in Iraq precludes such an intervention in Iran, even if it might have been possible without the Iraqi war.
So the military options are not very palatable: they are either too little (a single strike, perhaps even sustained bombing), too dangerous (given Iran’s ability to strike back in Iraq and the Gulf, and through supporting surrogate groups elsewhere), or impossible given available resources (an invasion). Yet diplomacy is unlikely to guarantee a real end to Iran’s program.
Is Proliferation Inevitable?
Of course, if neither the various diplomatic nor military options work and Iran is indeed working on a nuclear weapon (it would be imprudent to accept it at its word and assume it is not), then what alternative does the rest of the world face? The problem of living with a nuclear Iran seems to be unacceptable as well, at least so long as Iran continues to behave as it has been doing. Mahmud Ahmadinejad’s comments about Israel and the Holocaust certainly give Iran’s enemies considerable ammunition for urging some sort of action against its nuclear program, and his talk about the return of the Mahdi is disturbing as well. If Imam Mahdi is due back within two years, do we want this man to have the power to provoke an apocalypse?
But of course Ahmadinejad does not have that power. As Muhammad Khatami found, the Iranian President has only as much power as the religious leader and other institutions of the state will give him, and there are signs (See Defense Briefs in the last issue) that he is under considerable pressure and perhaps faces physical dangers.
That raises the question, of course, of an unstable Iran. One of the disturbing elements of nuclear proliferation is the concern that nuclear technology will somehow be transferred to non-state actors. Certainly everyone knows al-Qa‘ida wants a nuclear weapon, and there has been much concern about “loose nukes” in the former Soviet Union. Questions about Pakistan’s stability and North Korea’s sanity drive concerns about those countries’ nuclear capabilities. Given the rapid proliferation of recent years, such nightmares have increased, and we have not yet (in the famous subtitle of Dr. Strangelove) learned to stop worrying and love the bomb.
But it is possible at least that we may have little choice. After North Korea and Iran, pressures will build on other countries to go nuclear. The North Korean bomb has already led to some soul-searching in South Korea, Taiwan, and famously anti-nuclear Japan; an Iranian bomb, following on the Israeli and Pakistani bombs, could open the door to proliferation in the Middle East. Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Turkey could develop weapons with little difficulty; Syria and Algeria are perhaps a bit farther away; the ex-Soviet states of the Caucasus have the technology and some leftover Soviet facilities. Pandora’s box may be opening.
The Non-Proliferation Treaty was opened for signature in 1968 and entered into force in 1970. The NPT committed the nuclear powers to seeking to move towards nuclear disarmament while committing non-nuclear powers to remain so. Since the ratification of the NPT, Israel, South Africa, Pakistan, India, and probably North Korea developed nuclear weapons. The pre-existing nuclear powers have done little to reduce their arsenals or move away from their weapons. Many non-nuclear powers are asking whether the NPT is no longer useful.
Iran began its nuclear program under the Shah; it will likely retain a nuclear program under any regime that succeeds the Islamic Republic. Dealing on a case-by-case basis with rogues such as Iran and North Korea may forestall the dangers for a time, but the fundamental problem of proliferation and its perils needs to be addressed. |
