Negotiation Won’t End Iran’s Nuclear Threat
Trump is repeating one of Obama’s mistakes: focusing on uranium and ignoring plutonium.
By John Bolton
Uncertainty hovers over negotiations to end the Iran war.
President Trump should see that diplomacy won’t eliminate all threats from Tehran’s regime.
To protect the interests of the U.S. and its allies, the administration must eliminate Iran’s nuclear menace and destroy its terrorist capabilities and capacity for economic extortion.
That can’t be accomplished with negotiations—it requires regime change.
Terrorism and economic threats aren’t Trump administration priorities, and even discussions around nuclear weapons are too constrained.
The president’s narrow focus is on extracting Iran’s highly enriched uranium (which he insists on calling “nuclear dust”).
So doing would impede the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, which has long directed Iran’s nuclear program, but that is hardly enough.
Mr. Trump fears making a deal similar to Barack Obama’s 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, and he should. That arrangement was flawed, and Mr. Trump rightly discarded it in 2018.
Pursuing a latter-day version will do no better.
Both the Obama and Trump approaches focus on the uranium-enrichment path to nuclear weapons, all but ignoring the plutonium path Iran has pursued since firing up its Bushehr reactor in 2010.
Plutonium can be reprocessed from the spent fuel extracted from nuclear reactors.
Other authoritarian countries have pursued similar strategies.
Saddam Hussein’s Osirak reactor was his preferred route to nuclear weapons before Israeli bombers destroyed it in 1981.
North Korea used its Yongbyon reactor to produce plutonium, which Pyongyang later supplemented with a uranium-enrichment program.
Bushehr’s construction started under the shah, with Russia largely finishing the physical structures in the 1990s.
George W. Bush’s administration tried repeatedly to prevent Russia, which was also supplying fuel rods, from actually making Bushehr operational unless Iran guaranteed it would return all spent fuel to Russia.
Some in the administration, including me, urged that the better solution was Israel’s Osirak approach, but that view didn’t prevail.
Once Bushehr launched, its accumulating spent fuel amounted to ever larger amounts of accessible plutonium.
Mr. Obama’s nuclear deal glossed over this issue, relying on Russian-Iranian commitments to return spent fuel rods to Russia and barring Iran from reprocessing the fuel for 15 years.
Iran ignored these provisions.
Based on current Russian estimates of spent-fuel levels at Bushehr and International Atomic Energy Agency estimates about the reactor’s energy production, nuclear-proliferation expert Henry Sokolski estimates that Iran has enough plutonium to make more than 200 nuclear weapons.
There is no justification for any Iran deal that doesn’t eliminate both the plutonium and the enriched-uranium options for nuclear weapons.
There are further problems.
Since 2015 there is every reason to worry about Iran outsourcing some—or even all—of its nuclear-weapons activity to North Korea, which could conduct its work hidden from view.
Tehran and Pyongyang have long cooperated on both nuclear and ballistic-missile capabilities.
Both purchased uranium-enrichment and weapons designs from the infamous Pakistani proliferator Abdul Qadeer Khan (as did Libya).
Both used Soviet-era SCUD missiles as the basis for their indigenous missile programs.
In Syria’s desert, North Korea constructed a clone of its Yongbyon reactor that was almost certainly intended for Iran’s nuclear-weapons program, until the Israelis destroyed it in September 2007.
Cooperation between Tehran and Pyongyang isn’t hard to understand: An oil-rich country wants nuclear weapons, and a desperately poor country has detonated six nuclear devices.
Given their long history of duplicity, broken promises and obstructionism on nuclear matters, cooperation between Tehran and Pyongyang shouldn’t be permitted in any form.
Most important, the JCPOA didn’t eliminate Iran’s intellectual capacity to re-create nuclear-weapons efforts in concealed locations.
Instead, the deal allowed Iran’s scientists and technicians to continue gaining experience with nuclear technology and the handling of materials that aren’t only radioactive but also highly toxic and corrosive.
The greater the familiarity with any aspect of nuclear materials, the greater Iran’s confidence to carry forward a weapons program.
Although Israel over the years has eliminated many Iranian scientists, considerably slowing Iran’s nuclear efforts, Tehran’s intellectual capability hasn’t been completely extinguished.
Critics of the U.S.-Israeli strikes against Iran have raised precisely this point.
“You cannot bomb knowledge out of existence,” Sen. Chris Murphy (D., Conn.) said.
Exactly the same could be said about Saddam Hussein’s Iraq after the first Gulf War.
United Nations weapons inspectors destroyed Iraq’s nuclear program, and there was no evidence in 2003 that Iraq had centrifuges spinning.
Nonetheless, Saddam had sustained his team of some 3,000 nuclear scientists and technicians who could have re-created Iraq’s capability.
These “nuclear mujahideen,” as Saddam called them, posed a continuing threat.
That’s why in Iran today, as in Iraq earlier, regime change is the only long-term solution.
Even if today’s Gulf war wasn’t initially launched to depose the Iranian regime, that outcome remains the most certain path to prevent renewed Iranian nuclear proliferation and end its terrorism and economic blackmail.
Making a deal with Tehran’s current leadership won’t turn out differently than in the Obama years.
In Iran, the new boss is always the same as the old boss.
Mr. Bolton served as White House national security adviser, 2018-19, and is author of “The Room Where It Happened: A White House Memoir.”
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