John Wohlstetter - Sleepwalking with the Bomb

In 2010 things got even worse. On March 26 the North torpedoed a South Korean ship, the Cheonan; the ship sank with all hands. On November 12, the North unveiled its pilot uranium enrichment facility to a group of U.S. officials and scientists. Thus in addition to its ability to divert spent plutonium from spent nuclear fuel (the method used to fuel its two nuclear tests) Pyongyang now has the ability to fuel bombs with enriched uranium.

In sum, having never once since its 1948 creation honored a commitment in full, the North is, if nothing else, consistent. Its ace of trumps is duplicity, its ability to manipulate Western hopes that bad guys will become good. In the real world, for good things to take place there must be positive regime change, as happened in the former Soviet Union when Mikhail Gorbachev came to power.

The experience with North Korea repeated itself with Iran. After UN inspectors revealed Iran’s clandestine nuclear program in August 2002, a familiar drama unfolded. In 2003 the EU3 (Britain, France, and Germany) began three years of negotiations with Iran, seeking to confine it to commercial nuclear use. This effort went on despite the evident reality that Iran sits on immense oil and natural gas reserves (its energy dependency comes from lack of refining capacity, requiring it to ship some three-fifths of its oil elsewhere to be refined and returned for domestic consumption). In 2006 the U.S., Russia, and China joined the negotiations.

On November 30, 2007, U.S. officials released a new National Intelligence Estimate—reversing their position of two years earlier—concluding “with high confidence” that Iran had abandoned covert uranium enrichment four years earlier, in 2003, and also abandoned efforts to produce a nuclear weapon. But the estimate treated uranium enrichment, which is by far the main event in terms of going nuclear rogue, as commercial. As Vice President Cheney noted in his memoir, weaponization can be rapidly resumed.

In September 2009, on the eve of the annual UN General Assembly session in New York, in order to preempt a disclosure of the facility by the U.S., Iran revealed a new, hitherto undisclosed uranium enrichment facility near the holy city of Qom. The facility, which the U.S. had monitored for several years, has a 3,000-centrifuge capacity—far too small to be useful for a commercial program.

Instead of acknowledging the danger posed by Iran, President Obama’s response was to talk at the UN session about negotiating a new superpower arms treaty with the Russians, thus “setting an example” for other nuclear powers to reduce—and, eventually, eliminate—their own nuclear arsenals. It was left to French president Nicholas Sarkozy to point out that there were two present nuclear dangers—North Korea and Iran—that deserved prompt attention. The president went on in April 2010 to sign New START with Russia, and a month later presided over a two-day international nuclear proliferation summit in Washington, talking anew about moving towards a “nuclear-free” world.

Iran continues to proceed with open contempt for the U.S. and others, steadily increasing its military capabilities—testing longer-ranger multistage ballistic missiles, and launching a satellite. It continues working on advanced warhead design (necessary to build a compact nuclear warhead to sit atop a missile), including specialized devices with no civilian application, such as a neutron initiator, part of the triggering mechanism for a bomb. It has installed newer, faster centrifuges at its Fordo facility near Qom, aiming to speed up uranium enrichment to produce fuel for a uranium bomb.

Iran took British hostages (released after the British government groveled publicly) and arrested three American hikers who Iran asserted strayed over the Iraq-Iran border, ostensibly to spy on Iran. One was released by Iran as a “humanitarian” gesture, but the other two were convicted in a carnival show trial on ludicrously trumped-up charges. (They were eventually released.) In January 2012 Iran (falsely) charged an American with being a CIA spy—an action taken immediately after the U.S. Navy rescued Iranians from the Persian Gulf waters and immediately before the Navy rescued a second group of wayward seafarers.

Particularly disturbing was the supine reaction of the Obama administration to the rebellion that erupted in Iran on June 9, 2009, after a patently fraudulent election returned Iran’s firebrand Islamist president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad for a second four-year term. Brutal street shootings—plus mass arrests with beating and rape used as intimidation tactics against detainees—quelled the protests after several weeks. President Obama’s response was tepid because he held out quixotic hopes that he could somehow persuade Iran—which had spent 25 years developing its nuclear program and building a massive human and physical infrastructure—to abandon nuclear weapons on the cusp of successfully producing them.

At the end of 2011 the U.S. and Europe finally imposed strong sanctions, targeting Iran’s central bank and embargoing the import of Iranian oil. Had this been done in June 2009 the Iranian threat already might have been ended via positive regime change. Yet Iran’s nuclear march continues despite sanctions.

WHEN NEGOTIATIONS fail or are used to run out the nuclear clock (as with Iran and North Korea), and when sanctions fail (as frequently they do), the remaining options are aiding the opposition and taking military action. The former was not viable in Saddam’s Iraq—save after the Gulf War, when a countrywide popular uprising was on the verge of dethroning Saddam. But the U.S. stood down, and Saddam crushed the rebellion. As for Syria, it was only the Arab Spring of 2011 that galvanized popular revolt there, its fate uncertain at this writing.

As for the latter option, twice Israel has destroyed unloaded nuclear reactors, both times with complete mission success. Israel’s demolition of Saddam’s above ground reactor in 1981 was a textbook armament-prevention operation. Eight planes—F-15s for escort and F-16s to bomb—flew over the desert for two hours a few hundred feet off the ground, emerging at sunset to drop unguided gravity bombs on the exposed Osirak reactor. One 2,000-pound bomb landed squarely inside the reactor. Though publicly the U.S. joined a UN condemnation of the raid, privately President Reagan chuckled: “Boys will be boys.”

The raid was launched because the Israelis knew that the reactor would soon be loaded with nuclear fuel. Once it had gone critical the consequences of scattering highly radioactive material over several countries made a raid untenable. On the advice of most of his top advisors, who wanted to assuage anger in the Arab world, President Reagan allowed the UN Security Council resolution condemning the measure to pass, instead of ordering a U.S. veto.

There was no serious doubt that Iraq’s program was aimed at obtaining a nuclear weapon. While Iraq’s program started in 1959 as a commercial venture under Atoms for Peace, in the late 1970s Saddam Hussein signed contracts to purchase weapons-grade uranium from France and reprocessing equipment from Italy, the latter to separate plutonium from spent reactor fuel. France offered its newly developed, 7 percent enriched “caramel” fuel, which would have substantially cut Iraq’s operating costs but is not suitable for use as the core of a uranium bomb and does not allow easy separation of plutonium from spent fuel. Saddam turned down France’s offer.

Saddam preferred 93 percent enriched uranium for the reactor core—vastly higher than needed for commercial or research purposes. In November 1980, two months after invading Iran, Iraq ended international inspections of its reactor. In January it permitted one visit, but the reactor was not yet operational, so inspection was all for show. After Israeli’s June 1981 strike, condemnation was nearly unanimous. As noted earlier, American intelligence still refused to concede that Iraq had been seeking nuclear weapons, and only two of President Reagan’s senior advisers, Secretary of State Alexander Haig and National Security Adviser Richard Allen, backed Israel. Incredibly, Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger accused the Israelis of violating international law by committing an act of war. It took retired Supreme Court justice Arthur Goldberg to answer: as Iraq had attacked Israel in 1948, never recognized what it continued to call “the Zionist entity,” and never signed a peace treaty, the two nations were still legally at war. Israel’s precision strike was thus entirely lawful.