Earlier this month Vice President Biden said that President Obama is “not bluffing” when it comes to stopping Iran from getting nuclear weapons. Secretary of State John Kerry said, “Lines have been drawn before and they’ve been passed. That’s why the president has been so definitive this time.”
So why do I think Iran will get nuclear weapons? Because I do not think we can stop them. And that’s mainly because by the time we decide we need to act, it will be too late. Either Iran will surprise us and already have a nuclear weapon before we realize it or we will wait so long it will be too late to act even if we know about it ahead of time. Or most likely, some of both,
Olli Heinonen, a Finn who retired as deputy director-general of the International Atomic Energy Agency (“IAEA”) in 2010, said in an interview with David Feith of The Wall Street Journal on March 2, 2013, that "if you go back to the nuclear programs which have been revealed {elsewhere}, they all came with a surprise.”
There are at least two scenarios on how a surprise (or partial surprise) could happen. Olli Heinonen explains one of them. Though it is not a complete surprise, it would have much of the same effect:
“[I]t could go the North Korea route – defined by Mr. Heinonen as deciding ‘Enough is enough, to heck with this, we'll build a nuclear weapon’ – in ‘a month or two,’ he says. The precise timing would depend on how (and how well) Iranian engineers go about enriching their uranium stocks to weapons-grade purity. But in any case, Mr. Heinonen notes, Iran's breakout would likely outpace the ability of the ‘international community’ to respond.
First, IAEA inspectors would have to detect the breakout. This could take up to two weeks because they visit Iran's major uranium-enrichment facility about 24 times a year. (Roughly half of the visits are announced, meaning inspectors give the Iranians 10 days' notice, and the rest are unannounced, meaning about two hours' notice at any time of day.) Once inside, inspectors would quickly recognize from the enrichment machinery that Iran was dashing to a bomb, says Mr. Heinonen, but that would hardly be the end of the story.
The inspectors would formally alert the IAEA board, which takes ‘a few days' time.’ The board would meet and pass a resolution (which ‘needs a few days’) and then engage the United Nations Security Council (‘also not an overnight decision’). ‘In reality,’ he says, ‘one month is gone. Well, during that one month [Iran] may have achieved their goal, at least to have enough high-enriched uranium for a nuclear weapon. What next?’ Iran would have become the world's ninth confirmed nuclear state.”
The other scenario is the full surprise. It assumes that Iran has secret facilities, and as Mr. Heinonen says: “If there is no undeclared installation [in Iran] today . . . it will be the first time in 20 years that Iran doesn't have one.”
This scenario could go like this: Iran will continue to say that they do not want, and do not have a program for, nuclear weapons. They will maintain they are enriching uranium only for research and energy, not for weapons. And they will keep saying this until just before they announce that they have a nuclear weapon. But when they announce they have a nuclear weapon, they will not admit that they were lying when they said they were not developing nuclear weapons. Rather they will say that they were forced into developing a nuclear weapon to protect themselves against the West. The sanctions – and threats of attack – forced them to develop a nuclear weapon, even though they did not want one.
But why won’t we know about it? Because it is hard to know for sure. Expecting our intelligence agencies to tell us exactly when Iran will get nuclear weapons is expecting too much of them. They have not been able to get things like that right in the past; why do we think they can do it now?*
Stephen Carter writes about Gordon Corera’s new book on the British Secret Intelligence Service, MI6:
“As Corera points out, the enemy of good intelligence work is often time. It can take months or years to determine whether a bit of information is even true -- longer still to figure out what it means. The faster the spies have to work, the greater the likelihood of error.”
After everybody’s intelligence agencies got it wrong about whether Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, the CIA, et al., will not want to make the same mistake again. Instead of rushing, this time they may hesitate too much. They will wait because they are not sure.
Just as there our intelligence agencies will hesitate in telling our leaders about the status of Iran’s nuclear program, our leaders will hesitate in deciding to act. Saying we will not allow Iran to get nuclear weapons is easy. Actually stopping them is hard. It is so hard, in fact, and so dangerous, that the ultimate decision to do something will keep getting put off (as it has been). By the time the intelligence agencies tell our leaders it is time to act and by the time our leaders decide to act, it will be too late, if it is not too late already.
Iran will get nuclear weapons if they want them. And it is hard to see why they would not want them.
--------
* For a post expanding a little on this point, see here.
Comments