Unthinkable (10 page)

So much for the area of agreement. Ever since the NIE, there has been considerable debate among various Western intelligence services over the status of Iran's weaponization program. Contrary to the American position, several European and Israeli intelligence services contend that Iran did not shut down its weaponization program in 2003.
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As best we can glean from the unclassified reporting, there is widespread agreement among the American, European, and Israeli intelligence services that Iran retained some kind of a clandestine nuclear weaponization program under the same man who had been running it before 2003: Mohsen
Fakhrizadeh-Mahabadi. The program is more dispersed and more secret than it had been before 2003. It is also smaller than it had been before 2003, although just how small seems to be the primary area of disagreement between the Americans on one side and the Europeans and Israelis on the other. My interpretation of the disagreement, based on what has surfaced in the media, is that the Americans believe that the program is small enough that it can no longer be considered a serious weaponization program, whereas the Europeans and Israelis believe that it still represents a significant effort to build a functional weapon. Although the unclassified reporting provides no specific details about the discrepancies, they seem to focus on differing estimates of the numbers of personnel involved, the amount of money devoted to the program, the priority the program is assigned by the regime, and the progress it is making.
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For its part, the IAEA agrees that Iran has resumed at least some work on weaponization under Fakhrizadeh. In its November 2011 report, the IAEA laid out its understanding and concerns about Iran's weaponization program in an extensive annex. This section of the report provided detailed claims that Iran had performed work on every aspect of the design, engineering, and even testing of a nuclear device, as well as considerable work on the design of a nuclear warhead for a ballistic missile.
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The annex also contained a discussion of the evidence supporting these claims and concerns, which included more than a thousand pages of documentation, information from ten other nations, and information discovered by the IAEA itself. As a result, the IAEA concluded that it found the information provided in its annex to be “overall credible.”
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However, the IAEA report does not indicate whether the agency concurs with the American assessment of the Iranian weaponization program or the European/Israeli assessment.

TIME LINES.
Despite the rancorous debate over the extent to which Iran is working on the weaponization piece, most of the estimates about when Iran will cross various thresholds are consistent. In particular, there is a consensus that Iran has crossed certain key thresholds already. It has acquired
adequate know-how, centrifuges, and enriched uranium to be able to manufacture at least one (and probably more like three to five) nuclear weapons if Tehran chose to do so. Most Western governments estimate that if Iran were willing to break out of the NPT and use its existing array of centrifuges to enrich its existing stockpiles of LEU and MEU, it would probably take Iran less than a year (and possibly only a few months) to have enough HEU for one nuclear weapon. The more Iran can use MEU rather than LEU, and the more it can rely on more advanced centrifuges, the faster it will be able to produce enough fissile material for a weapon.

Although our knowledge of Iran's weaponization efforts is far more limited than our understanding of its enrichment activities, Western governments believe that it would take Iran at least a year to manufacture a crude nuclear device to receive the HEU it has manufactured.
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In March 2013, both President Obama and Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu publicly agreed that Iran would require roughly a year to build a nuclear weapon, from the time of a decision to do so.
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Nevertheless, a report by the respected researchers of the Institute for Science and International Security noted that “[i]f Iran were to attempt to make a nuclear weapon, it would likely face new engineering challenges, despite work it may have done in the past. Iran would thus need many additional months to manufacture a nuclear device suitable for underground testing and even longer to make a reliable warhead for a ballistic missile.”
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In other words, it would take Iran at least a year to build a crude nuclear weapon deliverable by truck, large aircraft, or ship. Making one usable in a missile warhead would take considerably longer. By way of comparison, seven years after North Korea first detonated a nuclear weapon most experts doubted that it had nuclear warheads for its missiles, and North Korea's nuclear and missile programs are both far more robust than Iran's.
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Of course, as Iran adds new quantities of both LEU and MEU, and as it masters its more advanced centrifuges, these time lines will change. In late 2012, French foreign minister Laurent Fabius announced that Paris expected that by mid-2013, Iran would have so refined its ability to manufacture the needed HEU that it would have a breakout capability—although
he omitted any reference to whether France also believed that the Iranian weaponization program was far enough along to keep pace. Most estimates suggest that it is not.
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Iran's adherence to the NPT precludes it from building or fielding nuclear weapons. So far Iran has not been willing to withdraw from the NPT, probably out of fear of an even harsher international backlash (including the possibility of military strikes). The NPT grants every nation the right to all aspects of nuclear energy and development, except a weapon itself. Its framers did not recognize that this loophole would allow states to traverse most of the path needed to manufacture nuclear weapons, and get so close as to be a few months—or theoretically less—from possible weaponization. A nation on the brink of a weapon could decide to withdraw from the NPT and race the last few months or even weeks to assemble one or more weapons to present the world with a fait accompli. Such a capability would enable Iran to assemble one or more working nuclear weapons faster than most of the world would react, and possibly faster than the United States or Israel could even react militarily. This condition is what is referred to as a “breakout” capability.

As the above discussion explained, Iran has already achieved something of a nuclear “breakout” capability. The long pole in the tent is whether Iran has a working device in which to put the fissile material and detonate it. We do not know, but most of the world's intelligence agencies seem to think that even if Tehran were to make an all-out effort to acquire it, Iran is at least one year away and probably more—perhaps as many as three and could only produce a crude device that would be difficult to deliver quickly or reliably.

The goal of the current Iranian program appears to be intended to narrow that window to a true breakout capacity, one that would allow Iran to field one or more workable nuclear weapons before the rest of the world
could act to stop it. Since UN inspectors travel to Iran every two months, it may be that Iran is looking for a breakout capability of a couple of months, or even a few weeks (if that is possible), so that as soon as the UN inspectors have left after one of their bimonthly visits, the Iranians could start assembling their weapon or weapons and have them ready before the inspectors returned. Because of the complexity of these weapons, that seems unlikely. However, Iran might be able to get most of the way toward having a workable nuclear weapon by the time the inspectors returned and alerted the world to Iran's actions.

What isn't clear is whether the achievement of such a short breakout window is meant to be the stopping point of Iran's nuclear labors or a milestone along the way to the deployment of a full-scale arsenal. Both are possible. Both are consistent with Iran's behavior so far.

HOLDING ON A BREAKOUT CAPABILITY.
There is considerable evidence to suggest that, at least for now, all that Iran is looking for is a breakout capability. At times, Iran has demonstrated a willingness to negotiate over its nuclear program, which would suggest that the Iranians are not hell-bent on getting nuclear weapons regardless of the cost. In recent years, the Iranian people have suffered under the harsh sanctions imposed both by the UN and by the West. It seems logical to assume that they might fear additional sanctions if they crossed the forbidden threshold of weaponization. So far, China, India, Russia, and a number of other countries have only participated partially in the sanctions imposed on Iran. However, they have all indicated that they do not want to see Iran acquire a nuclear arsenal. Iran's leadership—particularly Khamene'i—may fear that if they were to take that final step, they might push these countries to embrace more comprehensive sanctions against Iran. Former Iranian nuclear negotiator Seyed Hossein Mousavian has written that Tehran recognizes this possibility and is afraid of it. In his words, “Iran recognizes that by becoming a nuclear weapons state, it will compel Russia and China to join the United States and implement devastating sanctions that would paralyze the Iranian economy.”
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For
this reason, stopping at a breakout capability—especially one with a narrow window—might appeal to Tehran as the Goldilocks solution: close enough to having a bomb that they could assemble one with speed, but still on the right side of the NPT and therefore able to deflect the pressure for more severe sanctions.
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Moreover, Iran has deliberately refrained from pursuing a nuclear weapon as quickly as possible. Many feared that once Iran had accumulated enough LEU for one bomb's worth, they would immediately begin enriching it to bomb grade to be able to break out. They have never done so. Instead, beginning in 2012, Iran has regularly converted some of its MEU to plates for the Tehran Research Reactor (which make them difficult to enrich for bombs), ensuring that it has less than a bomb's worth of MEU in country.
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This pattern is consistent with establishing a breakout capability, not breaking out and racing for an arsenal itself.
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Israel's former chief of military intelligence, Amos Yadlin, and Israeli nuclear expert Yoel Guzansky have called attention to this important pattern, noting that “Iran is not advancing toward the bomb at as rapid a pace as it could. It appears to realize that such progress would bring with it negative strategic repercussions.”
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The chief of staff of the Israel Defense Forces, Lieutenant General Benny Gantz, has even said in public that he believes Iran plans to stop with a breakout capability and will not weaponize.
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Any number of Iranian officials, including the hardest of the hardliners, have made public statements in which they have said that they are not seeking nuclear weapons. On June 4, 2006, Khamene'i explained, “We do not need a nuclear bomb. We do not have any objectives or aspirations for which we will need to use a nuclear bomb. We consider using nuclear weapons against Islamic rules. We have announced this openly. We think imposing the costs of building and maintaining nuclear weapons on our nation is unnecessary.”
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And in February 2012: “The Iranian nation has never sought and will never seek nuclear weapons. . . . Iran does not seek nuclear weapons since the Islamic Republic of Iran regards the possession of nuclear weapons as a great sin, in terms of thought, theory and religious edict, and also believes that holding such weapons is useless,
costly and dangerous.”
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Even President Ahmadinejad made the point in December 2009: “We do not want to make a bomb. . . . Our policy is transparent. If we wanted to make a bomb we would be brave enough to say so. When we say that we are not making one, we are not. We do not believe in it.”
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Although no Westerner has seen it, Khamene'i reportedly issued a fatwa in 2003 that the production, stockpiling, and use of nuclear weapons are all forbidden under Islamic law—and therefore that Iran will never acquire them. In 2012, Iranian foreign minister Ali Akbar Salehi penned an op-ed in the
Washington Post
in which he argued that Khamene'i's fatwa “proved” that Iran could not be pursuing nuclear weapons.
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In early 2013, the Iranian Ministry of Foreign Affairs restated its claims that the fatwa exists and that, for Iran, it is binding.
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In 2005, the Iranians told the IAEA that “[t]he Leader of the Islamic Republic of Iran, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has issued the fatwa that the production, stockpiling, and use of nuclear weapons are forbidden under Islam and that the Islamic Republic of Iran shall never acquire these weapons. . . . The leadership of Iran has pledged at the highest level that Iran will remain a non-nuclear-weapon state party to the NPT and has placed the entire scope of its nuclear activities under IAEA safeguards and Additional Protocol, in addition to undertaking voluntary transparency measures with the agency that have even gone beyond the requirements of the agency's safeguard system.”
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Of course, the last part of this statement is less than truthful since Iran has not honored the terms of its Safeguards Agreement nor has it implemented the Additional Protocol. Indeed, some have cited the Shi'i concept of taqiyyah (dissembling to avoid danger) as one reason to suspect that the fatwa is a weak reed.

Of greater importance, the Iranian government has ignored or reversed other fatwas when reasons of state made them inconvenient. In an assessment of this issue, two highly knowledgeable scholars of Iran, Michael Eisenstadt and Mehdi Khalaji, warned that “it is the principle of
maslahat
(the interest of the regime) that guides the formulation of Iranian policy. Before he died, Ayatollah Khomeini ruled that the Islamic
Republic could destroy a mosque or suspend the observance of the tenets of Islam if its interests so dictated. And the constitution of the Islamic Republic invests the Supreme Leader with absolute authority to determine the interest of the regime. He can therefore cancel laws or override decisions by the regime's various deliberative bodies, including the Majlis (parliament), the Guardian Council, and the Expediency Council.”
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After Khomeini's fatwa in 1989 condoning the killing of author Salman Rushdie, Iranian officials went to great lengths to explain to Western diplomats and media that the fatwa was not legally binding on them.