Unthinkable (7 page)

Moreover, what the Arbabsiar plot may highlight is that as much as we may misunderstand the Iranians, they understand us no better, perhaps even less.

In June 2013, Iran surprised the world once again, electing the pragmatic reformer Hassan Rowhani to succeed Ahmadinejad as president. That the majority of Iranians would vote for Rowhani—the most anti-establishment figure among the six candidates—was no surprise. Iranians have consistently voted for whoever offered the greatest prospect for change since 1997, with the obvious exception of the (likely) rigged election of 2009. What was more unexpected was that Khamene'i would allow Rowhani to win given his apparent desire for a submissive president who would not challenge him as both Khatami and Ahmadinejad had.

Whether Rowhani's election will result in any meaningful change is another story entirely. Like his mentor Rafsanjani, Rowhani has expressed a greater interest in rationalizing Iran's economy, easing social restrictions, improving relations with the United States and compromising on aspects of Iran's nuclear program to rebuild foreign economic ties. As president, Rowhani will have some authority within the system to push such agendas, but ultimately he cannot rival the Supreme Leader. Khamene'i crushed both Khatami and Ahmadinejad when they attempted to deviate from his line. This history suggests that Rowhani will run into trouble if he tries to fundamentally alter Iran's domestic or foreign policies. If he does try to do so, he may simply provoke another major internal struggle that will at least be a distraction for the Iranians if not a real threat to the regime's hold on power. Still, Rowhani's unanticipated victory at the polls should serve as a reminder of just how unpredictable Iran is and how we should never assume that any conclusion is foregone in Tehran.

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Americans frequently group all unconventional attacks under the rubric of “terrorism.” However, the vast majority of accepted definitions of terrorism focus on the use of violence for a political purpose against noncombatants. Many of the Iranian attacks against the United States and its allies have used terrorist methods—such as car bombs—but against soldiers. Although they may feel like terrorism to us, they do not meet the definition. They are acts of war, of unconventional war or asymmetric war, not terrorism. To some extent, this distinction is one without real difference since they do engender a similar response; however, there is no question that Americans, and most people, react differently to the killing of women and children in civilian areas than they do to the killing of soldiers, especially soldiers in a war zone. Thus, labeling an attack on American soldiers “terrorism” is often inaccurate and excessively inflammatory. I believe it important to differentiate between these two different forms of political violence.

I
ran's nuclear program dates back to the days of the Shah. He hoped to build a nuclear power infrastructure and at least toyed with the idea of acquiring nuclear weapons to realize his ambition of having Iran join Russia and America as a third superpower. Most of the Shah's effort, however, was focused on nuclear energy to ensure that Iran's hydrocarbon wealth was available for export and not needed for domestic consumption. Moreover, the Shah appears to have recognized that Iran's size and wealth meant it could develop a conventional military that would allow it to dominate the Persian Gulf region and his acquisition of nuclear weapons was not only unnecessary, but potentially counterproductive if it spurred Iran's neighbors to do the same.
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Perhaps the best evidence that the Shah chose not to seek nuclear weapons was that he became a charter member of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), signing (even before France and China) in July 1968.
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The NPT remains the cornerstone of the modern nonproliferation regime. However, it is also a problematic document, reflecting the naïve
assumptions of an earlier time. It is grounded in the notion of “atoms for peace,” the early Cold War belief that one could separate civilian from military uses and countries would not use the former as a cover for the latter. Thus, the NPT enables all member states to pursue nuclear energy for civilian purposes, but forbids any that did not possess them in 1968 (that is, the United States, USSR/Russia, China, Britain, and France) from acquiring nuclear weapons. Moreover, the NPT requires all nonweapons states to sign Comprehensive Safeguards Agreements, which obliges them to declare all civilian nuclear facilities and allow them to be inspected by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).

The revolution of 1978–79 halted all aspects of the Iranian nuclear program. However, at some time during the 1980s, after Iran recognized that Saddam Husayn intended to acquire nuclear weapons himself—and doubtless would have used them to defeat Iran in their vicious eight-year struggle—Tehran reignited its own nuclear drive.
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The program came under the auspices of the Revolutionary Guard, and it had nothing to do with generating electricity. Yet even after the Iran-Iraq War ended in 1988, Tehran's nuclear program continued to chug along, possibly out of sheer inertia.

Soon thereafter, the Iranian nuclear program received an important boost from Pakistan's Abdul Qadeer Khan. Khan was the father of the Pakistani nuclear program and was later discovered to have run a covert network selling equipment, material, and know-how related to nuclear weapons to many of the worst countries in the world—Libya, North Korea, and Iran among them. Nuclear weapons require solving both complex theoretical physics problems and equally complicated practical engineering problems to manufacture both the radioactive “fissile” material that is the explosive fuel and the mechanical device that causes the fissile material to detonate. Most countries can benefit from the help of others who have already solved these problems, and in the late 1980s, Iran definitely needed help.

There are many ways to produce the fissile material. All of them involve separating trace elements of either uranium or plutonium from
other materials to produce purified concentrations, which when combined in sufficient quantity (a “critical mass”) can sustain the chain reaction that produces a nuclear explosion. Saddam's Iraq used giant magnets to try to do the job—the same technology that the United States used to produce the Hiroshima bomb in 1945. The North Koreans used a breeder reactor, which threw off quantities of purified plutonium as a by-product that can then be collected and reprocessed for weapons. The Iranians, following the Pakistani lead, chose to use cascades of high-speed centrifuges, which take uranium in gaseous form (uranium hexafluoride) and spin out the gas to separate the heavier U-238 molecules from the lighter U-235 (the uranium molecules needed for bombs and energy). Perhaps as a hedge, the Iranians also set up a plutonium separation facility on the North Korean model at Arak.

A. Q. Khan began to provide Iran with information related to nuclear weapons fabrication in 1989. He would go on to provide Iran with the design for Pakistan's first-generation P-1 centrifuge, and in 1995 he provided Tehran with the plans for a more advanced Pakistani centrifuge, the P-2. The P-1 design enabled the Iranians to build their own IR-1 centrifuges, which now form the vast majority of Iran's functioning centrifuge inventory. The Iranians also built a small number of advanced IR-2, -3, and -4 centrifuges modeled on the P-2, which can enrich uranium far faster than the first-generation models. In January 2013, Iran announced that it would begin to operate advanced IR-2 centrifuges at its Natanz uranium enrichment plant.
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Its IR-3 and -4 versions are not yet fully operational.
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Several years after Khan first began providing help, Tehran's nuclear ambitions received another important boost. Like most things in the Islamic Republic, the nuclear program was mismanaged and made little progress for most of its first decade or more in operation. Bizarrely, what pulled it out of its torpor was the reformist president Mohammad Khatami. There is no evidence to suggest that Khatami was more eager for a nuclear weapon than his predecessors. In fact, in private communications with the United States through trusted emissaries, he signaled his willingness
to trade away the program in return for American concessions in other areas, such as trade, aid, and investment.
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There are two versions of what happened. The first version focuses on Khatami's reforms, part of which were intended to remove from power the unqualified clerics and their bureaucratic protégés who had taken over the Iranian government after the revolution and helped run it into the ground. Khatami was determined to repopulate Iran's institutions with competent technocrats. In this version of events, the nuclear program was no exception. The alternative version is that it was not Khatami but Khamene'i himself who cleaned house. The Supreme Leader, annoyed with the glacial pace of Iran's nuclear program, wanted to see it making greater progress.
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In either version, the end result was the same: Reza Amrollahi, the longtime chief of the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran, was sacked, and replaced with the dynamic former oil minister, Gholamreza Aghazadeh-Khoi. Aghazadeh brought the same energy and efficiency to the nuclear program that he had once brought to Iran's hydrocarbon sector.
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As a result, between 1997 and 2002, between the efforts of Khan and Aghazadeh, the Iranian program began to accelerate. In August 2002, the Mujahedin-e Khalq (MEK), an Iranian Marxist-Islamist opposition group, happened upon information indicating that the Iranian nuclear program had made far greater progress than had been previously realized (it is widely rumored that the Israeli Mossad provided the information to the MEK). The MEK revealed to the world the existence of Iran's uranium enrichment facility at Natanz and its plutonium extraction facility at Arak, both in violation of Iran's requirements under its Safeguards Agreement with the IAEA, a critical component of its NPT obligations.

In response to these revelations, the IAEA began a much more intrusive investigation of Iranian nuclear activities. Neither Arak nor Natanz constituted incontrovertible proof of a nuclear weapons program, because it is possible to use either plutonium or enriched uranium in civilian reactors, but the fact that these facilities and other activity had not been declared to the IAEA left the impression that they were for military purposes. Similarly, the Iranians claimed that they were not obligated to
inform the IAEA of new nuclear facilities until they were finished—an argument they continue to advance. Not only is this not correct under their Safeguard Agreement with the IAEA, but if the facilities were purely for civilian use, why conceal them at all? In addition, if Iran wanted to acquire nuclear reactors for civilian purposes, they needed neither the capability to enrich uranium domestically nor to extract plutonium. It would have been far cheaper and easier for Iran to have bought fuel from another country, as the vast majority of countries with nuclear energy programs do.
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The Iranians insisted that they were not trying to acquire nuclear weapons, but they could not provide a plausible explanation either for having concealed the plants or for why they needed such capabilities.
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Since then, Iran briefly suspended its enrichment activities in 2003–2005, and may have ended or suspended most or some of its weaponization programs. It has been subject to six binding United Nations Security Council resolutions demanding that it halt its nuclear activities—all enacted under Chapter VII of the UN Charter and therefore superseding the provisions of the NPT under international law. Iran has endured multiple rounds of international and multilateral sanctions that have inflicted enormous damage on the Iranian economy. It has also had its nuclear program attacked by computer viruses and some of its nuclear scientists attacked physically (and some killed). Yet, Iran has persevered. Its program has been slowed but not stopped.

Why does everyone (or almost everyone) think Iran's nuclear program is intended to produce weapons? It's an excellent question. After all, enrichment is (technically) permitted under the NPT and could be related to civilian needs, and most of the hard evidence regarding the Iranian nuclear program relates to its enrichment of uranium. Indeed, Iran insists that its nuclear program is entirely peaceful. So it is worth asking why so
many people are so convinced that the Iranian program is really intended to give Tehran the capability to build nuclear weapons.

Iran does not deny that it has an extensive nuclear program—how could it with inspectors monitoring so much of it? However, Tehran insists that the program is meant only for medical uses and civilian energy production.
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This claim is difficult to square with the available information. The evidence suggests that the Iranian program is intended for military purposes, although it certainly can (and has) produced relatively small amounts of both civilian energy and radioactive material for medical uses. Nevertheless, while the evidence indicates that Iran intends to acquire the capability to build nuclear weapons, it does not definitively indicate that Iran has made the decision to build those weapons and field a nuclear arsenal, and that is where the debate within the international community is currently focused.