High Stakes for a Nuclear Agreement with Iran

May 15, 2014 | Edited by Lauren Mladenka and Geoff Wilson

Tweet - @Ali_Gharib: Fantastic @AnnCurry doc on #Iran nuclear negotiations & historic Nov. agreement. http://nbcnews.to/1jgG7Ra

Outlook - “This week, the United States begins one of the most complex and challenging set of arms control talks the country has ever undertaken. No surprise: it's with Iran,” writes John McLaughlin in USA Today. “The stakes could not be higher. A successful deal would mean Iran gives up any capability to build a nuclear weapon. That outcome could help ease rancorous relations between Tehran and Washington. Failure would mean the U.S. and Iran's bitterest rivals in the region remain on edge, afraid that Iran could still quickly achieve nuclear weapons status. A Middle East rife with suspicion and instability would be left even closer to boiling over.”

--“[Getting] a nuclear agreement would be the brightest spot in Iranian-U.S. relations since the 1979 revolution and the violent takeover of the U.S. embassy the same year. It could act as an opening wedge for eventual progress on all the other issues that divide Iran not only from the United States but from many of its regional neighbors as well. There's yet a long road to that eventuality, and one that starts getting a lot steeper in Vienna.” Read the full article here. http://usat.ly/1mY0HrP

Not the sanctions - “Sanctions are neither the reason for the breakthrough, nor the impetus behind the government of Iranian President Hassan Rouhani's openness to talks. They also did not get Rouhani elected,” writes Trita Parsi in Foreign Policy.

--“In reality, last year's elections were a continuation of the fraudulent 2009 elections -- some might argue, the completion of that tense chapter. Iranians wanted change in 2013, just as they did in 2009 -- before the imposition of Obama's sanctions. The last four years under President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad had been worse than the first four. Repression had intensified, the security atmosphere in Iran made the heyday of McCarthyism look like the enlightenment, corruption and economic mismanagement was at an all-time high, and the hardliners had criminalized everything from academia to tourism. The population was suffocating. The regime had thwarted Iranians' vote for change in 2009, and few believed they would even bother to cast their votes in 2013.”

--“If the myth of the sanctions success prevails, American foreign policy will be led down a perilous path. A false and dangerous blueprint for dealing with proliferators and international disputes in general will emerge: Forget diplomacy, never compromise, impose sanctions, threaten war -- and hope for the best. With Iran, thanks to the quiet compromise on enrichment, war is more distant than ever since the crises erupted. The world may not be as lucky next time it goes down an all-out sanctions path.” Full piece here. http://atfp.co/1lAOo0T

Dissenting opinion - “Comments by the former Director-General of the Israeli Atomic Energy Commission, Brig. Gen. Uzi Eilam, made big news in Israel on May 8 because they seriously challenge key elements of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s narrative concerning the Iranian nuclear threat,” writes Greg Thielmann in a piece for Arms Control Now. “Although Eilam’s Hebrew language interview was extensively covered in Israel, it was almost completely absent from America’s mainstream press. This is unfortunate, particularly at a time when the U.S. public and the U.S. Congress need urgently to acquire a deeper understanding of the issues involved in the critical negotiations underway in Vienna this week.”

--Eilam was quoted as saying that “the Iranian nuclear [weapons] program will only be operational in another 10 years,” and that he was “not even sure that Iran would want the bomb. It could be enough for them to be a nuclear threshold state – in order to become a regional power and scare the neighbors.” Furthermore he said that “the statements and threats [Israel] made regarding an attack on Iran did not help,” and that, “A strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities would in effect be the opening salvo in an all-out war. Bombing would achieve the exact opposite to what we want.”

--However, “Eilam is but the latest in a series of active or former senior Israeli security officials whose assessments of Iran’s nuclear potential differ from those of Prime Minister Netanyahu. For instance, Netanyahu’s standard refrain that Iran poses an ‘existential’ threat to Israel was contradicted in 2009 by then Defense Minister, Ehud Barak. Netanyahu’s threat of going it alone to destroy Iran’s nuclear weapons was characterized by former Mossad Chief Meir Dagan as ‘the stupidest idea [he’d] ever heard.’ Netanyahu’s recent assertions that Iran ‘is developing ICBMs to attack the United States, have been downplayed by senior Israeli security officials. In explaining his conclusion that Iran is ten years away from having operational nuclear weapons, Eilam notes that: “I have learned the hard way that things take time.” Even if one sees Eilam’s ten-year timeline as overly sanguine, it does provide an implicit warning against fixating on theoretical timelines for Iran producing one weapon’s worth of fissile material. As U.S. intelligence community estimates periodically make clear, the uranium enrichment timeline for fissile material is not the same as the timeline to produce nuclear weapons.” Full story here. http://bit.ly/1jy6XOR

Changing attitudes - “Since the implementation of the interim deal in January, Iran has halted the most sensitive aspects of its nuclear program, reduced its stockpile of 20 percent enriched uranium, and shown willingness to compromise on issues such as plutonium output at Iran’s heavy water reactor Arak. These steps combined with positive statements from the European Union’s Catherine Ashton and Iran’s Foreign Minister Javad Zarif has some hopeful that a deal might just around the corner. But with many more issues left to resolve, onlookers should restrain their ‘irrational exuberance’ and not be surprised to see a six month extension of the talks come July.”

--“Make no mistake, even the best deal will be a tough sell on Capitol Hill, and some will continue to oppose anything short of Iran’s complete capitulation. But while just a year ago, nearly any vote coming down hard on Iran would have enjoyed substantial majority support in both houses of Congress, a recent vote in the House Armed Services Committee showed a split in U.S. hardliners’ ranks. The amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) offered by Rep. Doug Lamborn (R-CO) expresses a nonbinding “sense of Congress” that sanctions should not be lifted unless the deal includes the complete dismantlement of Iran’s nuclear program and an end to the country’s state sponsorship of terrorism. But such ideas, which once sounded attractive to a less-informed Congress, are now largely understood to be a poison pill.”

--“Rep. Adam Smith (D-WA), the ranking Democrat on the committee, spoke out strongly against the amendment. ‘This is a very bad idea,’ said Smith. ‘It completely ties the hands of our negotiators … by setting out very specific criteria that have to be met before a deal can be achieved, going well beyond the nuclear question.’ Such talk would have been political suicide just a year ago, but Democrats have largely coalesced around the President’s position, and they’ve brought some Republicans along with them.” Read the full piece by Laicie Heeley in Nukes of Hazard. http://bit.ly/RGoOgm

Jump-starting talks - “A U.S. envoy on Tuesday suggested Washington could accept ‘reversible steps’ from North Korea on denuclearization in order to jump-start frozen negotiations,” writes Rachel Oswald in Global Security Newswire. “‘What they do, quite frankly, in the initial stages would be perfectly reversible steps that they would take, declaratory steps,’ said Glyn Davies, the Obama administration's special envoy for North Korea policy. He emphasized, however, that Pyongyang could only return to the long-paralyzed six-party process if it accepted the ‘fundamental premise’ that the negotiations were focused on the permanent shuttering of its nuclear weapons program.” Full piece here. http://bit.ly/1nO4441

Dealing with an immovable object - “The US, Russia, and China — despite all their other differences — can agree on a basic approach to how to deal with North Korea’s nuclear arsenal,” writes Sydney J. Freedberg Jr. in a piece for Breaking Defense. “The bad news? That approach can’t work...The only thing we all agree on is the only thing North Korea will never agree to: getting rid of Pyongyang’s nuclear weapons.” Read the full piece for a summary of the troubled negotiating position with North Korea and the practical steps parties could take to return to talks. http://bit.ly/1jLUTPd

Quick-hits:

--“Nuclear Weapons Complex Reform Could Mean Pay Cut for Contractors” by Douglas Guarino in Global Security Newswire. http://bit.ly/1sRJUWM

--“HEU and Plutonium Removed from Italy” by Pavel Podvig in the International Panel on Fissile Materials Blog. http://bit.ly/1ljuCFn

--“HEU and Plutonium Removed from Belgium” by Pavel Podvig in the International Panel on Fissile Materials Blog. http://bit.ly/1g8E4hf

--“The Half-Century Anniversary of ‘Dr. Strangelove’” by David Denby in The New Yorker. http://nyr.kr/QJyZ34

--“Iranian Reality Check” by Roger Cohen for The New York Times. http://nyti.ms/1jM6nlG

--“North Korea’s Actions at Atomic Test Site Confound Experts“ report by Global Security Newswire. http://bit.ly/1qFGxnW

Event:

--“The Role of Tactical Nuclear Weapons in Responding to the Crisis in Crimea.” Discussion with Peter Doran and Kingston Reif. May 19 from 6:00 to 8:00 at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, 1616 Rhode Island Ave., NW. RSVP here. http://bit.ly/1iUUxA6

Dessert:

How to say “danger” in 10,000 years - “The Waste Isolation Pilot Plant is the nation’s only permanent underground repository for nuclear waste. It holds radioactive byproducts from nuclear weapons manufacturing and nuclear power plants. WIPP was designed not only to handle a waste stream of various forms of nuclear sludge, but also more mundane things that interacted with radioactive materials, such as tools and gloves… Eventually, WIPP will be sealed up and left alone. Years will pass and those years will become decades. Those decades will become centuries and those centuries will roll into millennia. People above ground will come and go. Cultures will rise and fall. And all the while, below the surface, that cave full of waste will get smaller and smaller, until the salt swallows up all those oil drums and entombs them. Then, all the old radioactive gloves and tools and little bits from bombs—all still radioactive—will be solidified in the earth’s crust for more than 200,000 years. Basically forever.

--The real problem however, is figuring out how to warn people 10,000 years from now of this danger. “10,000 years in the future is still fairly inconceivable: 10,000 years ago, the biggest new technology spreading across the planet was farming. Culturally, we share almost nothing with people alive back then. Who knows what the world will look like 10,000 years from now?” The same goes for modern language and symbols, which have undergone extreme changes in the last 10,000 years and likely will again.

--Perhaps the best solution for how to warn people in the future came from two philosophers who “came to the conclusion that the most durable thing that humanity has ever made is culture: religion, folklore, belief systems. They may morph over time, but an essential message can get pulled through over millennia. They proposed that we genetically engineer a species of cat that changes color in the presence of radiation, which would be released into the wild to serve as living Geiger counters. Then, we would create folklore and write songs and tell stories about these ‘ray cats,’ the moral being that when you see these cats change colors, run far, far away. This is all a lot of effort to protect people that our great great great grandkids will never know. All while people now, in our own time, are already harmed by the results of nuclear weapons manufacturing.” Read the full piece here from Roman Mars in Slate here. http://slate.me/1nK5cFY