Obama Is Correct, About Three Months (Revelation 15:2)

  
How long would it take Iran to develop nukes? No one knows the answer for sure

By Kristina Wong

Experts aren’t sure how long it would take Iran to develop a nuclear weapon.

The timeframe is key to the debate surrounding the administration’s negotiations with Iran and other countries on a nuclear deal that would place limits on Iran’s program in exchange for the lifting of sanctions.

The Senate this week approved legislation that will allow Congress to review a deal — and to vote to disapprove it. The House will take up the bill next week.

A key factor that lawmakers will consider is the risk that Iran will obtain nuclear weapons, and they will want to know whether any deal negotiated with Iran is extending the time Tehran would need to develop a bomb.

“How far along is Iran in the weaponization process?” Rep. Eliot Engel (N.Y.), the ranking Democrat on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, said at an April hearing. “If Iran were to enrich enough fissile material to achieve a ‘breakout,’ how long would it then take them to then build a warhead and mate it to missile? We must have answers to these questions.”

The Obama administration has warned that Iran needs just two or three months of “breakout time,” or, time it would take for Iran to have enough fissile material to build a nuclear weapon.

But it would still take more time for Iran to create a weapon.

“What this means is that even if Iran crosses that line, it would still have a long way to go to have a nuclear weapon it can use, let alone a stockpile of nuclear weapons,” said Ariane Tabatabai, an associate at the Belfer Center’s International Security Program.

President Obama said in March 2013 that it would take over a year for Iran to actually develop a nuclear weapon.

The year-long assessment tracks with an estimate from Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu. In a September 2012 address at the United Nations, he indicated it would take about a year for Iran to develop a bomb.Later that year, he switched to the earliest time estimated to get enough fissile material, which at the time he said was “six months.”

People get confused between the two definitions, of getting enough material and developing a bomb, said Frank Von Hippel, professor and co-director of Princeton University’s Program on Science and Global Security.

There are multiple steps to getting a nuclear bomb, and producing enough weapons grade uranium is just the first step, said Hans Kristensen, director of the Nuclear Information Project at the Federation of American Scientists.

Iran would also have to develop a warhead, get the uranium into the warhead, and have a way to deliver it, he said. Even then, it’s not clear whether the weapon would work, since Iran has never done any nuclear weapons testing.

Experts say they can’t assess how close Iran is to actually completing those steps, without knowing what past research it has done, and how far it went.

The agreement being negotiated is supposed to address the issue, commonly referred to as “past military dimensions” of Iran’s nuclear program.

Lawmakers have called for answers on how long it would actually take.

“We need to know how far along Iran progressed in their weaponization so that we can understand those consequences as it relates to other breakout time issues,” Sen. Bob Menendez (D-N.J.), co-sponsor of the Iran bill, said Thursday.

Negotiators last month reached a framework agreement on a deal that would extend Iran’s breakout time to a year. Negotiators are not trying to fill in all the details on a deal by June 30.

“The breakout time has become the main criterion for judging how much Iran scales back its nuclear program under a deal but it is far from being fully reliable,” said Tabatabai.

The “worst case assumption” is that Iran could build a nuclear bomb as soon as Iran obtains enough weapons-grade uranium, Von Hippel said.

He said Iran has done some research on warhead design, but without knowing how far it got, it’s impossible to know.

“Nobody knows the answer,” he said.

The Deal That Will Never Happen (Ezekiel 17)

 Beyond the Iran Nuclear Deal

THE EDITORIAL BOARD
MAY 9, 2015

President Obama’s meeting with Arab leaders this week is an opportunity to reassure the deeply skeptical Gulf states that America’s engagement and probable nuclear deal with Iran is not a threat but an opportunity for regional stability.

Iran is a Shiite nation; the Gulf states are majority Sunni, and the closer Iran and the big powers get to a deal (the self-imposed deadline is June 30) the more anxious the Sunni leaders have become. On this score, Mr. Obama can offer a convincing response: an Iran restrained by a strong and verifiable nuclear agreement is a lot less threatening than an unfettered Iran.

But there is another aspect to the deal that has unsettled Gulf leaders. In exchange for limitations on its nuclear program, Iran will be freed from economic sanctions, thus unleashing billions of dollars in frozen assets and new foreign investments. The Gulf states fear this could strengthen Iran’s influence in the region and give it more resources to support militant groups like Hezbollah and continue its meddling in Iraq, Yemen and Syria, where, with Russia, it is a major enabler of President Bashar al-Assad of Syria.

They also worry that the United States, eager to end three decades of hostility with Iran, can no longer be counted on to guarantee their security. Here Mr. Obama’s answer is a bit more complicated. He is expected to make more explicit the security assurances, but he should flatly reject any idea of a formal pact similar to that of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization that some Arab leaders have pressed for. The United States must be extremely cautious about being dragged into Middle East conflicts.

Getting the balance right won’t be easy. It is one thing for Mr. Obama to say the United States will defend Saudi Arabia against an invasion by Iran. But what would America’s responsibility be if Iran uses proxies to stir trouble in Saudi Arabia, which is a more plausible scenario? There should be a clear understanding that America will not defend any of these regimes against their domestic political opponents.

The United States has already sold billions of dollars in weapons to the Gulf states and held scores of joint military exercises. More aid, and more joint exercises, lie ahead. The most important step now is to integrate the Gulf nations’ military systems so they can better defend themselves.

Iran is not the only threat the Gulf states face, or even the main one. As Mr. Obama told The Times’s Thomas Friedman, there are internal threats — “populations that, in some cases, are alienated, youth that are underemployed, an ideology that is destructive and nihilistic, and in some cases, just a belief that there are no legitimate political outlets for grievances.” Few people see democracy taking root in the region anytime soon, but the political systems have to be made more inclusive, including for Islamists.

There is one other important point Mr. Obama can make: Iran is too often discussed as a force to be contained. Iran’s history certainly does not inspire confidence. But as Ellen Laipson, president of The Stimson Center, a think tank, has argued, the nuclear deal should be seen as “a great moment of opportunity” for the Arabs (with Israel’s tacit agreement) to embark on new regional ventures with Iran on energy, climate change, water scarcity and arms control.

If the nuclear deal is completed, the administration would try to encourage Iran to play a more constructive role in Syria. Many are skeptical that this will produce results, but testing the possibility of expanded cooperation beyond the nuclear deal is certainly worth the effort.

The Real Choices Are War Now Or War Later (Eze 17)

 False choices about Iran

By Theodore L. Gatchel 
Posted May. 3, 2015 @ 2:01 am

Over the last six years, President Obama has become a master at selling his policies by using a rhetorical device known as the false choice. Recently, however, sources normally friendly to the president have been commenting on this technique. After a speech at the Military Academy last year, for example, The Atlantic published an article titled “Obama at West Point: A Foreign Policy of False Choices.”

A more recent use of false choice involves the administration’s negotiations with Iran over that country’s nuclear program. The president has stated in many ways that the only two options available are to accept whatever deal he reaches with the Iranians or war.

That approach conveniently overlooks a number of other possibilities ranging from tougher negotiating, harsher sanctions, covert actions of various types, the threat of war and military action short of all-out war.

There have been three air attacks on nuclear reactors. Ironically, the first such attack was launched by the Iranians, who are now so worried about an attack on their own nuclear facilities. In 1980, the Iranian Air Force attacked an Iraqi reactor under construction near Baghdad. The attack did relatively little damage. Less than a year later, the Israeli Air Force completed the job.

In 2007, the Israelis repeated their success by destroying a nuclear facility being built in Syria with support from both Iran and North Korea. Initially the Syrians denied the existence of such a facility, a claim that the International Atomic Energy Agency accepted. Later investigations caused the IAEA to reevaluate its assessment, and Syria’s dictator eventually admitted its existence.

The Israeli attacks generated much outrage, but no war, probably because no one in the region wanted either to take on the Israelis or let the Iraqis or Syrians develop nuclear weapons.

Unfortunately, the Iranians hid their construction efforts from the IAEA long enough to harden their most important facilities, making them more difficult, but not impossible, to destroy by air attack.

When Iraq was developing its weapons programs, a number of mysterious events occurred. Nuclear scientists were killed and explosions destroyed vital materials and equipment in European sites before they could reach Iraq. Nuclear scientists in Iran have also been assassinated, and a major cascade of centrifuges needed to enrich uranium was destroyed when a computer virus caused the centrifuges to spin out of control.

Opponents of military and covert operations claim that such measures don’t significantly set back a nation’s efforts to build nuclear weapons and only increase their determination to do so. Note, however, that neither Iraq nor Syria has nuclear weapons today. The attacks delayed their nuclear programs long enough for other events to end those efforts.

Threat of military action alone might deter Iran, but the threat would have to be credible. Unfortunately, President Obama’s failure to carry out his “redline” threat to Syria not to employ chemical weapons has weakened the credibility of any future threats he might make.

Regarding sanctions, most experts agree that the current sanctions along with low oil prices brought the Iranians to the negotiating table. Instead of using that tool to force more concessions, the administration appears ready to abandon the sanctions.

Finally there is diplomacy. Diplomacy only works in cases where a nation genuinely has no ambition to be a nuclear weapons state, a condition not likely to be shared by Iran. After the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, Ukraine inherited the world’s third-largest nuclear arsenal. Ukraine gave up that arsenal in return for a 2009 agreement by Russia, the United States and Great Britain that guaranteed Ukraine’s territorial integrity. Russia’s uncontested invasion of Ukraine will undoubtedly undermine confidence in future nuclear disarmament diplomacy.

Iran’s idea of diplomacy appears to be the type adopted by North Korea in which it made agreements and then violated them repeatedly in order to buy the time needed to create a nuclear arsenal.

All of the possible ways of preventing Iran from becoming another North Korea have both advantages and disadvantages. Before President Obama signs an agreement that almost certainly will lead to a nuclear Iran, he owes it to the American people to explain why his approach is better than any of the alternatives.

Anything else is simply another example of a false choice.

 Col. Theodore L. Gatchel (USMC, ret.), a monthly contributor, is a military historian and a professor emeritus of joint military operations. The views here are his own and do not necessarily reflect those of the U.S. Marine Corps or the Department of Defense.