FOR years, experts worried that the Middle East would face an uncontrollable nuclear-arms race if Iran ever acquired weapons capability. Given the region’s political, religious and ethnic conflicts, the logic is straightforward.
As in other nuclear proliferation cases like India, Pakistan and North Korea, America and the West were guilty of inattention when they should have been vigilant. But failing to act in the past is no excuse for making the same mistakes now. All presidents enter office facing the cumulative effects of their predecessors’ decisions. But each is responsible for what happens on his watch. President Obama’s approach on Iran has brought a bad situation to the brink of catastrophe.
In theory, comprehensive international sanctions, rigorously enforced and universally adhered to, might have broken the back of Iran’s nuclear program. But the sanctions imposed have not met those criteria. Naturally, Tehran wants to be free of them, but the president’s own director of National Intelligence testified in 2014 that they had not stopped Iran’s progressing its nuclear program. There is now widespread acknowledgment that the rosy 2007 National Intelligence Estimate, which judged that Iran’s weapons program was halted in 2003, was an embarrassment, little more than wishful thinking.
Even absent palpable proof, like a nuclear test, Iran’s steady progress toward nuclear weapons has long been evident. Now the arms race has begun: Neighboring countries are moving forward, driven by fears that Mr. Obama’s diplomacy is fostering a nuclear Iran. Saudi Arabia, keystone of the oil-producing monarchies, has long been expected to move first. No way would the Sunni Saudis allow the Shiite Persians to outpace them in the quest for dominance within Islam and Middle Eastern geopolitical hegemony. Because of reports of early Saudi funding, analysts have long believed that Saudi Arabia has an option to obtain nuclear weapons from Pakistan, allowing it to become a nuclear-weapons state overnight. Egypt and Turkey, both with imperial legacies and modern aspirations, and similarly distrustful of Tehran, would be right behind.
Ironically perhaps, Israel’s nuclear weapons have not triggered an arms race. Other states in the region understood — even if they couldn’t admit it publicly — that Israel’s nukes were intended as a deterrent, not as an offensive measure.
Iran is a different story. Extensive progress in uranium enrichment and plutonium reprocessing reveal its ambitions. Saudi, Egyptian and Turkish interests are complex and conflicting, but faced with Iran’s threat, all have concluded that nuclear weapons are essential.
The former Saudi intelligence chief, Prince Turki al-Faisal, said recently, “whatever comes out of these talks, we will want the same.” He added, “if Iran has the ability to enrich uranium to whatever level, it’s not just Saudi Arabia that’s going to ask for that.” Obviously, the Saudis, Turkey and Egypt will not be issuing news releases trumpeting their intentions. But the evidence is accumulating that they have quickened their pace toward developing weapons.
Saudi Arabia has signed nuclear cooperation agreements with South Korea, China, France and Argentina, aiming to build a total of 16 reactors by 2030. The Saudis also just hosted meetings with the leaders of Pakistan, Egypt and Turkey; nuclear matters were almost certainly on the agenda. Pakistan could quickly supply nuclear weapons or technology to Egypt, Turkey and others. Or, for the right price, North Korea might sell behind the backs of its Iranian friends.
The Obama administration’s increasingly frantic efforts to reach agreement with Iran have spurred demands for ever-greater concessions from Washington. Successive administrations, Democratic and Republican, worked hard, with varying success, to forestall or terminate efforts to acquire nuclear weapons by states as diverse as South Korea, Taiwan, Argentina, Brazil and South Africa. Even where civilian nuclear reactors were tolerated, access to the rest of the nuclear fuel cycle was typically avoided. Everyone involved understood why.
This gold standard is now everywhere in jeopardy because the president’s policy is empowering Iran. Whether diplomacy and sanctions would ever have worked against the hard-liners running Iran is unlikely. But abandoning the red line on weapons-grade fuel drawn originally by the Europeans in 2003, and by the United Nations Security Council in several resolutions, has alarmed the Middle East and effectively handed a permit to Iran’s nuclear weapons establishment.
The inescapable conclusion is that Iran will not negotiate away its nuclear program. Nor will sanctions block its building a broad and deep weapons infrastructure. The inconvenient truth is that only military action like Israel’s 1981 attack on Saddam Hussein’s Osirak reactor in Iraq or its 2007 destruction of a Syrian reactor, designed and built by North Korea, can accomplish what is required. Time is terribly short, but a strike can still succeed.
Rendering inoperable the Natanz and Fordow uranium-enrichment installations and the Arak heavy-water production facility and reactor would be priorities. So, too, would be the little-noticed but critical uranium-conversion facility at Isfahan. An attack need not destroy all of Iran’s nuclear infrastructure, but by breaking key links in the nuclear-fuel cycle, it could set back its program by three to five years. The United States could do a thorough job of destruction, but Israel alone can do what’s necessary. Such action should be combined with vigorous American support for Iran’s opposition, aimed at regime change in Tehran.
Mr. Obama’s fascination with an Iranian nuclear deal always had an air of unreality. But by ignoring the strategic implications of such diplomacy, these talks have triggered a potential wave of nuclear programs. The president’s biggest legacy could be a thoroughly nuclear-weaponized Middle East.
John R. Bolton, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, was the United States ambassador to the United Nations from August 2005 to December 2006.
@ ArnoldHarris:
I did a stint of work at the Sandia National Labs, Albuquerque, NM. Security and policy making folk were aware that strong man can be easily replaced. The systems in place cannot be replaced that easily.
@ SHmuel HaLevi 2:
Thanks for the information regarding General Amidror’s situational prognosis regarding potential neutralization of the operational components of Iran’s nuclear weapons development threat. And I do in fact understand that you have served in high capacity assignments in Israel’s defense establishment.
I think that the most significant operational components of Iran’s nuclear weapons development threat are not devices located deep in underground bunkers, but in the hearts and minds of a relatively small number of some of the most evil personages in the world, plus the leaders of the gangs that keep them in power.
And all things considered, I think you might agree with me that it is easier to neutralize those men, in cooperation with groups in place seeking their overthrow, than it would be to destroy their nuclear capability without, however, first removing them by the usual time-honored means.
What is needed here is a thin, very long needle that pierces the very heart of the leadership and their key people. Change the leadership of Iran, and chances are quite strong that the present course of history can and shall be changed, and the peoples of the Middle East, including Israel, shall be able to live again without the acidic, never-forgotten fear, of massive nuclear destruction of much if not all of the region.
Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI
@ ArnoldHarris:
Thank you for the very comprehensive comment
Moments ago General Amidror, former head of the Israeli Security Council explained at the IBA Channel “B” that Israel has the means to neutralize the active components of the Iranian nuclear program.
That was said at the radio broadcast program after assured military censor approval.
It is not “blof”. You know my younger years work at very high level defense programs. That is fact.
Will Israel be left alone to do it? Yes.
Will have the power of will and leadership to do it…
The jury is out on that.
@ SHmuel HaLevi 2:
Unless commando teams could be smuggled into all the tunnels and mountainside caverns where the nuclear weapons-grade enrichment centrifuges are hidden, and wherever all of them are in the large country of Iran, any attempt to destroy the threatening would-be arsenal would be doomed to failure, with one possible exception.
Israel has the capability of shutting off every electrical and electronic device, vehicle engine, and telecommunications line in most of Iran by deploying and setting off a nuclear electromagnetic pulse (EMP) device very high in the atmosphere above the country. The rays from such a device rays would kill or destroy nobody on the ground, and would not even physically harm them, but would instantly incapacitate the entire country. Only a few days or a week would be necessary for commando teams to destroy the enrichment hardware that would otherwise threaten region-wide nuclear war around the Middle East and even farther abroad.
However, the implications that would follow from any such nuclear attack could have seriously negative consequences to everyone concerned, and I am not certain that anyone in the Israel defense and military security organs would approve such a move.
But that does not imply helplessness on the part of the intended victims among both the Israelis, the Sun’a Arab states, and — even though they do not yet dully recognize the threat — the United States. One other method could be used to avert the threat of nuclear war. I refer here to induced regime change. That could be brought about by the disappearance from the scene of about 20 or 30 top leaders among the ayatollahs and the leaders of the the Revolutionary Guard Corps and the Basiji street gangs used by the religious leaders and the Revolutionary Guards to keep anti-government mobs from forming in Teheran and the other main cities.
As a matter of fact, induced regime change would be the best all-around fix for the already-looming Iranian international threat. I have also read reports that the geology of Iran itself, with terrible earthquakes, were one of the causes of the start of the downfall of the Iranian monarchy in the late 1970s, and that this could easily occur once again, because no Iranian government ever is equipped to respond to the chaos that ensues when who districts of the country are torn apart by these earthquakes.
However, Israel, the Sun’a Arab governments, and ultimately the world is in no position to wait for the next major Iranian earthquake. So induced regime change, in my judgement, would be the most feasible option. Moreover, it is an option that would meet the approval of a major segment of the Iranian population, who would like very much to get rid of the stifling and sometimes murderous rule of the ayatollahs and their henchmen.
Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI
@ NormanF:
Basically then Netanyahu and his associates have been lying about capabilities that are not there?
He clearly said on his speech that if need be “Israel will stand alone”. Stand alone to be incinerated or stand alone to destroy the enemy. What will it be?
Israel does not need to build anything more than what is available. Netanyahu just has to grow some and do the job. Governments failed for decades to prevent and or preempt. Time to pay the piper.
@ SHmuel HaLevi 2:
This is not Osirak. There is not a clean military solution. I’m in favor of Israel building up a massive nuclear arsenal and announcing that if Iran so much as tries to sneeze in Israel’s direction, Israel will strike first and wipe it out. This is the only realistic policy. Iran can be deterred but not through nuclear ambiguity. Israel must become a declared nuclear weapons power.
Simply said and correct. Netanyahu must stop meandering about who to screw out of the coalition and focus on the Iranian situation. If he fails to negate Iran a nuclear arsenal, even one bomb, he will be hounded forever as a total failure.
Why did the New York Times allow this article to be published? Is it possible that they want Bolton to say what their editorial writers are afraid to say in public?
As much as I agree with John Bolton, with Iran pocketing a bad agreement, the prospects of an Israeli attack have dropped to zero. Destroying what Iran has is next to impossible. If America won’t do it, no one else will take on stopping Iran from becoming a nuclear power. That’s now inevitable.