Goodbye to the Iranian nuclear bomb?

Is it agreement time in Iran? Is Iran going to bend to the will of the UN Security Council and engineer a compromise that will allow it to enrich uranium- but only to a small degree- in return for allowing the UN’s International Atomic Energy Agency to intimately monitor its nuclear industry to assure it doesn’t enrich further to enable it to build a nuclear weapon?

The West and Israel in particular have long been in a panic about a possible Iranian nuclear bomb. There is a strong “bomb Iran before it is too late” faction in the US Republican Party and even more so in Israel. This has never made sense if one reads the tea-leaves carefully.

Conveniently lost in the mists of history is the fact that Iran’s nuclear bomb research was begun by the pro-American Shah of Iran. It was given American scientific expertise

Dictatorial regimes find it exceedingly hard to build a bomb, as Jacques Hymans points out in an interesting essay published in an issue of Foreign Affairs. Of course, the Soviet Union and China succeeded but this was because they gave their nuclear scientists autonomy. But most dictator-led, would-be bomb states don’t. The political leaders interfere constantly which results in long delays in the creative process. Take Iraq. In the years leading up to Israel’s 1981 attack on Iraq’s Osirak reactor Saddam Hussein periodically ravaged the bomb project, dismissing and jailing both officials and scientists. Only after the strike did Saddam release the country’s head of the nuclear programme. Another calamity followed in the mid-1980s when Saddam’s son-in-law who had been put in charge of the project started to impose unrealistic deadlines causing both machines and personnel to crack under the pressure. He pitted scientists against one another in brutal competition. He demanded dramatic technical changes rendering prior work meaningless. Thus, even after an expenditure of $1 billion over 10 years by the time of the first Gulf War Iraq had not produced any weapons’ grade enriched uranium.

Libya, under Muammar Gaddafi, was unable to put all the pieces together despite buying an off-the-shelf bomb from Pakistan’s rogue nuclear bomb-baker, A.Q. Khan.

In Iran there is plenty of evidence that the Iranian regime has shown a marked preference for political loyalty over professional qualifications. This is one important reason that US and Israeli estimates have constantly overestimated the pace of development of the bomb. In the 1990s it was said the bomb would be ready by 2000. Then it was bumped up to 2005. Then to 2010 and, most recently, 2025 (but with the Israeli leadership warning, as they long have, it could be within a year or two). Both the US and Israel extrapolate from minimal data without much attention to what the great novelist Graham Greene would call “the human factor”.

All this suggests that in its negotiations with Iran the US has no need to raise the military stick, fearing Republican propaganda that argues that it must be used today. The US can afford to offer carrots, to be conciliatory and strike a real bargain. The sensible one that is being suggested is to agree to Iran enriching uranium up to 3.5%, which is what was negotiated by President Barack Obama- enough to fuel its domestic power network- just as the US accepts Brazil doing this. (The foolish suggestion made by some that Iran cannot enrich at all Iran will never accept.)

The US must also resurrect the idea that the Iranian negotiators once agreed to- that Iran’s stock of enriched uranium be sent to another country such as Russia or Turkey where it could be safely stored to be released as needed.

The word out of Washington and Tehran suggests this is the way the negotiations are heading. At last.