Nevermind the finer points of the
bargain being struck with Iran. Here’s why the entire premise is faulty—and
dangerous.
June 15, 2015
As the June 30 deadline for striking a comprehensive nuclear
deal with Iran looms, discussions quickly get bogged down in debates about
numbers and types of centrifuges, schedules for sanctions relief, and
procedures for international inspections. These arcane issues cause many
people’s eyes to glaze over, but, in reality, the details of the ongoing
negotiations are acutely irrelevant to the merits of the deal that the Obama
Administration wants to strike.
Indeed,
one can assess the merits of the outlined nuclear deal without any reference
whatsoever to its finer points. The framework deal does not even come close to
qualifying as an acceptable nuclear agreement, and the reason is simple and
easy to understand: Since the beginning of the nuclear era, scientists have
understood that the exact same technology could be used to produce fuel either
for nuclear energy or for nuclear weapons. The two methods for producing
nuclear fuel, uranium enrichment and plutonium reprocessing, therefore, became
known as “sensitive nuclear technologies.” The United States has always opposed
the spread of sensitive nuclear technologies to all states, including its own
allies, and it should not make an exception for Iran.
I personally worked on
nuclear issues both in and out of government (including at the Pentagon and other
agencies) for over a decade, and I and many of my colleagues had always assumed
that the only way to prevent nuclear proliferation in Iran would be to
eliminate its uranium enrichment capability. For over a decade, U.S. policy
reflected this assessment. Throughout the 2000s, the Bush Administration
engaged in international negotiations with Iran, but its bottom line never
changed: The only deal worth having was one that stopped enrichment in Iran.
Senator and U.S. presidential candidate Barack Obama also supported this goal, saying at
a 2007 meeting of AIPAC, “The world must work to stop Iran’s uranium-enrichment
program.”
The
policy that both Democratic and Republican presidents and presidential
candidates have supported for the past seven decades is a sensible compromise
that encourages the peaceful uses of nuclear technology while managing its
proliferation dangers: Countries can operate nuclear reactors for power or
research purposes, but they are not permitted to make their own fuel. The vast
majority of countries on Earth with nuclear programs do not possess sensitive
nuclear facilities. Rather the fuel is provided by a more advanced nuclear
power, such as Russia, France, or the United States. This eliminates the need
for the spread of dangerous enrichment or reprocessing programs to new
countries. Countries like Iran that insist on developing their own sensitive
technologies for “peaceful purposes,” therefore, are tipping their hand and
revealing a likely intention to build the bomb.
To
stop determined proliferators, the United States and the rest of the
international community have worked hard to halt the spread of enrichment and
reprocessing technologies, a campaign that has been prosecuted with equal vigor
by Democratic and Republican administrations alike. The enforcement of this
policy began even before nuclear weapons were invented, when Norwegian
saboteurs and allied bombing runs knocked out a heavy-water production facility
necessary for the plutonium path to the bomb (and similar to Iran’s heavy-water
production facility under construction at Arak) located in Nazi-occupied
Norway. It continued after World War II as the United States tried to prevent
the leaking of dangerous nuclear know-how. In 1946, the U.S. Congress passed
the McMahon Act, which made it illegal for the United States to cooperate with
any country, including its closest allies, on sensitive nuclear technologies.
Even countries that had worked with the United States to invent the bomb at the
Manhattan project, like Canada and Great Britain, were cut off.
Several
advanced industrial countries, including Britain, France, Germany, and the
Netherlands, were able to develop sensitive nuclear technologies early in the
nuclear era without Washington’s assistance, but this only reinforced the
United States’ understanding about the potential dangers of these dual-use
nuclear technologies.
When
America’s Cold War adversaries, the Soviet Union and China, began enrichment
and reprocessing programs, the United States immediately interpreted these as
the building blocks of a nuclear weapons program, and high-level U.S. decision
makers seriously considered military strikes against these facilities to keep
these countries from the bomb. (In the end, they refrained only because they
feared starting a superpower war, something that has not been a concern since
the Soviet Union’s collapse in 1989.)
Not
even Israel, America’s longstanding security partner, was spared from America’s
deep commitment to nonproliferation. When the U.S. government suspected that
Israel was building a secret reprocessing plant beneath its reactor at Dimona
in the early 1960s, U.S. President John F. Kennedy demanded that Israel allow
inspectors on the site. Kennedy wrote a letter to Israeli Prime Minister David
Ben-Gurion, threatening that if Israel were not more forthcoming about an issue
as important to international security as the possible existence of a secret
plutonium reprocessing plant, then “America’s deep commitment to the security
of Israel” could be “jeopardized.”
The
United States soon understood that it would need a multilateral framework for
managing the spread of nuclear weapons, and in 1968 it led the negotiations of
the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT). All nonnuclear weapon state
signatories, including Iran, agreed never to build nuclear weapons in exchange
for several benefits, including the “inalienable right to peaceful nuclear
technology.” Iran insists that this treaty grants it a “right to enrich,” but
the NPT does not explicitly mention uranium enrichment, and the United States
has never interpreted Article IV as providing an inalienable right to sensitive
nuclear technologies.
To
further strengthen multilateral bulwarks against the spread of sensitive
nuclear technologies, then-U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger spearheaded
the creation of the Nuclear Suppliers Group in 1975. This international cartel
of capable nuclear supplier states places tough restrictions on the transfer of
uranium enrichment and plutonium reprocessing technologies.
The
strength of the United States’ nonproliferation approach can be seen in the
vast majority of countries that never attempted to develop sensitive nuclear
technologies, but when these measures were not enough, Washington went to work
on a case-by-case basis to put an end to sensitive nuclear programs, even
taking the gloves off in standoffs with friends. In 1975, when Germany planned
to build enrichment and reprocessing plants for Brazil in the so-called nuclear
“deal of the century,” Washington intervened to slow and eventually kill the
deal. In the late 1970s, it also convinced France to cancel the sale of a
plutonium reprocessing plant to Pakistan and in 1985 it blocked the transfer of
reprocessing technology from Argentina to Libya. When U.S. allies Taiwan and
South Korean began reprocessing programs in the late 1970s, the United States
threatened to withdraw America’s security guarantee if the programs continued
and the countries relented. As one Taiwanese scientist said, “After the
Americans got through with us, we wouldn’t have been able to teach physics here
on Taiwan.” In a 2008 nuclear deal with the United Arab Emirates, Washington
developed a new “gold standard” for peaceful nuclear cooperation, requiring
that in exchange for American nuclear assistance Abu Dhabi agree to forswear
any future enrichment and reprocessing regardless of the source of the
material.
Washington
has bargained with rogue states over disputed nuclear programs in the past, but
its terms were always clear and uncompromising: Sensitive nuclear technologies
would not be allowed. The 1994 Agreed Framework with North Korea permitted
light-water nuclear reactors, but not plutonium reprocessing. When it became
clear that Pyongyang had been cheating on the deal from day one by secretly enriching
uranium, Washington sought to shut that program down, demanding nothing less
than “complete, verifiable, and irreversible disarmament.”
In an agreement with Libya
in 2003, a textbook example of
successful nuclear diplomacy, Moammar Qaddafi agreed to give up everything.
U.S. military aircraft transferred over 55,000 pounds of nuclear equipment out
of the country, including its stockpile of centrifuges and centrifuge parts,
within weeks of concluding the deal.
Which
brings us to Iran. Throughout the 1990s, suspicious procurement patterns led
the United States to believe that Iran was building a secret enrichment
program. In 1995, Moscow agreed to provide Iran with a uranium enrichment
plant, but Washington intervened and convinced Russia to cancel the deal. The
United States could live with Iranian nuclear reactors at Bushehr, but uranium
enrichment was out of the question. Then, in 2002, a dissident group in Iran
announced that Tehran was building a secret enrichment facility at Natanaz. The
United States immediately demanded that Iran halt its enrichment program. The
position was not harsh or unexpected: It was simply a continuation of decades
of U.S. nonproliferation policy.
The
United States, under Presidents George W. Bush and Obama, worked to bring the
rest of the world on board. In six separate U.N. Security Resolutions, the
international community demanded that Iran “suspend all enrichment-related and
reprocessing activities.”
Then,
suddenly, in what can only be described as a desperate attempt to get a deal
with Iran regardless of the terms, the Obama Administration abandoned this
70-year-old bipartisan mainstay of U.S. nonproliferation policy—a policy that
has stopped many countries from getting the bomb and thereby reduced the global
threat of nuclear war. In the interim deal with Iran in November 2013,
Washington and the rest of the P5+1 recognized a de facto right to enrichment
in Iran. Over the past 18 months, the United States has engaged in the
unprecedented act of haggling over the size and scope, not the existence, of an
illegal enrichment program in a rogue state.
Some
of my colleagues argue that a deal that places limits on Iran’s enrichment
program would be a logical extension of U.S. nonproliferation policy. They
claim that in the past, when the United States has failed in its initial goal
of preventing the spread of sensitive nuclear technologies, it has negotiated
to place pragmatic limits on other aspects of nuclear programs. In confidential
understandings with South Africa, Pakistan, and Israel, America contented
itself with limits on nuclear testing, weaponization, and public declarations
of nuclear weapons capabilities, respectively. Therefore, they argue, Iran
should be no different.
There
are several problems with this line of argumentation but foremost among them is
that all the examples these critics cite are of countries that were already de
facto nuclear powers and that eventually went on to build the bomb. If
Washington’s goal is to simply manage Iran’s entry into the nuclear club, then
the proposed nuclear deal can be rationalized. But that is not the case that
the Obama Administration is making to Congress and the public, where there is a
bipartisan consensus in favor of a policy of prevention.
A
deal that allows Iran to keep a uranium enrichment program will not prevent
Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons. Instead, it will make an Iranian bomb more
likely. It also increases the risk of a nuclear arms race in the region. Then
there is the matter of setting a dangerous precedent: It will be impossible for
Washington to argue that it trusts Iran with sensitive nuclear facilities but
not its friends and allies. To make matters even worse, in the wake of a deal,
all of this will happen with the international community’s stamp of approval.
Seventy years of successful U.S.-led nonproliferation policy will have been
trashed.
In
sum, if to this point you have been confused about the arcane technical details
in the Iran nuclear negotiations, save yourself some trouble. Unless the
negotiators return to insisting on zero enrichment, their efforts deserve zero
support.
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