As talks over Iran’s nuclear program and a revival of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action nuclear accord continue in Vienna, both the United States and Iran signal the talks are nearing their conclusion.
“We have, I think, a few weeks left to see if we can get back to mutual compliance,” Secretary of State Antony Blinken said a few weeks ago. Iranian Foreign Minister Hossein Amirabdollahian, meanwhile, said on Monday that a deal is “at hand.” There is also a growing sense in Congress that a deal is near, albeit not a favorable one. Special Envoy Rob Malley has thrown an increasingly generous incentive package at Tehran in exchange for restrictions that, at best, are transitory.
The 2015 Iran nuclear deal never did what its proponents advertised.
A military nuclear program has three main components: enriched fuel, warhead design, and delivery. The JCPOA addressed only the first. According to both the International Atomic Energy Agency and multiple U.S. National Intelligence Estimates, Iran had previously worked on the technology necessary to build warheads.
In order to win Iran’s agreement in 2015, Secretary of State John Kerry reversed the prohibition on Iran constructing delivery systems. So long as Iranian leaders say their rockets are designed to launch satellites into space, any dual-use purpose, even one delivering warheads thousands of miles away, becomes technically legal.
As for the enrichment, the JCPOA left Iran with more centrifuges than Pakistan had when it built not a bomb but an arsenal. That President Barack Obama acquiesced to a sunset clause, an expiration on controls and many inspections, simply weakened the deal further. This is why so many nonproliferation specialists and states living in Iran’s nuclear shadow worried about how Obama-era deal-making reversed decadeslong nonproliferation precedent. Nevertheless, many proponents of the Iran nuclear deal argue with almost religious fervor that its inspection regime was rigorous and essentially put Iran’s nuclear program in a box.
There is one huge problem which such certainty. While it is hard to hide an enrichment program (not that Iran has not tried repeatedly), warhead design takes considerably less space. Experimenting with detonators, modeling, calculations, and computer simulations can all occur in a relatively small space — a space that can also easily and quickly be sanitized. Perhaps the Biden administration, like Obama’s before it, will argue that the inspection regime is sufficient to ensure compliance (it’s not). Regardless, a core assumption of their confidence is that all Iranian nuclear work occurs inside Iran.
The relationship between Iran and North Korea runs deep. Their missiles have common origins. Their engineers and military scientists have attended each other’s tests. They have collaborated to augment Hezbollah’s underground tunnels and compounds. In the mid-1990s, North Koreans attended the same Tehran language school as did I. What the JCPOA and Biden’s prospective new version fail to do is address the interplay between rogue nations. It is simply arrogant for Biden and Malley to believe that Iran compartmentalizes its nuclear work in the same way as the United States. Add into the mix that Biden’s $12 billion-plus in sanctions relief can buy space to conduct warhead work in a North Korean safe haven.
Quite simply, it is a match made in hell and one to which Biden, Malley, and their liberal supporters remain blind.
Michael Rubin (@mrubin1971) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential. He is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.
