Trying to Scuttle Iran Nuke Talks, Again
by alethoBy Gareth Porter | IPS | May 15, 2014
As diplomats began drafting a comprehensive agreement on the Iranian nuclear program and Western sanctions in Vienna on Tuesday,
U.S. officials were poised to demand a drastic cut in Iran’s enrichment
capabilities that is widely expected to deadlock the negotiations.
Iran
is almost certain to reject the basic concept that it should reduce the
number of its centrifuges to a fraction of its present total, and the
resulting collapse of the talks could lead to a much higher level of
tensions between the United States and Iran.
The
Obama administration’s highly risky diplomatic gambit rests on the
concept of “breakout time,” defined as the number of months it would
take Iran to accumulate enough weapons grade uranium for a single
nuclear weapon.
Both
Secretary of State John Kerry and former U.S. proliferation official
Robert Einhorn have explained the demand that Iran give up the vast
majority of its centrifuges as necessary to increase Iran’s “breakout
time” to at least six months, and perhaps even much longer.
Einhorn,
who was the State Department’s special adviser for nonproliferation and
arms control until June 2013, wrote in a report for the Brookings
Institution that the number and type of centrifuges “will be limited to
ensure that breakout times are … a minimum of 6 to 12 months at all
times.”
In a separate article in The National Interest,
Einhorn wrote that such a “breakout time” would entail a reduction from
Iran’s present total of 19,000 centrifuges to “a few thousand
first-generation centrifuges.”
Kerry suggested in testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on April 8
that the administration would try to get a breakout time of more than
one year but might settle for six to 12 months. He compared that with
the two months he said was the current estimate of Iran’s breakout
capabilities.
“Breakout”
has been touted by hardline think tanks as a non-political technical
measure of the threat to obtain the high-enriched uranium necessary for a
bomb, but it is actually arbitrary and highly political.
Even
proliferation specialists who support the demand to limit Iranian
enrichment capabilities severely, however, including both Einhorn and
Gary Samore, President Barack Obama’s former special assistant on
weapons of mass destruction, believe that “breakout” is more about the
politics surrounding the issue than the reality of the Iranian nuclear
program.
In an interview with IPS,
Samore said the breakout concept can only measure the capability to
obtain the necessary amount of high-enriched uranium from acknowledged
facilities – those that are under inspection by the International Atomic
Energy Agency (IAEA).
It
does not deal with a scenario involving secret facilities, he said,
because it is only possible to estimate rates of enrichment in
facilities with known quantities and types of centrifuges.
The
use of the breakout concept is based on the premise that Iran would
make a political decision to begin enriching uranium to weapons grade
levels in its Natanz and Fordow plants as rapidly as possible. That
would mean that Iran would have to expel the IAEA inspectors and
announce to the world, in effect, its intention to obtain a nuclear
weapon.
Samore,
who left the Obama administration in January 2013 and is now the
executive director for research at Harvard’s Belfer Center for Science
and International Security, told IPS, “It’s extremely unlikely that Iran would actually take the risk for single bomb,” calling it “an implausible scenario.”
Samore
is no dove on Iran’s nuclear issue. He is also president of United
Against Nuclear Iran, an organization that puts out hardline propaganda
aimed at convincing the world that Iran is a threat trying to get
nuclear weapons.
Another
problem with the specter of “breakout” is that, even if it took the
risk of enriching the necessary weapons-grade uranium, Iran would still
have to go through a series of steps to actually have a bomb that it
could threaten to use.
A
report released last week by the International Crisis Group (ICG) noted
that calculations of breakout capability “are rough and purely
theoretical estimates” and that they “omit inevitable technical hitches”
and “an unpredictable and time-consuming weaponization process.”
According
to the testimony by director of the Defense Intelligence Agency. Lt.
Gen. Ronald Burgess before the Senate Armed Services Committee in April
2010, that process, including integrating the weapon into a ballistic
missile, would take three or four years.
The
ICG report quoted a senior Iranian official as saying, “Serious people
know that, even if Iran sought nuclear weapons, it will take years to
manufacture one. What’s more, no state has ever invited opprobrium or a
military strike just to produce a few kilograms of highly enriched
uranium.”
In
an interview, Jim Walsh of MIT’s Security Studies Program was scathing
about the “breakout” scenario the administration is using to justify its
diplomatic stance. “The idea of Iran kicking out inspectors to rush to
get one bomb is silly,” he told IPS.
Samore
believed that Iran would be far more likely to try what he calls a
“sneakout” – the use of secret facilities to enrich uranium to weapons
grade — than a “breakout.”
But
as is generally acknowledged by proliferation specialists, such a
covert route to a nuclear weapons capability would take much longer than
trying to do so openly. Furthermore, it is almost certain to be
detected, as Director of National Intelligence James Clapper testified
in April 2013.
Despite
his conviction that the breakout concept makes no sense as the basis
for negotiations with Iran, Samore believes it will be “the test for any
deal,” because it is the only way to measure it. “It’s a political fact
of life,” Samore said. “It all gets boiled down to breakout time.”
The
dominance that the breakout advocates have achieved in the lopsided
political discourse about Iran has given opponents of an agreement a new
form of pressure on the Obama administration to make unrealistic
demands in the negotiations.
Einhorn admitted at a panel at the U.S. Institute of Peace in Washington D.C. on Tuesday
that the decision on the length of breakout time and the level of
centrifuges to be demanded “will come down to a political judgment.”
He
clearly suggested, however, that the decision is primarily a response
to political pressures from various unnamed parties and not a matter of
finding a political compromise with Iran.
“Some say six months or less,” he said. “Others say you need a year. Some say a year and a half or two years.”
The
former senior State Department official on proliferation issues
insisted, moreover, that there was no possibility of accepting Iran’s
explicit demand to be permitted to increase its enrichment capacity to
as many as 30,000 centrifuges in order to support a nuclear power
program.
“That amount would bring breakout time down to weeks or days,” he said. “That’s breakout.”
He
did not discuss the possibility of agreement on gradually phasing in
additional centrifuges as the practical need for them is demonstrated by
progress on a new nuclear reactor.
The
tough talk by Einhorn, who has clearly been given the green light to
describe administration thinking publicly, makes it much less likely
that the administration will back away from a breakout demand in the
face of firm Iranian resistance.
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