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.
Preventing Nuclear Armament
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.
Saddam likely would have had the bomb well before launching his August 1990 invasion of Kuwait had Israel not moved. After the Gulf War, arms inspectors discovered that Iraq was at most a year or two away from having a bomb.
Israel repeated this strategy in destroying Syria’s nascent reactor in 2007. In his memoir former President George W. Bush recounted how Israel’s then–prime minister, Ehud Olmert, telephoned and asked him to have the U.S. Air Force bomb the Syrian facility. Bush declined, preferring to pursue a combination of diplomacy and threat of force, but kept mum while Israel acted. Bush said that the 2007 intelligence finding that Iran had suspended its nuclear weapons program undermined his military option.
Targeting Iran’s underground facilities is far more complex. Conventional-warhead cruise missiles are accurate enough, but cannot penetrate the hundreds of feet of rock or concrete that shelter Iran’s deepest facilities. Missile payloads likely would have to be nuclear to do the job, and neither the U.S. nor Israel is willing to resort to this choice, unless an Iranian nuclear attack takes place. Warplanes can achieve pinpoint accuracy, but in the absence of U.S. or Russian heavy bombers to carry massive penetrating bombs, smaller planes might have to drop several smart bombs into the same path to dig deep enough. An air attack would miss any undiscovered facilities. At best, the program could be delayed rather than ended. But on the other hand, a few years’ delay can buy precious time for sanctions or aid to the opposition to sink the regime.
There is another option against deeply buried facilities that, due to the deeply-ingrained taboo against nuclear use, Israel will forgo: according to the late American bomb designer Ted Taylor, a one-kiloton bomb if properly molded into a shaped charge could bore a ten-foot wide hole 1,000 feet into solid rock.
One dangerous consequence of the 2003 WMD intelligence debacle is that it establishes (for practical political purposes) a de facto standard of proof beyond a shadow of a doubt before the world’s governments might support military action. Closed societies conceal their programs and use periodic diplomatic “charm offensives” to cloak their intentions with ambiguity and raise hopes of peaceful resolution. Rejecting such hopes appears nearly impossible for Western societies, who value peace so highly that they assume all others must as well.
In effect, ruthless proliferators have taken Western societies hostage in the past, and continue to do so. In a diplomatic version of the Stockholm Syndrome—the condition of hostages who come to sympathetically identify with their captors—advanced societies reflexively shrink from the unpleasant task of confronting hostile states pursuing nuclear weapons.
Given how stark the military options are, and uncertain the prospects for success, it is understandable that the West recoils. But a nuclear Iran, even short of war, will ignite a nuclear arms race, shift the balance of power, and supplant the U.S. as potentially the preeminent Mideast regional player.