In the Fall of 2002  I drafted an essay that became a Cato Institute Policy Analysis paper on why invading Iraq was a bad idea. In essence, the paper used rational actor theory to propose that there were better ways to address the threat to US security interests posed by Iraq, to the extent such threats existed, than by going to war. Now, seven years later, it is interesting to revisit the subject.

What made me think about this the recent discussion about a surge for Afghanistan. General McChrystal’s suggestion that 40,000 additional troops need to be introduced into the theatre raised quite a stir in the news. However, there seems to be a widespread opinion among military leaders that the 40,000 could not begin to be introduced until the new year, and could not fully be in place until late next year (presuming that they would all come from the US.) Perhaps President Obama’s delayed response is due to an attempt to figure out where they could get these troops in a reasonable timeframe. It is telling that despite a budget of over half a trillion dollars (not counting supplementals) and a military of over three million people when all branches and reserves are included, we cannot come up with 40,000 troops. Of course, few of the three million are relevant to the task at hand (i.e. sending F-16 mechanics or submariner firemen to Afghanistan is not that useful), but this raises a question for another day about why our military seems to be so ill-tailored to the wars it fights. However, the point to note here is that we can’t come up with 40,000 troops because many of the relevant troops are either in Iraq, already in Afghanistan, or are momentarily  rotated out of one of our two war zones long enough to keep their private lives in order and their sanity intact.

Let me acknowledge first that I, at least, was as fooled as anyone about the likelihood that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and /or programs for WMD. Readers of past posts will note that I place little stock in the ability to know or predict behavior absent first-hand knowledge. Despite the sound advice of Sun Tzu that we cannot know an enemy’s capabilities (much less their intentions) without first-hand information (e.g. through spies) and that such knowledge cannot be derived from oracles, humanity still thinks it can – except our oracles are probabilistic risk models. That said, in the absence of certain knowledge one is forced to make a best guess based on a reasonable reading of past actions and the available  indicators. I maintain that, given the uncertainty, it was not unreasonable to think that Iraq had WMD, and, at any rate, the advice given was optimal whether Iraq had WMD or not. The fact that Hussein did not have WMD by no means invalidates but rather bolsters the core message of the paper that (even believing that there were chemical weapons or worse) the threat to US security interests was overblown, and, to the extent these threats existed, they could be handled more effectively without force.

The question at hand here is whether we are better off having attacked Iraq, and I would maintain that we are certainly not at the moment. If, unlikely as it may be, we are threatened tomorrow by an actual threat to our existence or fundamental strategic interests we would be slow and hard-pressed to respond because we are stretched thin by the war in Iraq. True, there is one less dictator in the world. Nice as that may sound, as long as that dictator is not ruling the US, it is not a good measure of whether US interests are improved.

One issue to consider is the threat posed by the perception of the US as a “high capability – low will” state. I don’t suspect we have any enemies that think the capability of the US military is anything but extremely high. Our military is technologically without peer, and is, at best, matched by few in terms of the level of training and morale of forces (I would contend that an all-voluntary military is a force-multiplier unto itself, particularly after spending so much time studying the Russian system and its influence on combat-effectiveness when I was a graduate student .) However, there is also a perception that the US has a limited stomach for warfare, and will not see its engagements through to the end. This problem is created when a country is a little too fast-and-loose in going to war. Its danger is that it decreases the perception of other states of the cost of conflict with America and makes them more likely to engage in activities that may be viewed as threatening.

Frankly, I am astounded at the relatively slow erosion of support for conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan that is, I presume, a mix of the influence of the 9-11 events on the national psyche and a detachment of the average American to these distant wars. The erosion is present none-the-less. It is not unreasonable that American support for the war in Iraq has diminished. The outcome of the conflict fundamentally affects the way people in Iraq live but not substantially how Americans live, and so it is a given that people over there will be willing to fight long after our will wanes. You may remember hearing a line during the political debates to the effect that ”Timelines to withdraw would be a boon to insurgents and radical elements”. I hate to break it to those critics, but whether we leave now, next year, or in 20 years, some radical element will be around to claim victory. 

The US needs to look at war more like it looks at nuclear war. In other words, it is an extreme action against dire attacks against the national existence or critical national interests and should not be engaged in lightly, and that, having made the decision, we will fully accept the consequences of war and see the conflict through to a definitive end. War as a means to reach limited objectives such as tweaking the world into a more palatable form – as I would suggest was the case in Iraq – is a dangerous game. 

Unfortunately, we are really only mid-course in the conflict in Iraq, so knowing the degree to which we will be better or worse off after than before the war remains unclear. If our government (both the Bush and Obama administrations) is correct in its prevailing presumption that we can leave an Iraq that is democratic, stable, and friendly to the US we may end up better off. However, we live in a world where uncertainty is inexorable, and there are other scenarios, that we cannot accurately judge the likelihood of, that may make us worse off. The most prominent of these alternative scenarios is that the Shia majority takes control and reciprocates against a minority that oppressed them for decades. Under this scenario, we will have essentially built an Iraq – Iran alliance that will make any involvement we have in the Persian Gulf region more challenging and may shake up regional stability.

Yesterday the New York Timesreported that the Obama administration had judged that there was a high likelihood that the North Korean freighter, Kang Nam, was probably just leading the US on a wild goose chase. In other words, that the rusty ship probably had no illicit cargo onboard, and was hoping that it could draw the US or one of America’s allies into the embarrasing position of searching the boat only to find no booty. (See: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/01/world/asia/01sanger.html?hp)

The US Navy has been tracking and monitoring the ship’s movements since it left North Korean waters, and it had earlier been speculated that the ship might contain a small arms shipment for Burma. The question has been whether UN Security Council Resolution 1874 that encourages states to board and search North Korean vessels suspected of violating the arms export embargo would be put to the test. The DPRK had said it would consider such a search a violation of its sovereignty, and an act of war.  (See: http://www.un.org/News/Press/docs/2009/sc9679.doc.htm)

The latest news seems to be that the Kang Nam has turned around, and, for the moment, is headed back in the direction of North Korea. (See: http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/chi-tc-nw-briefs-0630-07014jul01,0,3444662.story)

There has been speculation about the rationale for making such a jaunt, but it seems to be a quite beneficial test for the DPRK. I think the little vessel’s voyage is disconcerting. If North Korea wants to ship missiles in order to earn some funds, one of the few ways it is able to, then it would not send those missiles out on the first voyage. Rather, conducting a test is a win – win for the Kim’s. If they don’t get searched, they gain confidence that they won’t be searched in the future – as long as the level of intelligence remains the same. If they had been boarded, they would have also made it hard for the US to repeat the venture in the future without a much higher standard of intelligence. It is true that they would have had to deal with the fact that they had said such a search would be an act of war, but since the Korean War is not legally over, the Kim’s could worm their way out of that threat at low-cost manner.  The question of the day is what happens if the next time the Kang Nam goes out (or the third time or the sixth time) it does have missiles on it. We can’t count on having better information, so at best there is the lucky guess possibility. For those who want to dismiss the Kim dynasty leaders as irrational and incompetent (and I, myself, have certainly had trouble accounting for some behaviors with motives other than childishness or narcissism), consider the masterstroke of this gambit.

The Iranian “President”, Mahmoud Ahmedinejad, in an interesting move, has called for an investigation into the death of Neda Agha-Soltan – the sweet-faced young lady that the world has been watching bleed out on the streets of Tehran  on low resolution footage available through YouTube. I think there is a high probability that his course of action will blow up in the hairy faces of the Iranian leadership.

Let me be the first to predict the investigation’s findings. The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), possibly in conjunction with Britain’s MI-6, inserted a covert team of snipers that shot the girl in order to stir up trouble. The intelligence agencies of these Western governments decided to to this after they succeeded in an Internet blitz to cast doubt on the legitimacy of Ahmedinejad’s landslide victory.

Now, as I have said in past posts, I am no great believer the predictive ability of even the most revered experts when it comes to the behavior of other humans. However, in this case, I feel safe in that there is only one tack that Ahmedinejad is taking. This song and dance goes roughly like this, there is no significant dissent in Iran. That’s right dissenters, not to mention gays and lesbians, are not indigenously occurring phenomenon within the borders of Iran. Rather , this is all a foreign-led attempt to drive a wedge through the state of Iran so that the imperialists can topple a legitimate government.

This might have been a sound strategy, if anyone were listening. It’s true that there are plenty of Iranians who have reason to resent the United States and Britain. If you happened to be a political prisoner of the Shah or a torture victim of the SAVAK, you might legitimately hold ill-will toward the governments that helped to prop up that regime. Furthermore, whatever America’s involvement was in facilitating a coup against the Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadeq in 1953, it gives credibility to the claim of imperialistic meddling in Iran’s domestic political affairs. (This is precisely why countries like the US have to have the courage of their convictions to not undermine democratically elected scary governments in favor of friendly, but domestically brutal, dictators. Selective respect for the institutions of democracy and rule of law is a mistake with a long shadow.)  So, given this history, this strategy might be the means to create an “us against them” mentality in the populace that would heal divides. However, no one seems to be taking the rhetoric seriously.

This approach is not working for a couple reasons, I believe. First, it is a young population and they know their experience with an oppressive and, on some fronts [e.g. the economy], incompetent government, but they have only the stories of old-timers about imperial interference in their country (though the perception about operations in Iraq may be a different matter – not that there was any love lost between Iranians and Saddam Hussein.) People weight their own experience more substantially than they do history book chapters. Second, as I have discussed in past posts, it becomes increasingly more difficult each day for tyrants to control the flow of information. We live in an era in which a run-of-the-mill cel phone is a window to the rest of the world.

Given the lack of traction his strategy is achieving, I think that the scripting of investigation results will be a big mistake for Ahmedinejad and the Ayatollah Khamenei. Trying to twist the girl’s death to their own advantage could raise the stakes to a “torch and pitch-fork” level of volitility. Any path Ahmedinejad takes, other than the unlikely route of taking responsibility for the incident and submitting the gunman to legal justice, will further raise animous of the citizenry and reduce the government’s legitimacy. Even if it wasn’t a pro-Ahmedinejad malitiaman that killed Neda Agha-Soltan, the government’s legitimacy is so low that it would impossible to convince the people of it.

There is a lot of debate in the US about what the American approach should be toward Iran. President Obama has argued that if America takes sides, it could only help Ahmedinejad and Khamenei, and I suspect this is correct. Others argue that the US should be supporting Mousavi, but that seems to be the same mistake  we fell into in the 50’s. Regardless of the approach taken, we definitely don’t want to what we did in Hungary in 1956 and Iraq in the 1990’s. That is, we don’t want voices telling the opposition there will be support for bold action, and then failing to follow through. This is another lesson that I hope the US government has learned.

On April 5th, President Obama gave a masterful speech in Prague, the later half of which was devoted to the topic of nuclear disarmament. The speech began with an homage to people who acted on a belief that change could be achieved against an overwhelming sentiment that it could not (referring, of course, to the Cold War), and then implied that people of the same ilk were needed to advance disarmament in a similar manner.

Those wishing to see any momentum that may have been created by this speech derailed could hardly ask for better intervening world events. North Korea conducted its second test of a nuclear device, and, in the process, displayed an improved capability had been achieved. Following the nuclear test, they proceeded to set off short-range missiles like  some sort of Independence Day display, and it appears that they are preparing for a long-range missile test in up-coming weeks. Meanwhile, the Iran front remains unchanged. In other words, the Iranians are getting progressively closer to having an infrastructure that would support making weapons-grade fissile material in sufficient quantities within a reasonable time period, and this is making many countries (re: Israel) really unnerved.

It might be argued that such events are a potential boon to disarmament because they underscore the nature of the threat and give impetus for positive action. After all, nonproliferation is unlikely to go anywhere without the major nuclear weapon states showing progress toward disarmament. If the 2010 Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) review conference turns out to be a carryover from 2005, then we can expect backward and not forward momentum on nonproliferation. 

Unfortunately, I suspect that current events do not bode well for advancing the agenda President Obama laid out in his Prague Speech. Nuclear weapon states will only ease their grasp if they feel relatively safe from the threat of attack by states. I emphasize “by states” because I don’t think world leaders give much sway to deterrence as a strategy against nuclear terrorism, but they are pretty confident about the value of deterrence against states. While the threat of nuclear terrorism may (or may not) be on the rise, I don’t think that is a non-starter for disarmament. However, the same cannot be said of risk from states.

As the President stated, nuclear disarmament is not likely to be achieve quickly. There were a number of steps that were laid out that are considered intermediary steps including: reduction of the relevance of nuclear weapons to overall security, bilateral reductions between US and Russia, enactment the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT), verifiable implementation of the Fissile Material Cutoff Treaty (FMCT), strengthening of inspection authority, development of a fuel bank, and progress with North Korea and Iran.

The question is whether all of these are necessary, and, if so, whether any of them are intractable. Take, for example, the question of verifiability of the FMCT. The Bush Administration dropped this treaty supposedly because it was “impossible” to verify. The present administration seems to take as a forgone conclusion that it can be verified. This tells us one of two things. The best case scenario is that the two camps are working under different assumptions about what constitutes a minimally acceptable level of verification. I say this is the “best case” because there would ostensibly be underlying facts that could be agreed upon, and, therefore, there would be a map to understand what would be necessary to move towards a negotiated agreement (e.g. what technological developments.) The worst case is that politics is leading the facts and science- in which case there may be no room for agreement. By “politics leading” I mean that either the Bush Administration started from from the position that they did not want to support the FMCT and found arguing the unprovable case of non-verifiability a good means to quash it, or the Obama Administration started from the position that they wanted the FMCT and knew it required arguing that it was, in fact, verifiable, or, given the possibility that no one knows the answer yet, both of the above. If this is the case, then there is no incentive for either side to reduce ambiguity, and little prospect for moving forward.

When there is a point of intractability, one needs to determine whether there is a new approach to the subject that can be taken, and what it might be. Too often there is a failure to recognize points of intractability, and then to be creative about how to change the underlying conditions to one where progress is possible.

We are now on missile test number seven, following the test of a nuclear device by the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK). The Obama Administration’s stance seems to be: “just let baby Kim Jong Il do his thing, he’ll cry himself to sleep.” Secretary Gates has indicated that he has seen no reason to suggest a build up of forces on the peninsula, and the US is not taking any action that might be seen as escalatory.

I am not being critical of this strategy as it seems about the only reasonable course to take without having any better understanding of the motivations and thinking that inform Kim Jong Il’s behavior. It would be nice to have a good historical analogy as a guide to what strategy might best be employed. However, the most apropos analogy seems to be a thug that wants something and has decided to act out until others relent. If Kim Jong Il were trying to provoke the US into war, he could easily enough do that by artillery attacks on the South. This would guarantee a fight. However, it is difficult to imagine what Kim might think he could gain from getting into a war with an opposition that holds advantages in every area except perhaps raw number of servicemen. While I have no doubt that, like many dictators, he may be a little deluded as a result of his own narcissism and being surrounded by people too fearful to tell him how the world really is, I doubt that he finds the risk of war acceptable. Furthermore, I have trouble with the idea that Kim Jong Il is trying to get the rest of the world to give him some space while he gets his “house” in order with respect to transition, because his actions are designed to do anything but get others off his back. However, I can believe that there is a domestic driver to his behavior. It is certainly possible that he is trying to show no weakness to those within the DPRK as he tries to set up Kim Jong Un for successorship. He might be worried that certain elements smell blood in the water.

The options seem to be: contain and ignore, attack and destroy, or relent and be played. Attacking North Korea would be exceedingly costly given their ability to reign down artillery on heavily populated areas of South Korea. I’ve heard this capacity is pretty well hardened against possible preemption. Relenting just takes us down a dangerous path that we have been before, and it encourages bad behavior in others. This leaves the option of letting Kim do as he pleases as long as his activities don’t become a direct threat, and not giving him the attention and concessions he seeks, as probably the best course at the moment.  

It should be noted that there is also the argument that the tests are a signal to potential arms buyers. I would not be surprised if this were true. I am presuming /hoping that during the period when the IAEA and US were verifying dismantlement that there were  samples taken at the reprocessing facility such that attribution could be definitively made if a nuclear device using North Korean material were to go off anywhere in the world. It must be made clear to the DPRK that if a nuclear explosion occurs using their material anywhere in the world and by any perpetrator, they suffer massive retaliation.

Disarmament by the declared nuclear weapon states has historically been conceptually on par with the Tooth Fairy and Santa Claus. In other words, it is a sweet idea that almost everybody would love to believe in, but only a child or imbecile would place much stock in its feasibility. For the better, this is changing,  and, for the worst, it is  problematic. The idea of a nuclear weapons free world has certainly gained credibility in recent years with the support of popular statesmen like George Shultz, William Perry, Henry Kissinger, and Sam Nunn.

Not taking disarmament seriously is problematic because it is central to the bargain of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT). If nuclear weapon states do not comply with Article VI, then the question naturally arises as to why the [presently] non-nuclear weapon states should take their commitments seriously. While there may be logical reasons to support the status quo, there are few more visceral negative human reactions than those in response to breaches of fairness. It is clear that some non-weapon states are tiring of what they see as the prolonged uni-lateral commitment by non-weapon states as a group to the treaty’s core provisions.

There is no reason to think that the status quo can persist indefinitely, and, therefore, asking the right question is important. If the question is whether the US is safer if the status quo is maintained (the US retains nuclear arms and most of its adversaries does not have them) or abandoned (the US disarms and others maintain or build a capacity), then the status quo is optimal. However, if the question is whether it is safer for the US (and other nuclear states) to keep its weapons and risk regime collapse with a number of nascent bomb-building countries develop, or to take disarmament seriously, then one can make a good argument that disarmament is the optimal path.   

So need the nuclear weapons related labs and facilities worry that they will be put out of business altogether? Not likely. True. These institutions will need to become smaller and will need to be reconfigured to another set of tasks, but they must not be put out of business altogether. Why not? Because the there will forever remain a risk posed by nuclear and radiological weapons that will require the expertise of nuclear engineers, physicists, radio-chemists, and skilled technicians to counter.

Disarmament, sadly, can never mean letting the nation’s guard drop, and staying out ahead of those nations who would cheat on the requisite disarmament agreements and / or non-state actors who would illicitly produce nuclear weapons or devices will forever remain a full-time job. There will be a need to continuously remap the threat in the face of emerging technologies, advances in industrial practices, and improved understanding of adversary capabilities. Such a threat mapping will be needed to determine the shortest route to a nuclear bomb or device, and what can be done about it. Detection capabilities will need to be built that are quicker, more accurate, and more cost-effective, and so can be made more ubiquitous, and this requires people steadily working on developing these technologies. Heaven forbid there is ever a malicious use of a nuclear device, there will be a need to attribute the activity to a particular source with the supreme level of confidence required of taking extreme  retaliatory measures.

Is Mossad, Israel’s foreign intelligence service, assassinating Iranian scientists involved with Tehran’s nuclear fuel program? A number of sources are reporting on this story whose origins seem to be in a Daily Telegrapharticle dated February 16th by Philip Sherwell. Most concretely, the Telegrapharticle reports on circulating rumors about Mossad’s involvement in the death of Ardeshire Hassanpour in 2007. Hassanpour was reportedly a high level scientist at Iran’s uranium conversion facility at Isfahan. However, the thrust of the article is a suggestion that Israeli covert efforts are likely to be stepped up because of fears that President Obama will be less likely to approve of Israeli military attacks and more likely to be obstructionist against such operations. Other than the reporting of rumors, there is not a great deal of solid accusations in the article. Therefore, it is difficult to draw conclusions about the factuality of the claim.

It should be noted that, if the Israelis are engaged in such activities, it is hard to imagine that they would be able to continue to succeed. Even if the Mossad is not running a covert war against Iran, the Iranian government, which has completely demonized Israel, is likely to believe the stories are true and to sequester the most crucial people. There are people in the Iranian government who would readily accept a claim that Israelis grind up their elderly for plant-food, let alone something as unexceptional as that they are involved in a covert campaign of assassination and sabotage to slow down Iran’s progress in the realm of the nuclear fuel cycle.

Given Iran’s enthusiasm for the destruction of Israel, it would be difficult to fault the Israelis if they did form such a plan in desperation. However, the challenge of succeeding in such a task is considerable, and the potential for impacts deleterious to Israel’s well-being would be high. This is a big program, and it is hard to imagine crippling it with such covert operations. Those that can readily be killed are not critical, and those who are critical may not be easily accessed. One the cost side of the ledger, Israel doesn’t need to advance an image of itself as an underhanded rogue state reticent to engage in diplomacy and swift to resort to prison-yard tactics.

On the other hand, the measure of success seems to be in delaying progress, and, given this vague metric, Israel might find it worthwhile. However, if they are stalling for President Obama to be out of the White House, they will probably need to keep the ball in play for eight years. Unless, the economy hasn’t bounced back into positive growth within the next three years or there is a major terrorism event that pushes the American people in a more hawkish direction, President Obama is likely to be around in 2016. Of course, they may be banking on the President’s mind being changed or on developing a means to a more permanent solution that doesn’t require US support and/or sanctioning. Certainly if Ahmedinejad remains around, it may only be time before the President, himself, finds that he can’t suffer the idiot or his country’s nuclear ambitions a moment more.

The Los Angeles Times is running a story that suggests that the official stance of the US on Iran’s intentions with respect to nuclear weapons has changed under the Obama Administration. see: http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/washingtondc/la-fg-usiran12-2009feb12,0,3478184.story

Readers may remember the shocking National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) that was released toward the end of 2007 that proposed that there was good reason to believe that the Iranians had shelved their nuclear weapons program. To clarify, as the NIE does, this does not mean that they stopped work on uranium enrichment which is necessary for them to make a nuclear weapons but is also used to make fuel for light-water reactors, nor did it mean that they stopped work on delivery systems (i.e. missiles).

What did it mean? It meant that the intelligence community had some reason to believe that the Iranians had been, but were no longer, conducting research on the systems involved directly in producing a nuclear explosion. Such research might include development of specialized high explosives, metal machining, or the development of precision electronics. One would expect that they had inside sources to make such a bold determination. After all, these types of research are not like testing the nuclear device itself or missile testing that can be easily monitored by technical means such as seismic sensors or satellites. It is also unlike uranium enrichment which requires large electricity-intensive facilities.

The 2007 NIE left many scratching their heads. Even if one had such human intelligence or verifiable signal intelligence in place to give a high degree of confidence of the veracity of your statements, why would you publicize it? On one hand, this might seem to put at risk whatever sources or methods had been used to cultivate the intelligence, and, on the other, it put those negotiating with Iran into a weaker position. Ostensibly, someone had some sort of strategic thought process going on when they released the NEI. Perhaps it was sound and perhaps it was not, one cannot know without better understanding of the intentions of those involved. However, it was certainly controversial, and most significantly with the European nations negotiating with the Iranians.

The LA Time article states that there has been no indication of changing intelligence since the 2007 NIE, but that the current administration believes the Estimate gave a false impression.

What I find interesting is that Presidential Administrations have to take a firm stand about what they believe the opposition’s intentions to be, regardless of whether they can really know what those intentions are with any degree of certainty. While it strains credulity, it is possible that the Iranians are doing as they say. That is, that they are seeking to enrich uranium to use in the nuclear power plant that they have under construction with no intention of building a bomb. The Iranian government’s  behavior with respect to seeking to make fuel that will not be cost competitive with the fuel on the  global market, and in withholding information from the IAEA, makes their veracity seem a dim prospect indeed, but it is not impossible by any means. Of course, it is possible that intelligence agencies have a look “inside the mind” of the Iranians via human intelligence, but it may well be that their is no such insider’s view. In such case, the certitude of any politicians may be a point of concern.

A Q Khan was released from house arrest on Friday. Hopefully, we won’t see any advertisements like theone in the title above on Craigslist in the upcoming weeks.

Khan is the most irresponsible, and arguably the most nefarious, national hero any nation has elevated to that status in recent years. As a metallurgist and former employee of the European uranium enrichment consortium URENCO, he stole plans and components for URENCO centrifuges while spying for Pakistan.  Upon return to Pakistan, he was a dominant figure in the birth of the Pakistani nuclear bomb.

Had this been the extent of his activities, he would probably remain largely unknown to the world outside Pakistan. Few would begrudge a person for engaging in espionage activities that they believed to increase the security of their country (whether it did so or not is another question entirely.)  However, Khan decided to set up shop and sell uranium enrichment equiptment plans, components, and feedstock to the highest bidder. Said highest bidders include Iran, North Korea, and Libya. Iran now has an enrichment program that is well on its way to transitioning from pilot-scale into industrial scale that it likely could not have built without Khan’s assistance. North Korea’s status as a uranium enricher remains unknown. The DPRK claims that they do not have an active program. However, Assistant Secretary James Kelly stated that he was told by a high level source that the North Koreans were building centrifuges, but the North Korean’s later denied this and attributed itto translation error. In a far too rare nonproliferation success story, Libya renounced its program and verifiably reversed course.

While Khan was not in prison, there is a concern that now that he is not even under house arrest, that he will be able to resume his old ways. It should be noted that there does not seem to be confidence that the outer edges of the Khan proliferation ring were ever fully known. We know that Iran and North Korea have both been tight-lipped in refusing to give information about what they obtained from Khan and by what means. Some have speculated that the network might have even continued operation in Khan’s “absence”.

The Pakistani government claims that they have put a number of provisions into place to ensure that Khan cannot pass anything to foreign agents or resume leadership of the proliferation ring, but, given the man’s immense popularity, it remains to be seen whether they can make good on their word. If there is even one fanatical Islamist responsible for monitoring Khan, the world may face a dire increase in proliferation risk.

There have been a flurry of stories as of late about how Iran is on the verge of manufacuring an atomic bomb. The sensationalist headlines usually give way to an explanation that what is meant is that Iran will probably soon have enough uranium enriched to low levels (around 3-4% Uranium-235) that if it cycled this material (as hex gas) back through its  centrifuges  it could soon make enough bomb-grade highly enriched uranium (HEU) (i.e. higher than say 80% U-235) to make a weapon. 

The most recently posted International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) board of governors report, which was produced back in mid-November 2008, indicates Iranian records showing that 630kg of LEU have been produced. http://www.iaea.org/Publications/Documents/Board/2008/gov2008-59.pdf 

That report also indicates that the IAEA is confident in its ability to ensure that declared material is not diverted. The report notes that there have been a series of unannounced inspections of the Natanz enrichment plant and that none of the swabs taken has yeilded a sample higher than reactor-grade low enriched uranium. The report does urge that the Additional Protocols (AP) be put into effect as a means to build confidence that there is no production of undeclared material (perhaps, a Herculean task even with the AP.)  It also suggests that Iran could be more forthright with regard to research and development of a military nature (e.g. “Project Green Salt.”) It should be remembered that, while a crude terror weapon could be thrown together quite readily, there are some serious engineering tasks involved in building a weapon that can ride atop a missile and reliably function.

Estimates of when Iran could get the bomb seem to be based on the product of their known/declared facilities, but there is no good explanation of how they might get from LEU to HEU without creating a compelling incentive to preventively strike their facilities. If they perform any of a number of activities that might be necessary to develop HEU on the sly (turning away inspectors, dropping out of the NPT, removing or destroying monitoring equipment) it would seem likely that there would be a great deal of will to conduct attacks.

It is, of course, possible that Iran has developed [another] covert fuel cycle center.  (It should be noted that they did not declare their current pilot enrichment plant or its predecessor near Tehran until they were caught red-handed.) However, if they are building an undeclared facility, then an estimate based on their declared facility is nearly meaningless.

In short, I am skeptical of Iran’s ability to conduct a strategic break-out without suffering a severe blow. It may be true that it doesn’t take a lot to move up to HEU from LEU in terms of additional effort. (i.e.  I am told it is not a linear progression, but, rather, the first several percentage increases in U-235 are a greater challenge than working through the mid-range [i.e. I suspect wringing the last little bit would also be extremely expensive.]) However, diverting material that is being monitored by the IAEA would seem to be a challenge.