Visions of mushroom clouds
The world returns to dangerous games
Is the global non-proliferation regime dead?
“As Miracle Max said in ‘The Princess Bride,’ it’s not dead. It’s mostly dead,” says Joe Cirincione in today’s podcast episode. “It’s hanging by a thread… We’re looking at the end of the arms control regime we built up over the past fifty, sixty years.”
Rather than “totally obliterating” Iran’s nuclear program, President Donald Trump’s decision to dispatch B-2 bombers to destroy the centrifuges at Fordo may result in the unintended, but wholly predictable, consequence of convincing Tehran’s hard-liners that they have no choice but to pursue the bomb. And they might still possess enough enriched uranium to build a rudimentary nuclear device relatively quickly.
The demise of non-proliferation is more than an Iran problem. The power and prestige of achieving nuclear deterrence are luring governments, including U.S. allies, to consider embracing the bomb, says Cirincione, a national security analyst and career arms control specialist. He is one of a few Americans who has visited Iran’s Isfahan uranium enrichment facility, which was targeted in the U.S. raid.
The powerful lure of nuclear deterrence
North Korea was the last country to join the nuclear club when it conducted an underground test in October 2006, three months after testing seven ballistic missiles. The Stalinist regime had already bolted the NPT in early 2003. It had first threatened to withdraw in 1993, but the Clinton administration’s persistent diplomacy succeeded, or so it seemed at the time, to calm tensions and keep North Korea from going nuclear.
Clinton’s second term ended on a high note when he met General Jo Myong-rok, the highest-ranking North Korean official to visit Washington, in October 2000. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright then traveled to North Korea. It appeared the decision to choose diplomacy over military intervention was working, but Clinton’s successor took a harder line.
George W. Bush believed Pyongyang wasn’t complying with the 1994 Agreed Framework. After the 9/11 terrorist strikes by al-Qaeda, Bush declared North Korea part of an “axis of evil” threatening global security while starving its people. Even so, diplomacy continued in the Six Party Talks chaired by Beijing. North Korea again promised to denuclearize.
What does this failed engagement teach us? Neither good-faith diplomacy nor more coercive measures, such as sanctions, are guaranteed to persuade a state to abandon its nuclear ambitions if it believes it must have the bomb to survive. Indeed, coercion, including military intervention, may only reinforce in decision-makers’ minds the necessity of achieving nuclear deterrence.
“North Korea believed the United States was going to attack and destroy it, and that wasn’t a crazy idea,” says Cirincione. “For ten years, the U.S. contained the [North Korean] program effectively through diplomacy until Bush pulled out of it. You have this growing nuclear problem now, and faith in diplomatic solutions is clearly declining, particularly in the United States.”
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu deliberately derailed U.S.-Iran diplomacy by ordering strikes on Iranian air defenses and military leadership. President Trump, for all his talk of wanting a deal with the ayatollahs, joined Israel’s war on June 21. Whether the B-2s convinced the mullahs to shelve the country’s nuclear ambitions or race for the bomb instead, no one can say at this time. Cirincione fears it will be the latter.
“I wrote a book called ‘Bomb Scare’ that summarizes why countries go nuclear. The top two reasons are protection and prestige. Look at Great Britain getting the bomb for prestige. India for prestige. But most countries get it to prevent attacks. That’s why we got it. The U.S. built the bomb because Hitler was building the bomb,” Cirincione says. Likewise, Iran once pursued nuclear weapons when it feared Saddam Hussein was doing the same.
From the vantage of Iran’s clerical and military leaders today, having lost control of their airspace to two nuclear-armed powers (U.S. and Israel) and seen their Hamas and Hezbollah proxies severely weakened in the aftermath of 10/7, the only card left to play may be the bomb. Iran has even accused the IAEA of leaking sensitive details about its nuclear facilities to help Israel attack them.
The illusion of the nuclear threshold
In Tuesday’s podcast episode, leading Iran analyst Gregory Brew of Eurasia Group offered his tentative conclusion: Iran’s nuclear program was substantially set back but not destroyed, and the Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei is unlikely to capitulate. Whether President Trump will still demand “unconditional surrender,” as his infantile social media posts screamed, is unclear.
Iran miscalculated vis-à-vis Israel, Brew says, but the Islamic Republic could not have expected how swiftly its relative weakness would be exposed after 10/7.
After Trump tore up the JCPOA in May 2018, Iran began spinning its centrifuges to enrich uranium beyond allowable limits to reach the “nuclear threshold.” If Khamenei had wanted the bomb, he could have had it. But crossing the threshold would have provoked massive Israeli and/or U.S. military action. Thus, Iran’s leaders seem to have concluded, they would maintain a nuclear capability without going all the way to the bomb.
Netanyahu’s June 12 gamble that Iran could not or would not retaliate effectively has rendered the nuclear threshold strategy a massive failure. The hard-liners who wanted to build a bomb years ago may draw the lesson that they should not make the same mistake again.
“What we’ve seen over the past twelve months is a significant degradation in Iran’s regional position, the collapse of the ‘axis of resistance’ proxy network, the degradation of Hezbollah, Iran’s most important ally, the collapse of the Assad regime in Syria, and Israel’s direct strikes… have exposed Iran as vulnerable,” Brew says.
When you also consider the regime’s domestic legitimacy crisis brought on by economic strife, extensive corruption, and repressive measures to crush dissent, “developing a nuclear deterrent will be of increasing interest to the elites given how this war has exposed vulnerabilities…. There is an idea that you see come up in Iranian commentary all the time, that you can either be Libya or North Korea,” Brew adds.
In 2003, Libyan dictator Moammar Gadhafi surrendered his nuclear ambitions and chemical weapons stockpiles. Eight years later, his regime was gone. Rebels killed Gadhafi after finding him hiding in a drainage pipe. North Korea went nuclear twenty years ago, maybe earlier. Today, the Stalinist regime of Kim Jong Un is considered impregnable. Which would the ayatollahs, committed to preserving the spirit of ‘79, prefer to be? Then again, going nuclear would also risk bringing down the house.
For more on the teetering non-proliferation order and the lessons of recent history, read this excellent article by The Wall Street Journal’s Yaroslav Trofimov.
“Is the lesson that countries facing existential threats need nuclear weapons to survive? Or that pursuing those weapons is too dangerous, encouraging enemies to strike while they still can?” Trofimov writes.
I’m currently reading historian Vladislav Zubok’s new book The World of the Cold War. The possibility that several states may pursue nuclear weapons while the existing nuclear powers engage in a new arms race (see: China) echoes Zubok’s chapters on the Cuban Missile Crisis and its aftermath.
The prior decade saw the U.S. and Soviet Union stockpile large arsenals – enough to destroy the planet many times over – while publicly demonizing one another as existential threats to human civilization. No international treaties existed to control arms. Mushroom clouds were not a paranoid nightmare; they were a real possibility. As Zubok writes, the close calls caused by Khrushchev’s Berlin and Cuba gambles convinced everyone that a course-correction was overdue. The White House and Kremlin installed a hotline and agreed to ban testing.
What will it take to walk the world back from the proliferation precipice today?
Recapping…
Also discussed with Gregory Brew in the podcast: origins of Iran’s program going back to the Shah; Atoms for Peace; theory of deterrence; Israel-Iran relations in the 1980s and ‘90s; Iran’s lack of allies; and much else.
And with Joe Cirincione in today’s episode: 1952’s “duck and cover” civil defense film; Dr. Strangelove (briefly); Clinton and North Korea; Bush and North Korea, John Bolton’s Iran blunder; what kind of bomb Iran can build with its current amount of enriched uranium; and more.
Coming up next
First, an apology. In last week’s newsletter, I mentioned that today’s podcast would feature my conversation with Sean Wilentz about the Democrats’ problems.
The crisis in the Middle East compelled a schedule shuffle. “Democrats Lost in the Wilderness” will drop next Friday, July 4.
Coming up Tuesday, Rutgers Law School distinguished professor Adil Haque will talk about the demise of international law as missiles and bombs fly all over the world, and as Israeli soldiers shoot starving Palestinians daily.
Haque was quoted in this thought-provoking essay by Linda Kinstler. “The gap between the aspirations of international criminal law and the reality for people on the ground is greater and greater,” Haque said.
The “rules-based order” is whatever powerful countries want it to be.
