ISRAEL'S FUTURE AND IRAN'S NUCLEAR PROGRAM

Middle East Policy, Fall 2009 by Weiss, Leonard

Israel has had an arsenal of nuclear weapons since the late 1 960s, and its current inventory is estimated at between 100 and 200 warheads.1 Some of these weapons will eventually be, or have already been, placed on Israel's missile-carrying submarines,2 making them virtually impervious to preemptive military attack. They are or soon will be Israel's invulnerable nuclear deterrent.

Yet, hardly a day goes by without some Israeli official, journalist or lobbyist expressing apocalyptic warnings about Iran's nuclear program.3 Iran, a state party to the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT), is in technical violation of some of its treaty obligations, but its program is still under international inspection by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). Israel never signed the NPT and thus is not under any international inspection regime.

The tacit assumption behind the apocalyptic pronouncements is that Iran will not only make nuclear weapons, but will use them to destroy Israel shortly thereafter. This amounts to assuming that Iran's leaders are insane. That is, Israel's deterrent notwithstanding, the Iranian clerics' hatred of Israel is so intense that in order to destroy it they would launch a nuclear attack that would kill not only Jews but also up to 1.5 million Muslims living in Israel, as well as triggering an Israeli nuclear counterattack. An Israeli nuclear counterattack, which Iran could not prevent, would turn back the clock on Iran's development for many decades and reduce its leaders to radioactive dust. There is no evidence to suggest that the ruling clerics are so disposed.4 Some have speculated that Iran might make nuclear weapons and transfer some of them to third parties, e.g. terrorist organizations, for use against Israel.4 But no country that provides nuclear weapons to a third party can be sure that the transfer will be perfectly secure from discovery or that the weapons will be used as intended. A nuclear attack on Israel using a weapon originating in Iran would undoubtedly be treated as if it came from Tehran, again resulting in Iran's utter destruction.

This is not to say that Iran's nuclear program is benign. It is clear that Iran's near-term intention is to move as close to a nuclear-weapons capability as the nonproliferation regime allows, which is considerable. It is stockpiling enriched uranium, using centrifuge technology that may have come from the notorious A.Q. Khan network6, and constructing a heavywater reactor that could be used for the production of plutonium. Iran's recent test of a missile with a range of 1,200 miles showed that it is pursuing space technology that could also be the basis for a nuclearweapons delivery system. The CIA's 2007 National Intelligence Estimate said that Iran had been engaged in activities involved in the development of nuclear weapons, but had apparently stopped them in 2003. It is reasonable to suppose that Iran may reinsti tute those activities in the future, especially if it feels vulnerable to military attack.7

Moreover, concerns about Iran are not confined to its nuclear activities. Iran has been accused of supporting groups working to destabilize governments in various countries in the region. Those governments, including Saudi Arabia, Jordan, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Egypt, all of which, like Iran, have abominable records on human rights, are friendly toward the United States and supply it with a considerable amount of oil. They are also regional rivals of Iran. Accordingly, they and the United States view any increase in Iran's influence or prestige with great concern. Since Iran's nuclear program is likely to help its quest for such influence, some of Iran's regional competitors are seeking to counter it through the establishment of nuclear programs of their own, possibly creating a further threat of proliferation in the region.

The result in the United States has been to create common cause between those who view Iran's nuclear program as an existential threat to Israel and conservative foreign-policy hardliners who are ready to advocate military action to reverse Iran's surging ambitions. An example of such advocacy is offered by an organization called the Bipartisan Policy Center in a report supporting a course of action that would inevitably lead to war. The report calls for full-scale assaults not only on Iran's known nuclear facilities, but also on its infrastructure, including its electrical grid, water supplies and factories.8 Under this scenario, further attacks would occur if Iran were to try to reconstitute its nuclear program.

Iran's Nuclear History

It should be noted that the U.S. attitude toward Iranian civil nuclear ambitions has not always been negative because of fear of a piggy-back weapons program. Iran had an interest in nuclear-weapons technology going back to the days of the shah, and the United States was an unintended enabler at the time. Under a nuclear-research cooperation agreement signed in 1957, the United States supplied Iran with its first research reactor in addition to supplies of enriched uranium, plutonium and fissile isotopes. The shah expressed plans in the 1970s to build more than 20 power reactors, and the Ford administration, particularly at the urging of Henry Kissinger, agreed to sell Iran the first eight reactors along with nuclear fuel .^ There was even some support within the administration for the shah to obtain reprocessing technology for the purpose of separating plutonium from the spent fuel of those reactors,10 which would have given Iran nuclear weapons material." This was the administration whose White House chief of staff was Dick Cheney, whose secretary of defense was Donald Rumsfeld, and whose head of the nonproliferation office at the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency was Paul Wolfowitz. But Ford lost the 1976 presidential election before signing a new nuclear agreement with Iran, so it was left as an issue for the incoming Carter administration. Carter administration officials were initially favorable and drafted a new agreement that was tighter in its nonproliferation provisions due to the recent passage of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Act of 1978. But the agreement was shelved when it was discovered that Iran was engaged in clandestine nuclear-weapons research.