Doing little and doing a lot

Iran and North Korea are the two big nuclear non-proliferation challenges of our day.  Iran is moving to acquire a capability that will allow it to move quickly to nuclear weapons, should the Supreme Leader decide his country needs weapons he has declared immoral.  North Korea has exited the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and conducted its third nuclear test, with implicit and explicit resentment and threats against the United States.*  So what can be done?

Non-proliferation experts at the Carnegie Endowment have published a series of three short pieces saying “not much”:  we should focus on preventing North Korea from proliferating nuclear technology to others, on understanding and defining deterrence in Asia and missile defense, and on strategic consultations with the Chinese.

That seems close to the Obama Administration’s conclusions.  It has said the necessary minimum in response to the latest North Korean test, but it has done nothing to rouse American public concerns and seems content to let the echoes fade.  President Obama himself has made it clear he will also do nothing to offer further carrots to Pyongyang, which in his view is a mistake previous administrations have made in hopes of moderating the North’s behavior.

The hermit kingdom will continue to be isolated, poor and  belligerent.  We can hope that the prospect of American retaliation will make it reluctant to use its nuclear weapons against anyone.  Both South Korea and Japan are likely to continue to refrain from going nuclear, as doing so would cause them big problems (especially with China and the US).

So the hope is we may be able to adjust to North Korea’s nuclear status without too much difficulty.  That is much less likely with respect to Iran.  There are two big problems arising from Iran’s push for nuclear technology:  proliferation in the region and Israel.

The Center for a New American Security thinks Saudi Arabia will not go for nuclear weapons if Iran does.  The American experts on Saudi Arabia I talk to are split on this issue.  Some think Riyadh will definitely go nuclear, likely buying weapons from Pakistan rather than establishing their own program.  Others doubt that.  The uncertainty itself is enough to make me think we need to worry more about the consequences of Iranian nuclear weapons than we do about North Korea’s.

More important:  Israel.  The Israelis view the Iranian theocracy as irrational.  The Iranians view the Jewish state as irrational.  There is minimal communication between Tehran and Jerusalem.  Deterrence depends on rationality and good communications.  If Iran were to make and deploy nuclear weapons, the Israelis would need to decide on a nuclear posture in response.  They have a second strike capability (on submarines), but they cannot wait to launch on launch.  A very few nuclear weapons would deal a devastating blow to tiny Israel.  It would have to launch on warning.

This is inherently destabilizing and highly dangerous for Iran.  My guess is the Israelis would not just launch against whatever they could see being prepared for launch, but against every nuclear weapons site they know about in Iran, and perhaps not only those.  We are talking here about a massive Israeli nuclear strike, not the surgical strikes conducted against the reactors in Iraq in 1981 and Syria in 2007.  So Iran getting a nuclear weapons decreases Iranian security as much as it decreases Israel’s.

That ironically gives me some hope that Tehran will stop short of making and deploying nuclear weapons.  But it has to do so in a thoroughly transparent and verifiable way.  If the P5+1 negotiations with Tehran at the end of the month in Almaty do not take a big step in this direction (but some are optimistic), we could well be on the way to an American strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities, one with dramatic consequences not only for the US and Iran but for the rest of the world as well.

*Have doubts about the threats to the US part? Watch this North Korean propaganda film (with gratitude to the Washington Post and North Korea News:

Transcript:

North Korea has succeeded in proceeding with this nuclear test despite the United States’ increasingly unfair bully activities against North Korea. That United States that has no respect to others nor appreciation to equality…

It is not incorrect to state that the United States strong hostility policy and endless violence toward North Korea in the past 70 years has helped North Korea become one of the world’s strongest military power states.

Words spoken by the United States, a country that uses the law of jungle as the law of survival for fitness, is meaningless. As a result, North Korea’s high level nuclear test conducted against American imperialist invaders is a nuclear deterrent that protects our sovereignty.

Thus, the United States has practically guided North Korea towards nuclear testing and therefore needs to be considered as an American virtue.

North Korea’s third underground nuclear test! Let it be known once more that this is strictly our practical counter-measure for North’s safety and to protect its sovereignty from the aggressors. It is also a solemn warning that time is no longer on the side of the United States.

The people are watching. America should answer.