The Iranian Fallout

nationalinterest.org
by David Kay
09.02.2008

IT WOULD be both impossible and foolish to predict what lies immediately ahead for Iran. Will the United States or Israel drop bombs on the country? Will there be more sanctions? Air strikes? Negotiations? Threat assessment and war planning are (or at least should be) all about best-guessing capabilities and intentions. We need to make sound judgments about what a state can actually achieve, the leadership’s possible goals and the prospects for a bridgeable peace among the main actors in the crisis.

When it comes to Iran, these calculations are difficult to make. The country is a chimera. Tehran’s statements and intentions are often contradictory; displays of military strength juxtapose the proclamation of civilian use of nuclear technology; its capabilities are shrouded in secrecy; and its negotiating partners are at times volatile. Even still, there are some things we can—and must—figure out.

FIRST, WE do a run-through of the capabilities. We know that Tehran has a nascent nuclear program. We also know what it would take to develop a fully functioning nuclear-weapons capability. When we line up what we know and what we can best-guess, it looks like Iran is 80 percent of the way to a functioning nuclear weapon.

Nuclear-weapons 101: every program needs the raw materials, a way to refine them and, in the final throes, the weaponization. Getting and enriching the materials is the hardest part. A state needs to turn its raw material—unprocessed uranium—into fissionable material—highly enriched uranium or plutonium. Without this, a nuclear reaction is impossible. The unprocessed uranium needs to be made reactor- or weapons-ready. In the case of fissionable-grade uranium, that just means using high-speed gas centrifuges, separating the isotope that can be used as a nuclear fuel (U-235) from the heavier nonfissionable one (U-238). If a state opts to use fissionable plutonium in reactions instead, this material isn’t naturally occurring, but is manufactured by irradiating natural uranium in nuclear reactors and then separating out Pu-239, the plutonium isotope that is fissionable.

How does Iran’s nuclear program measure up on this front? The situation is a bit murky, but here is what we know, thanks in large part to the work of IAEA inspectors and a growing body of UN Security Council sanctions against Iran. Tehran has admitted that, for a period of at least eighteen years, it concealed a large number of activities in violation of its Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty obligation.

Basically, Tehran now has a handle on these two most difficult first steps: getting the uranium and turning it into fissionable material. Significant amounts of uranium hexafluoride (UF6, 1000 kg), uranium tetrafluoride (UF4, 400 kg) and uranium dioxide (UO2, 400 kg) were imported from China in 1991.

Iran has also attempted to produce weapons-grade material: Tehran subsequently used the materials obtained from China in their secret enrichment efforts, and have acquired designs, materials and samples of gas centrifuges for uranium enrichment from the A. Q. Khan network. They undertook plutonium-separation experiments between 1988 and 1993 that resulted in separated plutonium and irradiated wastes. Iran has also built and tested a uranium-conversion test facility that produced uranium metal, and they constructed the Kalaye Electric Company workshop, a pilot uranium-enrichment facility. In 1999, Tehran used unreported UF6 to begin centrifuge testing, and concealed the subsequent production of low-enriched uranium. Even more advanced, there has been substantial experimentation at two sites with laser enrichment—a much-more efficient process than centrifuge-based enrichment, which means it takes less effort to produce the highly enriched uranium—using Atomic Vapor Laser Isotope Separation, a technique even the most technologically advanced states have not perfected.

Paralleling the unmasking of the previously secret nuclear activities, Iran has continued to accelerate its (now acknowledged) uranium-centrifuge program, a vital step in creating the weapons-grade material—solidifying their technological gains. They have moved from a poor design in their first centrifuges to an advanced design that will be more reliable and more efficient. If these forthcoming six thousand new-design centrifuges were working for a year, they could produce about five weapons. My best guess is they are about two to four years away from accomplishing this.

NEXT COMES weaponization. The fissionable material must be converted into metal and packaged. That requires surrounding the fuel with very energetic high explosives that are specially shaped to focus the energy on the fissionable core. An additional source of neutrons, like polonium alloyed with beryllium, is needed to ensure the sustainable nuclear reaction occurs. All of these components must then be wrapped in a dense material capable of reflecting neutrons back into the explosive core for the brief nanosecond that it takes an explosive nuclear reaction to run its course. Once packaged, there must also be electronic triggering devices capable of setting the explosives off simultaneously, with no room for error—that is, if you want to have a nuclear explosion. And then, of course, all of this needs to be designed to fit into the warhead of its delivery vehicle, most likely a missile.

Here again, Iran has made substantial progress. They are making headway in this second half of the process—the weaponization. These additional nuclear-related activities, which have direct bearing on nuclear-weapons development, include testing of high-explosive lenses, beryllium-reflector-design polonium production to provide the reaction-sustaining neutrons and the machining of uranium metal.

What remains is to produce these elements in adequate numbers and amounts; combine them in an engineering design that will ensure they work and that fits on a missile; and gain confidence that the resulting weapons will get the job done. Of all these challenges, clearly the most demanding is to produce enough of their advanced centrifuges and get them working continuously to produce adequate amounts of highly enriched uranium for nuclear weapons.

NOW, ALL this is public knowledge. Of course, even more is suspected; much is rumored by Iranian dissident groups but with no independent confirmation; and most of the important questions relating to plans, intent and progress on crucial elements of weaponization are simply unknown.

And it’s the only partially understood and suspect activities that are most alarming. They include detection by IAEA inspectors of samples of highly enriched, weapons-grade uranium; more extensive plutonium separation than Iran has admitted; weapons-design work; construction of a heavy-water reactor and its associated heavy-water-production facility; design work on missile-reentry vehicles that seem to be for a nuclear weapon; and reports of yet-undiscovered programs and facilities. If all of these activities were reality, it would mean Iran is moving faster and is closer to obtaining nuclear-weapons capability than the hard facts imply. Obtaining that last 20 percent of elements needed to make a nuclear weapon would take perhaps only one to two years if these things were true, instead of the four to seven years needed if they were not.

On top of these suspicions, there are plenty of unanswered questions. We still do not know the answers to the most important ones, even though we do know more about Iran’s nuclear program than we have known at a similar point about others—the USSR, China, Israel, South Africa, Brazil, North Korea. In fact, we know a lot more about Iran than we did about Iraq—both times. First time around, we thought Baghdad didn’t have a nuclear-weapons program, only to discover an extensive one that placed the country within months of producing a crude nuclear weapon, and probably only twenty-four months away from having enough highly enriched uranium for a more advanced nuclear weapon. Iraq War redux, we thought they were well on their way to a resurgent nuclear program, and came to find they had virtually nothing. As is more often than not the case in the world of intelligence and weapons proliferation, the critical unknowns might be the most important, but they are also hard-to-impossible to resolve with any certainty. So, here is what we don’t know:

What are Iran’s real intentions with regard to its nuclear activities? Does it really only seek to develop an indigenous peaceful nuclear-power program that covers the full fuel cycle? Is it after a virtual nuclear-weapons capability similar to Japan’s where all the elements are present except the final weaponization, testing and assembly? Is it hell-bent, as many believe, on acquiring and deploying actual nuclear weapons? Has a decision even been made at the highest levels of the Iranian government as to what it wants to eventually do?
If Iran has made or will make a decision to acquire nuclear weapons, how long will it take and how many can it produce per year?
How much foreign assistance was there and from whom did Iran get help? Did this help include advance nuclear-weapons designs that would make it unnecessary for Iran to do its own design and testing?
Are there unknown clandestine nuclear facilities and, if so, how many doing what?
What are the real capabilities of Iran’s various weapons-delivery options? Particularly its missiles?
What are the command-and-control arrangements for Iran’s nuclear program and any nuclear weapons that may result? Where is President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in this mix? Are we any better off if he is not in control? If nuclear weapons are acquired by Iran, how will it control them (physical security), command them (determined by when and against whom they should be used) and communicate this to those in control of the weapons, and provide warning as to when Iran may be about to come under attack (use them or lose them)?
This dirty-laundry list is one reason why efforts to summarize and draw net assessments about where the program is and where it is going have proven so contentious. The last U.S.-government attempt in December 2007 to produce a National Intelligence Estimate (“Iran: Nuclear Intentions and Capabilities”) led to a comedy that was remarkable even by Washington’s relaxed standards. The director of national intelligence, in whose name all NIEs should be issued, disassociated himself from its conclusion that Iran did not have an ongoing nuclear-weapons program. He was joined in this view by the president, most proliferation analysts and experts outside of government, and the secretary of defense who, in a speech at West Point, declared that Iran was “hell-bent on acquiring nuclear weapons.”

In reality, all this amounts to a country with known nuclear ambitions, a track record of violating international obligations in pursuit of those goals and lots of unanswered questions.

SO, WE ARE left with some pretty-frightening knowledge about their nuclear-weapons program. Still to decipher: their intentions.

In light of what we know about Iranian capabilities, the big unanswered question is whether they have the intention to take it to the next level and actually build a weapon. Plus, in such a volatile region, there is always the question of spillover—whether others in the neighborhood will respond to that intent, be it real or perceived.

On the one hand, if we look at Iranian rhetoric, Tehran claims to only want to pursue a civilian nuclear program. On the other hand, they say they want to wipe Israel off the map. It’s difficult to know what to believe. Couple this with an indecipherable weapons program, and matters only get worse.

What truly gets tensions running high, though, is that Iran views the world with an understandable and realpolitik skepticism and fear. Iran’s history is filled with eras of unbelievable glory almost always followed by invasions and subjugation. At times the light of the Persian nation has been so dimmed as to almost fade into the fog of mythology. Its neighbors and various “great powers” have tried to conquer or convert it to something more to their liking. In the modern age, it has endured British colonial superiority, American political subversion to remove a democratically elected government, and constant Saudi efforts to subvert and eliminate the Shia variant of Islam practiced in Iran. The result is a political culture that is, outside of Israel, the most cosmopolitan in the Middle East, but also deeply suspicious of all outsiders, and in many ways even other Iranians. Daily interactions, as well as all diplomacy, seem to be duplicitous and truth is infinitely pliable. Pride in the past, incessant fear of the power of others and a determination to prevail and preserve the nation and regime mark the bedrock of the Iranian strategic view. Iranians have learned to fear the power of others and to believe that they must ultimately organize their world in a way that lessens the power of more muscular nations, the states that must pose the greatest threat.

For Iran, the essential national-security threat has never been Israel. Israel does not pose an ideological alternative to the Shia country, either within Iran’s borders or within those of its neighbors—Zionist ideology, of course, holds little appeal for the Persian or Arab masses. Iran recognizes the limitations of Israeli military power as the ability to wreak terrible destruction, but only in the final act of its own self-destruction. Most importantly, Iran does not worry that Israel can organize and build a regional coalition that will limit the power of Iran or might even topple the regime. Only one state has that power in the eyes of Tehran—the United States.

For the Iranian regime, therefore, there can be no greater threat than the United States. Proof lies not in secret intelligence of U.S. war plans, but in seventy years of U.S. alliance building to surround Iran, a web of American military bases, forward deployments of military forces, rash acts by the United States (such as shooting down an Iranian civilian airliner) and Iran’s belief in a multitude of acts of U.S. political subversion—some observed, others suspected and a great many more imagined.

All of this helps us make a best guess at Iranian intentions.

Iran may decide to react to the growing volume of evidence that some type of military action is looming by temporizing and negotiating to let the immediate storm clouds dissipate. Or it may decide that this evidence of military preparations is all an elaborate psychological-warfare exercise filled with sound and fury but without any real threat. Bottom line, it looks like they will likely try to appear accommodating to further negotiations. At the same time, they will not too subtly remind other states of the consequences to the world economy that would arise if there were any disruption in the flow of oil from the Middle East and the serious problems that Iran could cause for the United States in Iraq. My humble best guess is that Iran is pushing ahead toward a nuclear-weapons capability as rapidly as it can. But, if Tehran believes that American—not Israeli—military action is imminent, it may well slow work on the elements of its program that it thinks the world can observe. Such temporizing would only be tactical. Its strategic goal is to maintain nuclear weapons as a counter to what it views as the U.S. threat. And, as of now, that threat is real in Tehran’s eyes. Iran appears not to see or believe that the United States is willing to accept the validity and survival of the Iranian revolutionary state.

BUT OF course Iran does not live in a strategic vacuum. How Israel and the United States decide to perceive the threat based on their own historical memories and strategic priorities is a large part of just how messy this may get. Iranian history is in many ways an eerie echo of Jewish history. At times they seem like twins separated at birth that, regardless of the distance of separation in time and space, seem to share many of the same traits and attitudes. For Israel, the struggle of several thousand years of the Jewish people after expulsion from their historic homeland ending in the horrible tragedy of the Holocaust followed by the redemptive act of the founding of the Zionist state is not history but the bedrock of their strategic view. Never again must the very survival of the Jewish people and the Jewish state rest upon the goodwill and support of other states. Israel knows that it lives in a tough neighborhood and is surrounded by states that at one time or another have all attempted to end its existence. The memories of how the states that now say Iran must not be allowed to gain nuclear weapons looked the other way as Hitler attempted to eliminate the Jews of Europe are burned forever into the nation’s consciousness. Israel’s strategic vision requires that it always be able to meet any threat to its existence with its own resources and that it must not turn away from such threats out of fear of the costs of action. It has paid the price of inaction within the living memory of the nation, and it is determined to never pay that price again.

For Israel, an Iranian nuclear capability is seen as an existential threat to its survival as a nation. For Israel, words have meaning and Israelis remember the price Jews paid for ignoring the words of Hitler as he rose to power. When the president of Iran speaks of wishing for the destruction of Israel in a sea of fire, it cannot be dismissed as political pandering to the souk. Self-delusion with regard to those who say they want to kill Jews is not an admired political trait in Israel.

Israel may well decide then that the last of the many red lines laid down during the past five years has been crossed and that it does indeed face the existential threat to the Jewish homeland that all Israeli governments since its founding have said they will not let prevail. Or Israel, faced with yet another domestic political crisis that threatens to expel its political leadership and throw the country into confusion yet again, may decide that it actually risks little by letting Iran have some extra time to alienate even more of the international community with its defiant behavior—and that maybe Washington will use its abundant military might rather than having to spend scarce Jewish blood on a military action that can only, even if successful, buy but a little time.

PERHAPS THE biggest agitator of all in this is the United States, with its abbreviated historical memory and a sort of diplomatic ADD. America views itself as a homogeneous nation of shared values. Problems must be met head-on and dealt with on their individual merits and then we move on to the next task. In the Middle East the agenda began with gaining oil concessions, followed by meeting the Nazi challenge, rebuffing the Communist threat, dealing with the aftermath of the Iranian revolution and the seizure of the U.S. embassy, Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait and WMD programs, and now Iran’s nuclear program. These all take place against a background of U.S. actions—or lack thereof—in other regions. As the Iranians are fond of pointing out, America’s commitment to countering nuclear proliferation took a distinct holiday when it came to the nuclear programs of Israel and Pakistan and even the grandiose nuclear ambitions of the shah, not to mention how the United States looked the other way as long as Saddam was using WMD on the Iranians, Kurds or Shia.

The United States must figure out and articulate its real strategic objectives with regard to the Iranian nuclear program. At present, its actions and rhetoric are often as conflicted as Iran’s. At times the Bush administration has spoken as if halting Iran’s nuclear program was essential to halting a global rush to nuclear arms. At the same time, however, the administration entered into a deal with India to give it all the benefits of an established nuclear power without any attempt to roll back or limit its nuclear-weapons program. At other times, the language of the administration has taken on the tone of seeking change in the Iranian regime. When backing Israel’s military attack against a facility in Syria that was said to be a nuclear reactor under construction, the president declared that the attack sent “a message to Iran and the world for that matter about just how destabilizing nuclear proliferation would be in the Middle East.” U.S. diplomacy has not only been silent as to how it sees Iran fitting into any type of regional-security arrangement, but it has refused to address these issues until Iran halts its uranium-enrichment program.

Will the Bush administration in the end decide to encourage and facilitate an Israeli air strike on Iranian nuclear facilities by opening a passage across Iraqi airspace and establishing a combat air-patrol barrier to any Iranian hot pursuit? Will the Bush administration calculate that, just as the McCain campaign says a terrorist attack on the United States would help their candidate, military action against Iran might provide a decisive advantage to a lagging McCain campaign? Or will President Bush—who criticized the Clinton administration for not taking decisive action against al-Qaeda and leaving the known growing threat from Osama bin Laden to the next administration—decide that he will not pass on the Iranian nuclear threat to the next administration, but will take decisive action to destroy or at least seriously disrupt it?

THE CONTEXT within which these national strategies and decisions are interacting is being reshaped by two factors. First, oil prices have exploded, greatly enriching Iran and making clear to the West the pain and destruction to their economies and political structures that could come from a serious disruption to the flow of oil from Iran. Second is Iran’s belief that it has gained a strategic advantage against the United States, as a result of the United States being tied down in Iraq, and against Israel from the tactical blunting, if not defeat, of the Israeli military in Lebanon.

Politicians often have a difficult time drafting policies to deal with unpleasant events prior to their actual occurrence. Most within official Washington have echoed Senator John McCain’s (R-AZ) statement to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee that “Tehran’s pursuit of nuclear weapons poses an unacceptable risk, a danger we cannot allow.” While not all would agree with Senator McCain’s assessment that the only thing worse than a military attack by the United States or Israel on Iran would be Iran acquiring nuclear weapons, there seem to be few in the mainstream of American politics ready to go on the record with a plan for “the day after” that does not involve military action.

In one sense this is not surprising, and even historically consistent with the reaction to other states that acquired nuclear weapons after the initial use of such weapons in World War II. We now know that General Curtis LeMay and other air-force officers advocated a preemptive attack on the Soviet Union before it could acquire nuclear weapons. As China approached the nuclear threshold the Soviets sought to determine whether the United States would join it in a preemptive strike. In the Clinton administration, military action against North Korea was only stopped by the diplomatic intervention of President Jimmy Carter.

It is hard, however, to understand why so many in the case of Iran invite either the humiliation of having to back down from their previous unequivocal declarations of the necessity of an attack in response to an Iranian nuclear weapon, or the obvious economic and political disasters that would follow from such an action. This is even harder to understand when you realize that as a nation we have a lot of experience in crafting policies and security guarantees that have actually prevented states from gaining any decisive advantages from acquiring nuclear weapons. Think Soviet Union, China and North Korea. Other states have largely on their own decided that nuclear arms really do not offer them any real benefits even after they had acquired such weapons (South Africa) or embarked on the road to such weapons (Argentina, Brazil, Sweden, Switzerland and Taiwan).

What seems to be most absent from the current discussion about Iran’s nuclear future, whatever it is and whenever it arrives, is the response to two questions. First, what policies will limit any advantage, political or military, that Iran might gain from such weapons? Second, how do we begin to craft, with all the states of the region—certainly including both Israel and Iran—political, economic and security arrangements that recognize their varied interests and concerns and their often very different perspectives of what these are? In the end, we need to decide how we can perform damage control and create arrangements that take into account states’ varied interests.

Figuring these things out is really not intellectually tough, not rocket science. We survived the cold war and reshaped Europe from three centuries of nation-states often at war with each other into a rapidly coalescing and even expanding region where armed conflict has receded into a past that is hard to remember and impossible to recreate. Japan, China, India, the Republic of Korea, Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore and Indonesia all represent something far different and beyond the imagination of their citizens and most outsiders fifty years ago. So what is needed now is to begin the process of discussion, consultation, planning and acting that will lay the groundwork for the region’s future—one far different from either the past marked by conflict or the current path toward a regional conflagration that may very well involve nuclear weapons.

President Charles de Gaulle of France is said to have pronounced that the United States would never be willing to respond to a Soviet nuclear attack on Paris with actions that would threaten the destruction of an American city such as Chicago. De Gaulle drew the conclusion that Europeans would have to build their own nuclear forces to meet this threat. The United States and the rest of Western Europe did not accept de Gaulle’s proclamation as fact. Quite the opposite, they created policies and military deployments that convinced the Soviets that any attack on Western Europe would result in a devastating American reply. In this shadow of security, Western Europe thrived and built new institutions, and eventually the Soviet Union collapsed. Why is it not feasible, along with all of the states in the Middle East, to create security policies that guarantee acts of aggression will not be allowed to threaten any state’s survival while beginning to build the economic institutions and policies that can create a future where war seems impossible?

What is hard is the actual act of stepping off the shaky, and probably sinking, ship that we now stand upon to construct a very different vessel. This is one of those times in history where will is more important than brilliance, where determination to shape a different future is more vital than experience in the rituals of the past.

David Kay led the UN inspection after the first Gulf War that uncovered the previously unknown Iraqi nuclear program and, after the most recent Gulf War, led the CIA’s Iraq Survey Group that determined that there had been no Iraqi weapons of mass destruction at the time of the war. He is now a private consultant in Washington, DC.