What Iran and America can(not) do

Last Wednesday, the Director of National Intelligence, Dennis Blair, at last treated Iran’s nuclear program with some of the honesty it deserves: he admitted that it’s up to Iran whether or not it wants to build the bomb. Although on one level this forms the latest round in saga of political posturing between two sides, it is also a surprisingly frank statement. For one, it acknowledges that if Iran is really dead set on becoming a nuclear power, there is little that America, Britain et al can do in the long run to stop them, short of launching an Iraqi-style invasion of a country of 72 million people. Secretary of Defence Robert Gates has estimated that a missile strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities would merely delay the scheme by a few years. Punitive economic sanctions (which look far from certain at the moment anyway) may only push back the schedule and endear what seems like an irrational Iranian regime to an increasingly unhappy public.
Second, Blair’s statement inevitably focuses attention on America’s own nuclear arsenal, as well as those of its allies. With America and Russia holding an estimated 21,000 nuclear warheads between them (out of a global total of 23,000), it is rightly difficult to tell another country that they can’t have just one. From Iran’s point of view, it is faced down by a collection of hostile nations who are essentially telling her ‘You can’t have the same weapons as us because we don’t like you’. Just to be clear, I am not an Ahmadinejad-sympathizer, and would not in practice be opposed to any action against him. I do think, however, that we need to recognize the moral dilemma of our situation. So long as countries like the U.S., Britain and Israel possess nuclear weapons which are deployed to target just about anywhere in the world (in the case of the first two), the incentive will be out there for others to follow. Although it would be unrealistic to suggest that disarmament on the part of stable nations would ensure a nuclear-free future, it would be less likely that weapons would fall into the wrong hands. Not only did Iran obtain its original atomic know-how from Russia, but Russia’s large (and, in some cases, questionably secured) arsenal also continues to be the only serious cause for concern for those intent on mopping up any so-called ‘loose nukes’. In this sense, working towards disarmament both gives us a sounder platform to stand on and reduces the threat of existing weapons going astray.
A nuclear-armed Iran would serve as the perfect example of the knock-on effect of proliferation. Should Iran succeed in what many believe to be a covert weapons program, the U.S. would have a very hard time stopping her neighbors from doing the same. Towards the end of his appearance last week at the U.K.’s Chilcot Inquiry, Tony Blair, in a rare moment of truth, stated that were Saddam Hussein still in power, he would be now be in a desperate competition with Iran to produce nuclear weapons. Therefore, he argued, a post-Saddam world is a far safer world. However, he did seem to forget that there are other countries in the Middle East who share similar sentiments. And having just let Iran get away with their ‘illegal’ agenda, how could Obama tell the likes of Turkey, Saudi Arabia and the U.A.E. not to embark on programs of their own? And unlike Iran, which has yet to convince the world that it is able to build a working bomb, the technology is probably well within their grasp. Perhaps the greatest danger is that Iran’s scheme will result in a post-1945 like arms race. This is precisely the scenario of the book The Nuclear Tipping Point, which examines how a large number of countries (ranging from Japan to Germany) could easily feel forced to “reconsider their nuclear choices”, resulting in a heavily-armed globe. Clearly, this is a situation we must desperately avoid, but it ought also to remind the U.S. of her own role at the heart of past proliferation. For now, the problem is how to kill off Iran’s role in shaping our future. As Dennis Blair knows, this may not be so easy.
Photo credit: Payam’s flickr stream