Proliferation expert Jeffrey Lewis and Ali Vaez of the International Crisis Group say all the attention being paid to such things as “breakout time” and the number of centrifuges is just a distraction from what really matters in the ongoing nuclear talks.
What really matters, says Lewis, is the inspection procedures to catch the Islamic Republic if it cheats.
Defense Secretary Ashton Carter and many other officials in the Obama Administration have been saying similar things, but they tend to get drowned out by talk of issues that are easier to grasp like the number of centrifuges allowed.
In an interview with the Vox website, Lewis, who is proliferation specialist at the Monterey Institute of International Studies in California, said his worry isn’t that Iran will do something illicit at any of its known nuclear facilities, but rather that it would try to build a parallel nuclear industry in secret.
Lewis said, “I’m way more worried about the covert facility problem. I’m not as worried that they’re going to use Natanz [or another known nuclear development site] to break out. I think if the Supreme Leader wakes up one morning and is really feeling it, they’re going to dig another hole under a mountain someplace.
“So, to me, the value of the agreement is not just ‘does it lengthen the breakout time’ but does it make less likely they can build a secret facility.”
Fisher said, “We have this crazy situation right now where the IAEA has basically no access to the places where the centrifuges are made. And so Iran can put those centrifuges on a truck, and if they drive them to Ö some hole in a mountain, then Ö we don’t see them. The Iranians have provided some limited access to the centrifuge workshops. But [expanding that access] would be a big achievement.”
And that is one of the provisions listed in the State Department’s 42 agreed-upon parameters, which was published in last week’s Iran Times. Secretary of State John Kerry said the world would for the first time have Iran’s fuel cycle under observation from “cradle to grave,” from digging ore out of mines to disposing of nuclear fuel waste.
Speaking before the list was published, Lewis said among other things that concern him is whether the lifting of sanctions will allow Iran to import dual use goods that could be used for peaceful purposes or for a clandestine nuclear program.
The parameters list says the UN will bar Iran from importing any such materials except through a UN agency to be created that will screen all the dual use goods Iran seeks to buy.
“What we want is for Khamenehi to know, for certain, that if he wakes up and decides to build a bomb, we’re going to know about it, and there’s going to be a showdown,” Lewis said.
He added, “Here’s the thing about the conversation focusing so much on breakout time [or how to maximize the amount of time it would take Iran to enrich one bomb’s worth of uranium]. I don’t think Khamenei wakes up and says, ‘Ugh, did you see the breakout calculation today? Nine months! That’s too much. If we can get it down to about six and a half months, then I’d be willing to go [build a nuclear bomb].’
“He won’t do that. But since we can’t get inside his head and know what he’s thinking, then we’re going through these bizarre DC wonk thought experiments to satisfy ourselves. ‘If we make it a year, then he’d have to know that we’d have enough time to respond.’
“But a year is a totally arbitrary amount of time. It’s one of these things where we try to take the abstract and unknowable and impressionistic and we try to put a number on it.
“Nobody ever specifies what they [Iran] would do with all this time. And keep in mind, the breakout calculation is for one bomb.
“That’s why I’m much more worried about covert [nuclear] sites. Because if you’re Iran, you want to do what Pakistan did, which is to get a whole bunch of fissile material [prepared in secret]. So that by the time the world really figures out [that you’re running a clandestine weapons program], they’re like, ‘Oh, I think they have an arsenal.’ ‘How many?’ ‘I have no idea.’ And then it’s an unsolvable problem.”
Lewis said, “I care about whether the IAEA can look at Iran’s centrifuge workshops and can make sure that they’re getting information about all of the different mining locations, so there’s not another source of natural uranium that could be enriched some place else.”
Many critics are concerned that US intelligence is not competent to find secret sites in Iran, noting how it bungled what nuclear program Iraq had.
But Lewis said, “Give the intelligence community credit. I mean, they caught Iran with [secret nuclear sites at] Lavizan, Natanz and Fordo.
Lewis was caustically dismissive of the Iranian program, calling a lot of it “nutty” and little more than an effort to give the regime prestige. He said, “The entire Iranian program is like a national airline. It’s this incredibly expensive, preposterous thing that makes people feel better about their country. But there is just no reason that they need to do this.
“If you took out nationalism and people’s testicles, you would look at the centrifuge program and be like, ‘Ah, this is really expensive and causes us a lot of anxiety. Do we really need to be doing this?’ And the answer would be, No.”
Over at the International Crisis Group, a respected think tank based in Brussels, Iranian-born Ali Vaez says the loud debate over how much breakout time Iran should be allowed misses the point.
He says, “The timescale for Iran to produce a bomb’s worth of fissile material is an appealingly simple criterion in light of the technical complexity of the negotiations. But it’s also a deceptively simple one. Five common misperceptions make breakout time a misleading gauge of the potential threat.”
First, he says, breakout time only measures the time needed to produce fissile material for a bomb, not a bomb itself.
“Even if Iran got everything right on a first attempt, it would still need to test its bomb — as every nuclear-armed country has done — which would require more than one device and lengthen the time frame.”
Second, he says, breakout time is only a gross estimate, not some finely tuned mathematical calculation. “Different experts using the same numbers come up with different time frames, even among the countries negotiating with Iran. They differ on assessments of average centrifuge efficiency and the time required to chemically convert uranium into feedstock, reconfigure centrifuge cascades and recycle waste. Breakout estimates, moreover, usually assume that an Iranian dash for the bomb would face none of the technical challenges that have plagued the program over the past decade.”
But, more importantly, Vaez says, “The breakout capacity measure ignores the reality that a single bomb does not make a nuclear deterrent. Assuming that Tehran would at minimum need two bombs’ worth of material in order to test one, the breakout time estimate doubles; assuming that Iran, like other nuclear-armed countries, would want a small arsenal, the time frame increases several times over.”
Third, Vaez says, just like Fisher, that Iran is unlikely to use its known facilities to build a bomb, but will pursue a secret and parallel nuclear program—what people in Washington call “sneakout” rather than breakout.
“Both Iranian enrichment facilities—in Natanz and Fordo—were built covertly and declared only after being exposed by Western intelligence agencies. Fixation on a possible breakout distracts from the greater risk of a sneakout and therefore from the two main safeguards for preventing one: transparency and monitoring,” he says.
Fourth, he points out that the United States can launch air strikes on Iran with just a few days notice. It has hundreds of aircraft based in the region and, even in the 2003 Iraq war, it flew its bombers from bases in the middle of the United States, not even bothering to deploy them in the region. “That capacity to strike means there’s little practical difference between six, 12 or 24 months of breakout time,” Vaez argues.
Finally, Vaez says, Iran’s breakout time was very short—less than six months—before it agreed to the interim nuclear deal in January 2014 that cut back its nuclear program. But he notes that Iran didn’t pursue breakout then.
A number of US officials, while not publicly dismissing the issue of breakout time, have said that the key to the agreement is the ability of the world to monitor what Iran is doing outside its known nuclear facilities. And they also put great emphasis on a system that will allow sanctions to be “snapped back” on Iran if any violations are detected.