Sanctions Politics Hinder Success at Moscow Talks

June 13, 2012 | Edited by Benjamin Loehrke and Leah Fae Cochran

Rigid position on sanctions - A draft letter authored by Sens. Robert Menendez (D-NJ) and Roy Blunt (R-MO) outlines a set of ”minimum steps” Iran must take in Moscow, including shutting down Fordow, shipping out its stockpile of 20% uranium and ceasing enrichment to that level.

--Problem: the letter does not consider any concessions on sanctions the P5+1 can make in order to get a deal where Iran takes those minimum steps. Ali Gharib at Think Progress has the letter and notes that such a rigid position on sanctions would likely lead to failed talks. http://bit.ly/KBz0Om

Helping talks succeed - Domestic politics leave little room for U.S. diplomats to offer any sanctions relief to Iran in exchange for caps on Iran’s nuclear program. Europe, however, has the political space to help talks succeed by offering to delay its impending embargo on Iranian oil for six months, argue Trita Parsi and Reza Marashi in The Huffington Post.

--”If the [EU] embargo is formally imposed, however, it will become more difficult and costly to lift it and it will serve as naked escalation that will beget Iranian escalation rather than concessions.” http://huff.to/LJjkMF

Levin on DOD cuts - Sen. Carl Levin (D-MI), Chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, acknowledged that the nuclear stockpile is “ripe for cuts”, reports Walter Pincus in The Washington Post. At an event at the National Press Club, Levin encouraged the Defense Department to consider cutting $10 billion a year for the next ten years in order to avoid the across-the-board cuts required by sequestration. http://wapo.st/LRHNvJ

Q&A - Transcript from the event with Sen. Levin and Gen. Cartwright:

--Q: “Senator Levin, do you agree with some of the comments that General Cartwright has made about the unnecessary size and expense of our nuclear arsenal?
--Sen. Levin: “I do.”

Tweet - CATO’s @capreble: We could save billions through responsible cuts in the nuclear arsenal, and by rethinking the nuclear triad. ‪#triadtodyad

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The costs of ABM Treaty break - The Bush Administration pulled out of the ABM treaty ten years ago. Was it worth it? No, says Tom Collina at Arms Control Now. The politically motivated abrogation of the treaty did not result in any meaningful ability to intercept long-range missiles. Instead it complicated U.S.-Russia arms control efforts and encouraged China’s nuclear modernization.

--The irony- “the necessary development work could have been carried out within the confines of the ABM treaty, which banned deployment but not testing of a land-based system limited to 100 interceptors at one site”. http://bit.ly/MrB8un

Rocky Flats - Kristen Iverson grew up playing in fields near Rocky Flats - the Department of Energy facility where the U.S. made plutonium pits for its nuclear weapons until 1990. Over the years, radioactive contamination from the plant leaked into the atmosphere and local groundwater.

--Iverson’s reflects on the decades-long environmental scandal at Rocky Flats in her new book “Full Body Burden: Growing up in the Nuclear Shadow of Rocky Flats.” NPR’s Fresh Air spoke with the author. http://n.pr/L7j4HK

Grace period for transparency - A report written last month by the former deputy director general of the IAEA addressed a catch-22 with current IAEA negotiations with Iran: if Iran admits to past nuclear discretions regarding alleged military scope of its nuclear programs it would likely lead to further sanctions.

--The answer, suggests Pierre Goldschmidt, is building in a “grace period” similar to the deal between the IAEA and Libya when it came clean in 2004. Such a confidence-building step would allow IAEA inspectors into Iranian facilities and would encourage a normalization of relations between Iran and the IAEA, he argues. Laura Rozen at Al Monitor has the story. http://bit.ly/Nf1Eu9

Keeping a 10.4 MT secret - It’s difficult to keep a nuclear explosion equal to 10.4 million tons of TNT secret. Yet that is what the United States attempted to do in 1952 after its first thermonuclear test - Ivy Mike.

--Rumors of the H-bomb test almost immediately leaked to the press, though the U.S. did not admit to having the bombs until 1954. Alex Wellerstein at Restricted Data goes through the history of secrecy and strategy at the outset of the thermonuclear age. http://bit.ly/KmZMNM