The art and not the article

Nuclear talks with Iran start again February 18 in Vienna.  This time the objective is a comprehensive agreement to replace the Joint Plan of Action initiated in January for six months and possibly to be renewed for another six months.

There are two routes to the fissile material needed to make nuclear weapons:  enrichment of uranium (in Iran’s case using centrifuges) to above 90% U238 (in nature it occurs mainly as the isotope U235, containing three fewer neutrons); or production of plutonium 239, which is generated by irradiating U235 in a reactor and then “reprocessing” the spent fuel to separate plutonium.  Ideally, if you don’t want someone to have nuclear weapons you would block both these routes:  no enrichment and no plutonium production.

That is what my friends at the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA), led by Eric Edelman and Dennis Ross, prefer in their  Assessment of the Interim Deal with Iran.  They don’t like the Joint Plan of Action because it exchanges a limited freeze and small rollback on nuclear facilities for a limited freeze and small rollback of sanctions.  Their detailed critique is well worth reading.  They fear, echoing the Israelis, that there will be no comprehensive agreement and that the Obama administration will settle for extending the interim deal indefinitely, leaving Iran with a substantial nuclear capability even if no nuclear weapons.  They want a big rollback of enrichment and reprocessing capabilities in Iran, with stringent limits imposed ad infinitum.

I might prefer that too, but to my knowledge no country that has learned to enrich uranium or produce plutonium has given up the technology entirely.  Quite a few countries have given up the nuclear weapons option–“nuclear reversal” is the term of art–but more often than not they hedge for an interim period, maintaining the appearance of a viable nuclear option by continuing to enrich or reprocess on a limited scale, often shifting their technological prowess in the civilian direction.  As Churchill apparently put it, before Britain decided to get its own nuclear weapons:

We should have the art rather than the article.

Sweden, Japan, Italy, Germany, South Korea, Brazil, Argentina, Egypt and many other countries have hedged at one point or another.  By now all the cases named could reasonably be labelled reversals, but the reversal may still be reversed in several of these instances.

What the P5+1 (that’s the US, UK, France, Russia, China and Germany) are trying to achieve with Iran is nuclear reversal.  Iran already has enrichment technology sufficient to produce bomb-quality material in sufficient quantities to generate a small nuclear arsenal quickly. It is close to having a plutonium production reactor.  Separation of plutonium is a conventional chemical process, albeit one that has to be conducted under hot radioactive conditions.  The Iranians won’t have a lot of trouble mastering it.

What would make a country give up the nuclear option, or at least hedge?  Ariel Levite suggests:

Among the political factors that play a dominant role, external security considerations—however defined by different leaders—stand out as having consistently had a profound impact on states’ nuclear choices. Moreover, although a favorable external security outlook appears necessary to bring about nuclear reversal, it rarely if ever appears to be sufficient, by itself, to produce this outcome. This is where the combination of domestic regime change and the availability of external incentives may tilt the balance in one direction or another.

In other words, threats don’t work, because they increase a potential nuclear power’s sense of insecurity and give it an incentive to develop nuclear weapons.  What works is “a favorable external security outlook” combined with nudges from both inside and outside the country in question.

Only in the case of South Africa has reversal been achieved in one fell swoop.  That’s an exception that proves the rule:  South Africa faced a totally changed security environment once it decided to end apartheid.  While some future Iranian democrat may be prepared to foreswear nuclear weapons in order to fix Iran’s relations with the Gulf Arabs and the United States, Supreme Leader Khamenei is unlikely to wake up one day and decide it really was a mistake to think developing nuclear weapons would help guarantee the regime’s survival, deter Israel and help Iran restore itself as a regional power.  At best, we can hope that Iran will move gradually and incrementally towards recognizing that it will be more secure, prosperous and accepted in the region if it poses less of a threat to its neighbors, Israel and the United States.

This is where my friends at JINSA make their most serious mistake.  They believe that the overt and repeated threat of military action and increased pressure of sanctions will break Tehran’s will and force it to accept stringent limits on its enrichment and reprocessing capabilities. The only instance I know in which that has sort of worked is North Korea, which reneged on reversal as soon as it felt the pressure lift.  Iraq redoubled its nuclear efforts after the Israelis bombed its Osiraq reaction.

I have no doubt at all about the importance of sanctions as an “external incentive,” but the military threat can be overdone.  President Obama has gotten a lot further with the Iranians by downplaying it than President Bush got insisting on it.  He has also foresworn regime change in Iran, thus contributing substantially to “a favorable external security outlook.”

I don’t like the Iranian regime.  It is a brutal, illiberal and dangerous theocracy that exports terror, threatens stability throughout the Gulf region, and puts Israel at risk.  But diplomacy requires clarity about priorities and goals.  If your first priority is to block Iran from nuclear weapons, you are going to have to lessen threats to the regime and offer it a positive perspective without nukes.  This means exchanging sanctions relief and reintegration into the international community for limits–as stringent as possible–on enrichment and reprocessing.  It also means eventually giving up a military option, whose use would be counterproductive in any event.  An attack on its nuclear facilities will give any government in Tehran an enormous incentive to complete the production of nuclear weapons as quickly as it can.

Some will answer that buying time is useful.  I agree.  That’s why the Joint Plan of Action is an important step forward.  But only an interim one.