EurasiaNet Eurasia Insight - Facing a Nuclear-Armed Iran, US Should Stess Deterrence

EURASIA INSIGHT

FACING A NUCLEAR-ARMED IRAN, US SHOULD STESS DETERRENCE
Mark N. Katz 8/08/03
A EurasiaNet Commentary

Throughout the spring and summer, the Iranian government has vociferously denied any desire to develop nuclear weapons. Recent evidence subverting this denial has grown so solid, though, that policymakers should consider a different challenge. The question before diplomats and strategists is not whether Iran seeks nuclear arms. It is what the United States should do about Iran’s efforts to become a nuclear power. The available evidence in the current international context suggests that the answer lies with deterrence.

Evidence is accumulating that makes Iran’s nuclear ambitions very hard to deny. When Iran refused to sign the International Atomic Energy Association’s Additional Protocol in June, barring United Nations experts from making unannounced inspections of nuclear sites, it weakened its good name as a signer of the Nonproliferation Treaty. Iran’s intransigence also lent credence to claims by opposition groups that Tehran had underreported its stocks of nuclear material. [For background see the Eurasia Insight archives]. Indeed, in June Iran forbade IAEA officials to inspect even a declared nuclear facility, and startled many by refusing to agree to the return of spent fuel to Russia from the nuclear power plant Moscow is building in Bushehr. On August 7, Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, seemed to put the world on notice in a radio broadcast. "Iran is among the ten countries which have been able to produce the nuclear-fuel cycle," the transcript of his speech reads. "This is not a small matter."

Seen in this light, other revelations seem to bury doubt. On August 4, the Los Angeles Times published a detailed investigative report exposing dramatic hints of a nuclear-weapons agenda. According to the report, Iran purchased 1.8 tons of uranium from China in 1991 and processed some of it in secret. The article also posited that Pakistani, Russian and North Korean scientists had variously assisted and examined Iran’s nuclear development projects, and that United Nations inspectors had found trace amounts of uranium that could be consistent with weapons development at a facility south of Tehran in June. Hamid-Reza Asefi, a spokesman for Iran’s Foreign Ministry, reportedly denied the claims about international collaboration on August 7 and called the entire article misleading.

Khamenei was more oblique. "Of course, it is only natural that when there is such success they should make a commotion about it," he said in his August 7 radio address. "They say �Yes, they want to do this and do that, they want to build [nuclear] bombs,’ and they say other things. But this is not important. This progress has been made as a blessing of the Islamic system."

None of these revelations disprove Tehran’s claims of peaceful intentions, but there is no credible explanation for processing spent fuel except to produce a weapon. The US government is thus justified in contemplating three options. The strongest, for erasing the threat of a nuclear attack, are intervention, preemption and deterrence.

An American military intervention in Iran would not only end the Islamic Republic’s efforts to acquire nuclear weapons, but would hasten the end of an Islamic Republic in which hardliners like Khamenei exercise ultimate authority. [For background see the Eurasia Insight archive]. An American presence in neighboring Iraq and Afghanistan could facilitate such an intervention. But the United Nations Security Council would almost certainly disapprove such a step after refusing to endorse the American-led invasion of Iraq. And the administration of Tony Blair in the United Kingdom, which staunchly backed that invasion, is suffering politically. Many Britons may mistrust claims about nuclear threats, since they have accused Blair of overselling Iraq’s work on weapons of mass destruction. And even if American soldiers could end the Iranian regime without any international help, their failure to effect stability in Afghanistan and Iraq suggests that a military invasion would trigger more chaos. It would also further many countries’ tendency to view the United States as a hostile power.

Alternatively, the Pentagon could launch preemptive strikes to destroy Iranian nuclear facilities. This would also elicit outrage in many countries, but would avoid the much greater costs that invading and occupying Iran would entail. Under this scenario, though, Khamenei and the hardliners would remain in power, and would presumably seek nuclear weapons more intensely than ever. Russia would be unlikely to stop selling both missile technology and nuclear know-how to Iran after an American preemptive strike. Indeed, a successful strike might make Iran eager to buy replacements for whatever Russian supplies and expertise the Americans had destroyed.

The remaining option is deterrence. The United States has, of course, pursued such a strategy with nuclear-armed adversaries for decades. The Soviet Union, under Joseph Stalin, acquired nuclear arms in 1949; Mao Zedong’s China has owned them since 1964. These regimes were much more powerful than Iran’s, and much more hostile to Americans and to the United States’ democratic model. Under the knowledge that a nuclear attack would lead to devastating nuclear retaliation, Soviet and Chinese tyrants kept their arms docile. There is every reason to believe that Iranian leaders would do the same. Whatever their rhetoric, Iran’s ayatollahs are neither as reckless nor as isolated from reality as Saddam Hussein and North Korea’s Kim Jong Il. Since the death of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini in 1989, Tehran has largely given up its effort to spread Islamic revolution abroad. Facing challenges to their authority from millions of young Iranians, ayatollahs focus on staying in power. Indeed, their desire to acquire nuclear weapons appears to be based on the assumption that America is less likely to attack if Iran possesses them than if it does not.

If Iran’s hardliners are pursuing deterrence, the Bush administration can prosper by doing likewise. Whatever the ayatollahs’ intention, many states will see an Iranian nuclear weapons program as a source of danger. If the United States refrains from preemptively attacking Iran, it can present itself as an ally to governments who view Iran as a threat. Finally, as the Soviet Union demonstrated in 1991, the possession of nuclear weapons cannot protect a government from its internal opponents. The future of the democratic opposition in Iran depends on other factors besides Tehran’s capacity to strike other nations with nuclear weapons. For an administration seeking to end the hardliners’ rule, deterrence should not be an impediment.

Editor�s Note: Mark N. Katz is a professor of government and politics at George Mason University in Fairfax, VA.

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