As talks to restart the 2015 Iran nuclear deal flounder in Vienna and Iran admits that it now enriches uranium up to 60% (an enrichment level of around 5% is sufficient for reactor fuel), many Western academics and analysts appear to have given up.
“I’d take my chances with a nuclear-armed Iran,” nonproliferation specialist Jeffrey Lewis tweeted, suggesting that outcome would be better than chancing military strikes. Even some conservatives question whether Iran’s motives are certain, let alone dangerous.
Many political pundits rationalize Iran’s actions. “Iran’s leaders are not suicidal,” Peter Beinart wrote. Many scholars agree. This has always been a strawman argument, though. The nightmare scenario is not a suicidal regime but rather a terminally ill one. Should Tehran build nuclear weapons, the most ideologically pure units of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard would control them. Deterrence breaks down if there is a popular uprising in Iran. If the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps know they only have hours left, they may calculate they can act on their ideological prerogative, knowing that no one would retaliate against a country whose regime has already collapsed.
But does Tehran even want nuclear weapons? Or are concerns about Iran’s motives exaggerated?
The basic problem is that Tehran’s statements never made sense. Iranian leaders said, for example, that they need nuclear power to be energy-independent and that they hope to build eight nuclear reactors. But Iran only has enough uranium to power eight reactors for 15 years. For a small fraction of the cost of its nuclear program, it could upgrade its refinery and pipeline network and power itself with gas for more than a century.
Often, American officials navel-gaze and assume Iran’s nuclear ambition is reactive rather than proactive. If the United States was not in Iraq and had not been in Afghanistan, Iran would have no need to consider a nuclear deterrent. The problem with this argument is that the Islamic Republic restarted the shah’s moribund nuclear program in the mid-1980s — before the U.S. had troops in either country.
The intelligence about Iran’s program rests both in International Atomic Energy Agency inspections and the explanations Iranian officials gave when caught in lies. Suffice to say, civilian energy programs do not need to experiment with warhead design, mathematical modeling of explosives, or nuclear triggers, nor do they need to bury secret plants under mountains or try to hide the archives of their nuclear work from inspectors.
If that was not a clear indication of their motives, there are the words of Iranian officials themselves. Just two months after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, former President Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, often considered a moderate, declared, “The use of an atomic bomb against Israel would totally destroy Israel, while the same against the Islamic world would only cause damage. Such a scenario is not inconceivable.” Former Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad famously called for Israel to be “wiped off the map.” While some American apologists said that was a mistranslation, no one told the Iranians that. A decade ago, General Hassan Moghadam, the father of Iran’s missile program, died in an explosion. His last will and testament asked that his epitaph should read, “The Man Who Enabled Israel’s Destruction.”
While Democrats can blame Donald Trump for his strategy and Trump’s backers can blame President Obama, the reality is that Iran’s leaders have agency and Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei has made the decisions according to his interests. It is simply preposterous to suggest that the Iranian leadership’s motives with regard to its nuclear weapons program are unclear. Genuine programs do not stockpile uranium at the enrichment levels Iran has.
Michael Rubin (@mrubin1971) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential. He is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.
