Gen. Dempsey: Military Option Premature

On the radar: JCS Chair on the military option; IAEA in Tehran for talks; Lugar for the gold standard; History lesson on preventive strikes; Flying lightsaber goes softly into the night; Khamenei’s calculations; Cartwright, Fallon and Sanger at CSIS; Roles and numbers of nuclear weapons; and That time we dropped an ICBM from a plane.

February 21, 2012 | Edited by Benjamin Loehrke and Mary Kaszynski

Quote - "I believe it is unclear (that Iran would assemble a bomb) and on that basis, I think it would be premature to exclusively decide that the time for a military option was upon us," JCS Chair Gen. Dempsey told CNN’s Fareed Zakaria.

--“A strike at this time would be destabilizing and wouldn't achieve their [the Israeli’s] long-term objectives.” http://owl.li/9ciRt

IAEA in Tehran - IAEA inspectors are wrapping up a two-day trip to Iran, the second visit in less than a month. Inspectors “sought to meet Iranian nuclear scientists and visit a key military facility,” AP reports. http://owl.li/9ciHY

--“This meeting is a crucial opportunity for everyone, including the Iranians, to get serious,” Arms Control Association Director Daryl Kimball told Bloomberg. “Getting serious means focusing on the near-term problem that 20 percent enriched uranium represents,” which drives the “hysterical war talk in some quarters.” http://owl.li/9ciEO

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Lugar on 123 agreements - Sen. Richard Lugar argues for reversing the administration’s decision to pursue nuclear trade agreements on a case-by-case basis. “American leadership in nonproliferation has been the basis for many of the established prerequisites for any nation contemplating nuclear trade...[resulting in] substantial international nonproliferation and nuclear-trade gains,” Lugar writes in The National Interest.” http://owl.li/9ciPn

Headline of the week - “Boldest Nuclear Cutters Recently? It’s been GOP” Robert Burns for AP.

--From the article: “Republican presidents seem to have a thing for 50 percent nuclear reductions," said Hans Kristensen of the Federation of American Scientists. http://owl.li/9ciNF

Making sense of nuclear cuts - Options for specific force levels are coming from the Pentagon, not the administration. The bipartisan Strategic Posture Commission was the starting point for the NPR and the ongoing guidance review. And nuclear reductions reflect the new defense strategy. Kingston Reif on why nuclear cuts make strategic and fiscal sense. http://owl.li/9cjg4

History lesson - “Just as Israel is openly considering preemptive strikes against Iran, many in the West urged such strikes against Moscow in the late 1940s,” writes Fareed Zakaria. The US chose not to strike, despite seeing the Soviet Union as an existential threat; Israel should do the same now, Zakaria argues.

-- “The efforts to delay and disrupt Iran's nuclear program are working...a policy of robust containment and deterrence is better to contemplate than a preemptive war.” http://owl.li/9ciLM

Tweet - @DangerRoom: “RIP, Raygun: Pentagon’s Laser Plane Laid to Rest http://bit.ly/y0TBQR

The domestic politics of Iran’s program - “The Islamic republic’s strategy of marrying its identity to nuclear aggrandizement makes the task of diplomacy even more daunting,” writes Ray Takeyh in The Washington Post.

--”However, it may still be possible to disarm Iran without using force...A coercive strategy that exploits not just Khamenei’s economic distress but his political vulnerabilities may cause him to reach beyond his narrow circle, broaden his coalition and inject a measure of pragmatism into his state’s deliberations...Such a strategy requires not additional sanctions but considerable imagination.” http://owl.li/9ciKj

Event - CSIS hosts “Iran: U.S. Policy Options” with Gen. James Cartwright, Adm. William Fallon, and David Sanger of the NYT. Bob Schieffer moderates.

--Thurs. Feb. 23rd from 5:30-6:30 at CSIS. RSVP here. http://owl.li/9ck0O

What are nuclear weapons for? - “Maybe it's time to acknowledge that the world has changed dramatically since we first started building nuclear weapons, and it might be time for our nuclear weapons to change with it,” writes Ivan Oelrich in The Atlantic.

--”The president and the nation have a real choice and it's about much more than how many warheads we deploy; it's about why we have nuclear weapons at all and what we want them for.” http://owl.li/9ciCX

Airborne ICBMs - In 1974, the Air Force put a parachute on a Minuteman missile, dropped it out of a C-5 cargo plane, let the missile fall a few thousand feet, fired the missile and let it fly under its own power for 10 seconds - simply to test the concept. Defense Tech has the story and the video. http://owl.li/9ciAM