Winston Churchill described the actions of Russia as a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma. The nuclear diplomacy of Iran is constructed more simply: it is one lie after another. Western diplomacy has proved susceptible to the tactic. A US National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) in December 2007 concluded that Iran was “less determined to develop nuclear weapons than we have been judging since 2005”. Documents obtained by The Times reveal that this assessment was worthless.The information comes from Iran’s most sensitive nuclear project. It concerns a four-year plan to test a neutron initiator. This is the component of a nuclear weapon that triggers the explosion. The plan was initiated in the very year that the NIE delivered its reassuring message.
The documents outline the use of a material called uranium deuteride. Its destructive potential is huge. Robert Oppenheimer, the pioneering nuclear physicist, once ventured: “I think it really not too improbable that a ten cm cube of uranium deuteride . . . might very well blow itself to hell.” In the view of experts contacted by The Times, Iran’s work in this field has no possible civilian application. It makes sense only for a programme to develop a nuclear weapon.
The discovery is an indictment both of Iran’s duplicity and of the West’s complacency. The Iranian regime has not been a monolithic force in the 30 years since the revolution. Western diplomats have had to make fine judgments as to whether the mullahs seek to spread Islamist revolution throughout the Middle East, or are more concerned to consolidate the country’s status as a leading power in the region. But regardless of divisions within the regime, Iran has sought a nuclear capability. Its efforts have been accelerated in the past decade. The prospect of an Iranian bomb is alarming.
First, a nuclear-armed Iran will feel little constraint in supporting its terrorist proxies, Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon, with money and materiel. A strengthening of these elements will make more difficult an eventual two-state resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Second, a nuclear stand-off in the Gulf is unlikely to replicate the stable deterrence of the Cold War. In the adversarial relationship of the old superpowers, the threat of massive retaliation deterred the Soviet Union from military expansionism. Communism was brutal, but the Soviet gerontocracy after Stalin was risk-averse. Iran’s leadership is not like that. The regime is, as Tony Blair has remarked, “a major strategic threat to the cohesion of the entire region”.
Third, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad seeks the annihilation of Israel, a sovereign member of the United Nations. The notion that his noisome anti-Semitic rhetoric is somehow explained by a faulty translation from the Farsi is one of the more bleakly fatuous suggestions of recent diplomatic debate. Israel was founded by a people that had doggedly clung to survival through persecution, pogrom and genocide. Israel’s leaders have not only the right but the historic obligation to take at face value the threats of a religious millenarian who looks forward to a second Holocaust while denying that the first one ever happened.
Fourth, Iran invariably seeks to aggravate regional disputes. It was not the aggressor in the Iran-Iraq War of 1980-88, but its retaliation included mining international waters and attacking Kuwaiti oil tankers. Through its client, Hezbollah, it has sought to destabilise Lebanese democracy as well as threaten Israeli civilians with rocket attacks.
The protests of Iran’s leaders that the country’s nuclear programme is purely for generating electricity ought to have invited caution from the outset. But the serial deceptions that have accompanied Iran’s nuclear developments demand more than scepticism. The regime’s nuclear adventurism is a provocation and a threat.
Iran’s leaders ritually speak of the country’s rights to nuclear energy and a full fuel cycle. No one disputes the first point. The problem with the second is that it is compatible with a nuclear weapons programme, which Iran appears determined to pursue. That is a choice by the regime: it is not a defensive reaction to any supposed Western provocation.
The country’s nuclear effort was given impetus a decade ago when President Clinton was seeking a new relationship with Iran. The US and the EU have consistently been open to a compromise whereby Iran has access to the full fuel cycle provided that uranium enrichment takes place in another country.
Iran has instead elected to cheat. It developed secretly a uranium enrichment facility at Natanz and a heavy-water plant at Arak. Neither was necessary for a civil nuclear programme. Other countries with nuclear reactors simply buy uranium on the open market, and do it more cheaply. These are countries such as Sweden, whose peaceful intentions no one could doubt. Iran has since developed a second enrichment facility and announced plans for another ten.
All the signs of Iran’s progress to a nuclear weapon have been there. The regime’s adherence to the requirements of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has been selective. It was not widely noted at the time, but the deeply flawed 2007 NIE explicitly did not take account of Iran’s conversion and enrichment of uranium. Much to his credit, David Miliband, the Foreign Secretary, immediately remarked on this omission. Iran was still pursuing an enrichment programme that had no obvious civilian application but great utility in producing fissile material for nuclear weapons. And it carried on regardless of demands by the IAEA and the United Nations Security Council to stop.
By its own lights, the Iranian regime has acted rationally. It has dissembled, played on divisions within the UN Security Council, and exploited America’s understandable diffidence — since the fiasco of intelligence about Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction — in stating firm conclusions. Iran suspended work on its nuclear weapons programme in 2003, after its clandestine activities had been exposed; and it resumed those activities when it believed it had the opportunity. By these means, it has edged closer to acquiring a terrifying military capability.
Anticipating the end of America’s brief post-war nuclear monopoly, Churchill also declared: “We ought not to go jogging along improvident, incompetent, waiting for something to turn up, by which I mean waiting for something bad for us to turn up.” Sixty years later, that is precisely what Western diplomacy is doing.
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The Times, editorial
