University Place Global Hot Spots Andrew Kydd, "A Nuclear Iran?" 10/15/2010  UP 500   cc >> Jeff Wendorf: Good afternoon. My name is Jeff Wendorf, vice president of programs and outreach for the Wisconsin Alumni Association. On behalf of the Wisconsin Alumni Association, the Division of International Studies and UW Continuing Studies Senior Learning Program, we'd like to welcome you to today's Global Hot Spots lecture. Today we welcome Andrew Kydd, associate professor of political science at UW Madison, as our speaker. Professor Kydd is an expert on international relations, especially international security topics such as war  and peace, nuclear weapons, terrorism and conflict resolution. He received his PhD in political science from the University of Chicago in 1996, and he taught at the University of California Riverside and Harvard University before joining the UW Madison Department of Political Science in the fall of 2007. He has published articles in the American Political Science Review, International Organization, World Politics and International Security, amongst other journals. His book, "Trust and Mistrust in International Relations" won the 2006 Conflict Processes Best Book award. So please join me in welcoming Professor Andrew Kydd. (applause) >> Andrew Kydd: All right, well, thanks very much for coming, everyone. 

It's going to be hard to compete with a beautiful day out there. But I'll do my best to keep you entertained and talk a little bit about what's going on in the world today. So the topic for my presentation is, as it says on the screen, a nuclear Iran. It's the topic that's been much in the news lately, and so there's a lot of things recently to talk about, but also I want to give you a little bit longer sense of the question and so that we have a context in which to face it. So the main questions I'm going to talk about today are the following: what is the status of the Iranian nuclear programs, both their civilian and potential military applications; what is the state of international negotiations over this question, this has been the hot topic of international negotiations ever since 2003 and remains so today; finally, wrapping up with two reflections on sort of the basic question, is Iran pursuing a nuclear weapon or not, opinions differ on this and what do you think the appropriate policy response will depend upon, what you think is the answer to that question in part; and then finally what can or should be done about it? Whether we think Iran is developing it or not, that's clearly uppermost in a lot of people's minds. So this is the main topics for today. If we look at Iran's neighborhood, and if the map would actually appear, but it doesn't, so let me paint you a picture of Iran's neighborhood, a picture with words. Iran is a large country located to the east of what we think of as the Middle East proper. It is bordered on the west side by Iraq, where United States troops are presently of course, and have been fighting since 2003. It's bordered on the east side by Afghanistan and Pakistan. 

Afghanistan in the north and Pakistan to the south. Of course, American troops are also in Afghanistan right now, and Pakistan has been aiding us to some extent in that conflict. To the south you find the Persian Gulf where most of the world's oil flows through on its way out of Saudi Arabia and the Gulf Arab oil states, as well as Iran and Iraq, to the rest of the world. So a very important body of water. And of course we've got Saudi Arabia also across the Persian Gulf. So it's a region which is full of conflict. Historically there have been many wars in that region so it's historically unstable and yet of extreme interest to the United States, of course, because of the presence of the oil and the instability in the region. So clearly very important to the United States. If we step back and think historically about Iran, Iran is, of course, a country with thousands of years of history. I won't take you back into the Persian empire going back thousands of years, but if we take up the story roughly at the end of the World War II, beginning of the Cold War, the United States supported the Shah of Iran in Iran, helped him come to power in the 1950s against the existing government at that time. 

That regime lasted for quite some time until the 1970s when it began to weaken and eventually, of course, there was the Islamic revolution in 1979 bringing Ayatollah Khomeini to power in Iran. This was, of course, not just a superficial change in government, this was a fundamental change in government, profound change in government, from a secular nationalist leader to a deeply religious leader and accompanying worldview. So the hostage crisis, of course, which we all remember, took place at that time when American workers at the embassy, the United States embassy, were taken hostage by Iranian students and held for over a year. That played out during the course of the American election campaign of 1980. Subsequently to the Iranian revolution, Iraq invaded Iran in 1980, sensing weakness, sensing opportunity, Iran was in turmoil. They were militarily weakened compared to what they were under the Shah. There's a question to how many generals would survive, what the Iranian military would look. So Iraq, under Saddam Hussein, seized the opportunity to invade, and that resulted in an eight-year war which was extremely costly for both sides. Chemical weapons were used in large quantities by Iraq against Iran. Nuclear missiles, sorry, not nuclear missiles, but conventionally armed missiles were also used extensively, first by Iraq and then subsequently on a smaller scale by Iran in retaliation. 

So this was a very hard fought war leading to many casualties on both sides. Iranian support for terrorism also began in 1980s as well, and particularly the alliance which is prominent today, Iran's alliance with Hezbollah, the Shiite group in Lebanon which has attained a significant amount of power in Lebanon. So the contours of the modern Iranian state and the problems it encounters with its neighbors are traced to this period with the birth of the Iranian revolution, the Iran/Iraq War, I would say, and their development of relationships with foreign groups such as Hezbollah. If we look at the Iranian nuclear infrastructure, I guess once again our pictures are only sometimes coming through, we're interested in the Iranian nuclear question. We can trace this back quite a ways as well. Iran first got nuclear reactors, two research reactors, from the United States in 1959. This is during the Shah's regime, of course. This is during the heyday of the Atoms for Peace program. So the United States is going around the world encouraging states to develop nuclear expertise, nuclear power for research and for eventual use in power-generating reactors out of a belief, at least on the surface, that this would help foster good relations among nations that we would not be seen as jealously guarding the secrets of nuclear energy but we would try to be open with them as much as possible. Of course not with the nuclear secrets involved in making weapons but with those related to civilian technology. 

So the United States was actually promoting atomic exports at this point. Those reactors had been under International Atomic Energy Agency inspections ever since. The International Atomic Energy Agency, IAEA, is the international body that is set up to monitor nuclear materials and nuclear reactors around the world to make sure that those materials are not being diverted for use in nuclear weapons programs. Somewhat more controversially and more recently, there's a large nuclear power generation reactor at Bushehr. This project has had an enormously long and troubled career. It was begun by Germany under the Shah. It was set back during the Iranian revolution. It was damaged by Iraq during the Iran/Iraq war. In 1995, the Iranian regime signed a contract with the Russians to get the Russians to complete the reactor because the Germans were no longer willing to do so under American pressure against anybody cooperating in nuclear matters with Iran. Russians were willing to go ahead and finish that reactor for them. 

It was planned to be under International Atomic Energy Agency safeguards as well. And quite recently, actually this past summer, they've actually put fuel in the reactor. So this reactor is up and running. So finally after many years Iran has a civilian nuclear power generation reactor. If we look at Iranian missile capabilities, nuclear weapons by themselves, if you're worried about Iran developing nuclear weapons, nuclear weapons by themselves are not very useful. You need to be able to deliver them against an adversary if they are to be militarily of any interest. And the typical delivery mechanism is either aircraft or missiles. In this case, we're most interested in missiles because missiles are very difficult to defend against. Aircraft can be shot down, missiles cannot be, by and large. So other states are most fearful of Iranian missiles capabilities. 

If you look at Iranian missiles capabilities, they developed scud missiles, the famed Russian, previously Soviet and now Russian, short-range missiles that were exported quite widely around the world. They derived that capability during the war in Iraq when they needed to cobble together some response to the Iraqi missile onslaught. These were relatively short range missiles. The Shahab series is a longer range missile. That was derived from a North Korean model. This exemplifies the trade between states around the world in nuclear and missile technologies. So North Korea has been exporting missile technologies to the Middle East to countries like Iran and others. The Shahab-3 has a 1300-kilometer range. That enables it to hit most of the targets in the near vicinity such as Iraq and over to the east in Pakistan and Afghanistan if they so wanted. The Shahab-4, which is under development, would have a 2,000-kilometer range that would easily enable them to hit Israel among other states as well. 

So they have a missile program under way. They display them in parades, and they've actually recently launched a satellite as well. So they can actually, they have some serious missile capabilities which makes people worry if they develop nuclear weapons that they would actually be able to deliver them. In 2002 the issue of Iranian potential acquisition of nuclear weapons became much more salient on the international community, international community's radar screen. In August of 2002 a group called the National Council of Resistance of Iran had a press conference and revealed the existence of a facility at Natanz. And this facility, pictured here in a satellite photograph, turned out to be a uranium enrichment facility based on centrifuges. So what does this mean? If you want to make a nuclear weapon, you need to have what's known as fissile material. Fissile material is material such that the nucleus of the atom will split apart under appropriate conditions when they're bombarded by neutrons. So if you have, say, uranium, these are very heavy atoms. If you hit them with a neutron, if they're the right kind, they will split apart, emit further neutrons, those will hit other atoms, those will split apart releasing lots of energy, that's what makes an atomic bomb go. 

Also what makes atomic reactors go. But with uranium, in order to do that there's only some kinds of uranium that actually work. When you dig up uranium from the ground it comes up, it's an ore like any other sort of ore. When you dig it up from the ground it's mostly a kind of uranium called U-238. There are different isotopes which correspond to the number of neutrons in the atom. And U-238 is not actually what you want. You want U-235 and there's actually less than 1% of U-235 in the natural state. So what you need to do is you need to enrich the uranium, which means sift it out, winnow out the U-238 and concentrate the U-235 which is the stuff that makes the bombs go. And you do that by using centrifuges because the U-238 and the U-235 have different weights or different masses. And so one way to separate things that weigh a different amount is to spin them up into centrifuge. 

And then the heavy stuff goes to the outside, the light stuff stays on the inside and you can extract it. That's why centrifuges, if you read about centrifuges in the context of the Iranian and context of others, centrifuges are key in terms of nuclear weapons production. Centrifuges allow you to enrich uranium, get at that U-235 that you want in high concentrations. So in nature when you dig it out of the ground it's less than 1%. If you want to run a civilian nuclear reactor, you need to have at least 5%, typically speaking. Most western, the garden variety reactors use 5% in the enriched uranium. If you want to make a bomb you want it to be 90% U-235. So it takes a good deal of enrichment separating out the U-238. There's other techniques aside from centrifuges. We won't go into them right now, there's no need to. 

In the uranium case, they've decided to go the centrifuge route which is smart because centrifuges are the most efficient way to do it anyway. So this rings alarm bells, right? If you're enriching uranium, you've got a covert plant here to enrich uranium. Why would you want that? Well, there's two or three primary uses for enriched uranium. One, as I mentioned, if you enrich it to the 5% level, you can use that to fuel a civilian nuclear reactor such as the one at Bushehr. If you enrich it a little bit more to the 20% level, that level of fuel is often used in research reactors, and it's often used for naval propulsion, for submarines or for aircraft carriers, etc. You can also use highly enriched uranium. Highly enriched uranium is usually thought of as the bomb-grade or U-235. Or, of course, you can enrich it all the way to 90% and use it in an atomic weapon. So they're in the business of enriching uranium, why are they doing that? It leads to questions. The IAEA of course, the International Atomic Energy Agency's ears perked up when they heard about this, and they wanted to inspect that facility and see what's going on there. 

They did inspect it and discovered that uranium had been diverted from peaceful programs to be enriched in this facility, and that raised further alarm bells as to what exactly the Iranians were doing. So in 2003 a crisis began between the West at large, the international community, if you will, and Iran over its nuclear issues. In March of 2003, of course, the United States invaded Iraq. Over 100,000 American troops are now right next door to Iran. There's an International Product Energy Agency resolution in September of 2003 saying that Iran must end its enrichment and reprocessing activities by the end of October. What's reprocessing? Reprocessing is actually, so there's two actual kinds of fissile material which are usually used for weapons. One is uranium and I just told you about that. You need to dig it out of the ground as ore and then enrich it to the proper concentration. The other alternative is plutonium. Plutonium is a byproduct of nuclear reactors. 

It's not actually found in the ground. You have to have a working nuclear reactor to generate the plutonium in the fuel in the reactor itself, and then you take this spent fuel and you separate out the plutonium. That's usually what's called reprocessing. You reprocess the plutonium from the spent fuel, gather that together and that's an alternative fissile material for making nuclear weapons. So the IAEA says you've got to stop all that by the end of October. The United States pushes this question to the security council of the United Nations. This is of course ominous because if the security council were to find against Iran and authorize the use of force then that would be bad news for Iran in this case. But the United States, of course, has its hands full because it's just invaded Iraq and is beginning to realize that things aren't going to go as smoothly as they seemed to go at the very beginning. And so essentially the United States subcontracts this to the Europeans for a while. And we let Britain, France and Germany conduct negotiations with Iran. 

October 2003 Iran promises to halt the assembly of centrifuges and enrichment activity. Where do they get these centrifuges, by the way? That's a whole other story of nuclear trade. The AQ Khan Network from Pakistan, Abdul Qadeer Khan, he was the father of the Pakistani nuclear weapons program. He subsequently went into business, semi-officially, exporting nuclear plans and parts for centrifuges around the world. And it's likely that Iran got their designs and even spare parts from that source. That wasn't the end of the crisis though. We're still with it. In 2004 Iran continued to assemble centrifuges. Putting together their plant. I should mention that, let's say you want to enrich uranium to make a bomb, how many centrifuges do you need? Well, you need more than one. 

It turns out that you need thousands of these things in a large industrial facility to make them anything like an efficient and timely manner. So having just one centrifuge isn't enough. You need to be able make them, you need to be able make thousands of them and then you need to connect them all together in a cascade of centrifuges from one to the next to enrich enough uranium to make a bomb. So assembling centrifuges takes a while, especially if you're not very good at it and you're just starting out. So Iran continues the process of assembling centrifuges. In June 2004 the International Atomic Energy Agency criticizes Iran. Iran fully resumes centrifuge production. So you see this kind of cat and mouse game or pattern where the International Atomic Energy Agency criticizes Iran, Iran sort of retaliates by going back and doing exactly what the IAEA doesn't want them to do. Interestingly, in August of, I believe, 2005 actually, Iran, no, it must have been 2004, the supreme leader of Iran, the Ayatollah Khamenei issues an antinuclear fatwa. What's a fatwa? A fatwa is a religious ruling by an Islamic cleric. 

And the higher up the cleric is, the more authoritative that ruling is. And of course you've got the supreme leader of Iran here that can't get any higher within the Iranian context. So he issues an antinuclear fatwa saying it's actually anti-Islamic, against Islamic law, for a country to develop nuclear weapons, to store them, stockpile them, develop them, use them, etc. So this is an interesting issue because Iran is, of course, a country which takes religion seriously, takes Islam seriously and takes these sorts of issues seriously. Here you've got the supreme leader, a cleric, saying, this is not Islamic. That doesn't resolve all doubts, of course, from the international community but it does raise some interesting questions. In September, Iran announced it's producing uranium hexafluoride. What does that mean? When you're going to run uranium in a centrifuge you can't just dump in chunks of uranium ore. You need to make it into a gaseous form because centrifuges spin gases, and if you put in rocks it would destroy them. So you need to convert, you need to react uranium with something in order to turn it into a gas and uranium hexafluoride is the gas of choice. 

So producing uranium hexafluoride means that they are going to the next step. They've assembled a bunch of centrifuges, now they're producing the gaseous form of uranium that they need to put into the centrifuges to spin them up to enrich that uranium to do whatever they want to do with the enriched uranium. In October, the Europeans propose a new deal basically the same as the old deal from 2003, and in the fall, again, remember Iran accepts that deal, suspends their enrichment. So fall of 2004 we seem, after a lot of rocky back and forth, to be kind of back on target and getting back to a situation where this situation, this crisis might be solved diplomatically with the Europeans taking the lead. However, I'm glad that picture at least came through, there was an election in 2005 in Iran and President Ahmadinejad, Ahmadinejad was elected president in June 2005. We've all become familiar with President Ahmadinejad, his incendiary statements talking about how he would like to wipe Israel off the map, essentially deny the Holocaust, sponsoring conferences, academic conferences in Iran for Holocaust deniers, etc. So he's a person with rather extreme views. And even within the Iranian political context, the right wing, if you will, the hard line, anti-Israeli, certainly anti-US side of things. Anti-compromise. This is a symbol of the whole movement, you could argue, in Iran at this point in the direction of less compromise, taking a harder line against the United States and against the external world. 

Correspondingly, in August of 2005 Iran begins resuming enrichment activities for uranium. The crisis hardens. September 2005 the IAEA finds Iran in violation of the Non-Proliferation Treaty. The Non-Proliferation Treaty is the treaty negotiated in 1968 and brought into force in 1970 which prohibits countries from developing nuclear weapons. Iran signed and ratified that treaty so they are, in fact, prohibited by their signature on that treaty from developing nuclear weapons under international law. July 2006 there's a United States Security Council resolution, 1696, demands that Iran suspend enrichment. This is another step in the international campaign to try to coerce Iran into suspending their enrichment program. So the crisis heats up once again. And in some sense we are still in this phase. Of course President Ahmadinejad is still in power in Iran, having been reelected in 2009 in an election that was widely seen as rigged which was followed by extensive street protests, which has subsequently been suppressed. 

So the crisis seems to be heating up in 2006. However, other things are going on. 2006, of course, is perhaps the worst year of the Iraq war. The United States troops are being bloodied. Things are not going well. A lot of voices in the United States are calling for withdrawal from Iraq. President Bush, controversially at the time, decides on a surge which is to put more troops in to implement the new counterinsurgency strategy developed by General Petraeus and others. But that hasn't happened yet, it hasn't worked yet certainly, and so it's a pretty dire moment for the United States policy in that region. In 2007 there is a new what's known as a national intelligence estimate on Iran produced by the American Intelligence Committee. National intelligence estimates are documents which the intelligence community, led by the CIA, puts together to represent the administration's best knowledge about some particular issue of concern. 

So the NIE on Iran in 2007 was concerned primarily with the Iranian nuclear program. And, controversially at the time, it announced that it had high confidence that Iran had actually halted their nuclear weapons program in 2003. That is that they had had a nuclear weapons program up until 2003 but they stopped that program in 2003. Why 2003? Possibly in reaction to the invasion of Iraq, hard to say. But they believe, they had high confidence that Iran halted its nuclear weapons program in the fall of 2003, moderate confidence that Iran had not resumed that program in the interval since then and moderate to high confidence that Iran did not have enough fissile material, again the stuff you need to make a bomb, in order to make nuclear weapons. So this was a revolutionary document in this sense that up until this point things seemed to be going pretty badly for Iran and towards generating the possibility for external intervention, certainly with sanctions if not something more extreme. Here you get the United States intelligence agencies saying, we think the Iranian nuclear program has stopped. As a result, it's really too bad you didn't get that picture, it basically took the military option off the table. This was a picture of Dick Cheney on Meet the Press. (laughter) So the United States, the military option basically died at that point because of the National Intelligence Agency estimate. 

There were, of course, still forces, Cheney amongst them, still in the administration who were arguing forcefully at that point for military action against Iran. The context, though, of course which undermined this was the disastrous failure of American intelligence in the war with Iraq. The United States had believed that there were nuclear weapons, a nuclear weapons program in Iraq prior to 2003. We believe they had chemical weapons, we believe they had biological weapons. Indeed that was the main justification for the war. As Paul Wolfowitz said in Vanity Fair a few months after the war started that there were three reasons for the war. One was weapons of mass instruction. Two was Iraqi ties to terrorism. And three was the suffering of the Iraqi people. And he admitted that the suffering of the Iraqi people all by itself was not a sufficient reason to, as he put it, put American kids' lives at risk on the scale in which we did it. 

So that gets you back to number one and number one, weapons of mass instruction and ties to terrorism. They weren't really very convincing ties to terrorism, and of course there were no weapons of mass instruction at all. It turned out that Saddam Hussein, for once in his life, was honest when he said that he had given up his pursuit of weapons of mass instruction after the first Gulf war and that those programs had not been resuscitated. Everyone in the intelligence community, well, of course this was very controversial within the intelligence community whether this was true or not. There were accusations that the Bush administration had politicized the intelligence process, had engaged in so-called stove piping, which means taking raw intelligence from the field that happens to agree with your policy prescription and bringing that straight to the top and emphasizing it, ignoring the context, ignoring the question of liability, of the source, etc. And so there was a big debate and a big questioning of the United States intelligence process going on at the time. And for then the national intelligence estimate to come along and say no, there's no Iranian nuclear weapons basically made it impossible for the forces of Cheney and colleagues to make any headway at that point with any sort of more militarized response to the Iranian program. Indeed it was as if the boy who cried wolf. If you cry wolf too many times and you're wrong, you can cry wolf even if there is a wolf next time and nobody will believe you. And some might argue that that is what happened to Dick Cheney. 

Recent developments, another non-picture, in September of 2009 a second site was discovered with a second nuclear enrichment, uranium enrichment, plant in the nascent stage of construction. If you had seen this picture it basically shows construction sites. They're digging a big hole, digging some tunnels into the ground. They are burying this facility deep underground. It's another enrichment plant. This generated a renewed round in the crisis. The International Atomic Energy Agency visited in October and they eventually negotiated a deal by which the Iranians would use nuclear fuel in, say, the Bushehr reactor, their other research reactors, and then return that spent fuel to Russia for reprocessing to get that out of the country. The idea behind that was, again the plutonium route to nuclear proliferation is you reprocess the plutonium out of the spent nuclear reactor fuel, gather it together and then you've got materials for a bomb. To try to forestall that, if you bring the spent reactor fuel out of the country and give it to the Russians, they are the ones who have custody of it and presumably it doesn't feed into the Iranian nuclear program subsequently. That deal was rejected in the end by Iran, although their negotiators initially agreed to it so that fell through. 

So you've got a new nuclear enrichment facility, another diplomatic effort to try to solve the problem by getting the spent fuel out of the country and no success. More recent developments. The International Atomic Energy Agency censured Iran for keeping this new enrichment plant near -- secret. They demanded a halt to the work on it. In retaliation, Iran pledged to build 10 nuclear enrichment plants. Just by putting that claim in context the United States has one uranium enrichment plant. So having 10 would seem like overkill even for a superpower. So clearly again in escalation in the war of rhetoric, war of words, Iran is probably not economically capable of building 10 nuclear enrichment plants. At least it would be an extraordinary waste of money. But nonetheless an indicator for lack of cooperation between the West and Iran on the nuclear issue. 

So let's think about the big questions now. First, is Iran pursuing the bomb? And number two, what can be done about it or should be done about it? What are the options? So first, is Iran pursuing the bomb? Let's think about evidence, let's think about theory. If we look at the evidence, what do we see? We see, without going into classified details, just in terms of the macro obvious facts, Iran is developing enrichment facilities, uranium enrichment facilities. They're developing them in a clandestine fashion. They're keeping them secret. Now, an interesting fact is you're actually allowed to enrich uranium under the Non-Proliferation Treaty even if you are a non-nuclear weapons state. And there are actually non-nuclear weapon states out there which enrich uranium. Australia does it. Argentina does it. Other countries do it. 

Why would you do it? Because you could make money off it. You could sell the enriched uranium, if it's enriched to the 5% level, as civilian reactor fuel. If you want to be in business if, say, you've got uranium mines in your country and you want to make money from them, you could set up an enrichment plant, enrich to the 5% level, sell on to the international market for civilian power generation reactor fuel. So enrichment facilities per se aren't necessarily conclusive evidence that a state is pursuing nuclear weapons. But clandestine nuclear uranium enrichment facilities raises the question, why are you keeping this secret? If all you want to do is enrich fuel, say, for your own nuclear reactors or to sell on the international market for your reactor fuel, why keep it secret? What's the point of that? There are answers to this, of course, possible answers. One answer being because we think that if we develop these capabilities, the Israelis would blow them up as they did in other cases. So there are responses to that question. I'm not saying there's no response. But it does raise a red flag. Also, the collapse of the deal to deal with uranium spent fuel, if the spent fuel from the reactors. 

There was a deal which seemed to be acceptable to give that up to Russia for disposal or reprocessing, that deal falls through. So what that indicates is that Iran wants to maintain control or maintain the ability to develop what's known as the whole fuel cycle. Where the fuel cycle means from mining the ore out of the ground, to making uranium hexafluoride, to enriching it in the centrifuges, using it in the reactor, reprocessing the spent fuel from the reactor, developing plutonium, if need be, that's the fuel cycle. And sometimes we can put the plutonium back into another kind of reactor, that makes it a cycle rather than just a once through. So it's clear that Iran wants control over the whole fuel cycle. They want that ability to manage all those steps. They're not content to simply have nuclear reactors, buy foreign fuel, get rid of the foreign fuel on the international, get rid of it to Russia or some other place. They want to do it all themselves. So you ask why, why do they want to do that? Well, a straightforward desire for energy would not seem to be a very plausible explanation. Iran has the third largest reserves of petroleum in the world. 

They've got more oil than every country in the world except for Saudi Arabia. And I think number two, I forget what number two was. It might be Canada actually. So they've got enormous reserves of energy, more than they know what to do with. In fact, what Iran needs is petroleum refining capability, not nuclear energy. If they simply want cheap sources of energy. So it wouldn't seem that cheap sources of energy is what they have in mind by this. You can imagine other scenarios. An interesting comparison case here is Argentina. Argentina also developed secret uranium enrichment facilities during the 1970s and '80s. 

And that led, when it was discovered, a lot of people to think they were pursuing the bomb. They really weren't pursuing the bomb. They wanted it most likely for their naval propulsion system. The Navy was in charge at that point of the program, and the Navy wanted to run submarines and they were interested in nuclear submarines and so they were interested in the idea of uranium enrichment. So it was for military use but not for blowing stuff up, for making stuff go. So it's not that there's no alternative explanation but having clandestine uranium enrichment facilities in a land of petroleum plenty, again Argentina doesn't have a lot of oil deposits, it raises questions. In terms of theory, in the political science business we have a bunch of ideas that are sometimes honored with the term "theory" about why states do various things. And one topic, of course, is acquire nuclear weapons. So I'll just go through four ideas as to why states might acquire nuclear weapons that apply to the Iranian case. Number one, security threat. 

Do they face a security threat? Are there countries out there that have attacked them, that want to get them, against whom they would want nuclear weapons as a deterrent? And you can think of two at least. There's Iraq, of course. Iraq attacked them in 1980 when Iran was weak and there was an eight-year war. Many thousands of Iranian dead as a result of that. So that memory lingers. Iran doesn't forget that. They might think they want nuclear weapons to deter future Iraqi leaders who might not be as friendly towards them as the current batch of Iraqi leaders installed thanks to the United States. They're hedging against future threats. It's not clear that they would need nuclear weapons now to deal with that problem but perhaps eventually in the future. Then there's the question of the United States. 

The United States obviously posed a threat to Iraq. We invaded their country and overthrew their regime. The Iranians could feel that the United States poses a similar threat to Iran and they might look at, say, North Korea and say if you've got nuclear weapons, the United States doesn't invade you, but if you don't have nuclear weapons, they do. And so what we need to do is get nuclear weapons as soon as possible to deter a United States intervention. Counter-arguments to that are the United States only invaded Iraq because we thought they had nuclear weapons programs. If we didn't think they had nuclear weapons programs, we wouldn't have invaded them. And it's not clear actually that North Korean nuclear weapons are what prevented the United States from attacking North Korea given that we also didn't attack them when we didn't think they had nuclear weapons in 1994. In fact, this North Korean conventional threat on Seoul, largely through artillery, is typically thought to be enough to deter American military action in Korea. So actually acquiring nuclear weapons, or trying to acquire nuclear weapons, is one of the most provocative things you can do to the United States and does make the United States and Israel, of course, think about attacking your country. But the United States the doesn't go around attacking most countries that don't acquire nuclear weapons. 

So it's an interesting question, is the Iranian fear of the United States what's driving this is that just a smokescreen for something else? Another possible explanation is expansionist designs which is a sort of grandiose word for they want to change the system in some way. They want to do something. They're not satisfied with the way things are. So the uranium revolution comes along in '79. It's not a status quo state anymore. It's a state that wants to achieve something. They want to spread the Iranian revolution. They think they've got a handle on a better way to live. They want this system to be exported to other countries. So they want to export the Iranian revolution and cause other countries to have a similar sort of situation. 

And of course they don't like Israel. They don't want Israel to exist. They would prefer, in Ahmadinejad's terms, that the Jews go home, wherever home might be. And they believe that the Jewish state should be wiped out, should be a Palestinian state. So they have desires to achieve. They're not satisfied with the way things are. And maybe if you've got nuclear weapons you can either help use those to achieve those desires or you can use those to deter larger countries who might try to prevent you from achieving those desires, namely the United States. So the United States would like to stop Iran from supporting Hezbollah, would like to stop them from attacking Israel, etc. If Iran has nuclear weapons, perhaps they could achieve, they can be a little bit more proactive in their foreign policy without worrying about an American military intervention. So expansionist desires. 

Two other theories that are often mentioned have to do with economic orientation and the leader's personal orientation. The economic orientation of the state suggests that states which are very heavily interested in trade, in openness, in exports, in foreign directed investment, etc, states like South Korea, Japan, Taiwan, Germany, these states can't really develop nuclear weapons in the current context in which the United States wants to prevent states from developing nuclear weapons because there are attendance sanctions that are imposed typically on states who do that. So if you want to export your way to prosperity, you cannot really afford to go down the nuclear weapons path because it's simply too costly. Whereas if you are more inward looking in terms of your economy, if you are closed off to the outside world, if you have a huge state sector, you don't engage in trade, you don't welcome foreign direct investment, then the cost of pursuing nuclear weapons are much lower because the sanctions don't matter to you that much. You don't trade much to the outside world, what can they do? Not much. But if you look at the Iranian economy, it's pretty inward looking. They are not focused on external trade, they not that vulnerable to US sanctions and so that theory would suggest again that the costs of nuclear proliferation are relatively low for the Iranians in comparison to other states which have more outward directed economy. And a final set of ideas has to do who the orientation of the leadership as revealed in leadership rhetoric. That is, leaders who have what's called an oppositional nationalist frame of mind will tend to be more prone to develop nuclear weapons. What do we mean by that? The nationalist component is leaders who are very proud of their country's abilities, very self-confident about their nation. 

So hence nationalist. Oppositional means you have some other out there, some hostile relationship with some other state oppositional with whom you view yourself to be locked in some kind of deadly conflict. And so you need to be in opposition to them. So if you are both oppositional and nationalist you are proud of yourself, proud of your capabilities and locked in a deadly struggle with some external enemy. That gives you fear of the external enemy, pride in your own capabilities and that leads to a desire to acquire nuclear weapons. If you look at the rhetoric of Ahmadinejad, he would seem to fit this oppositional nationalist type to a T. Always talking about the United States, the West, Israel, of course, as the enemy. Very proud of his own country, its own abilities, etc. So basically if you run down the list of theories that people use typically to explain nuclear proliferation, Iran is a pretty good fit for all of them. Again, not decisive but still pretty suggestive. 

So what should be done? There's basically two sets of broad policies in response to this question. One is economic sanctions and the other is military strikes. Economic sanctions, of course, have been tried before. They're being tried now. We could try them some more and try to make them tougher and make them more targeted towards the leadership. We have been imposing new sanctions on entities connected with the revolutionary guards in Iran to try to make them more targeted towards the elite. That's certainly the road that we're on now and it might succeed, however the likelihood is not extraordinarily high that it will succeed. Usually economic sanctions by themselves are not capable of coercing very large policy shifts from states. So it remains to be seen whether that road is actually going to work. The other sort of broad category of options is military. 

Military options. Since 2003 no one has really been talking about regime change in Iran. That's pretty much off the table given the difficulties that were encountered implementing regime change in Iraq. However, the possibility of more limited air strikes is coming back to the floor. There was an article recently in the Atlantic Monthly describing Israeli officials or recounting interviews with Israeli officials who were apparently quite gung ho to attack the Iranian nuclear reactors and enrichment facilities. Israel, of course, struck the Iraqi nuclear reactor at Osirak in 1979 or '80 right before the Iran/Iraq war which, as it turned out, was quite fortunate that they did so because that delayed the Iraqi nuclear weapons program such that when the Gulf war happened in '91 their weapon was not ready to go and so they were not a nuclear country at that point. We subsequently discovered, by the way, many people forget this, but Iraq actually did have a very developed nuclear weapons program in the 1980s. And that was discovered in 1991 when inspectors went in there after the first Gulf war. But they did subsequently give it up after that. So it's not just a theoretical possibility that Israel could do this. 

Israel has done this before. They attacked Syria recently actually as well a couple years back destroying a reactor that was being built by the North Koreans in Syria. So they've done it before, they can do it again. It's a little bit harder this time. Iran is further away. They are would have to traverse Iraqi air space which of course we control at this point. So they would have to ask our permission. Unclear whether we would give it to them. But it's a possibility. It's a possibility that the United States could do it. 

After all, if you want a job done right you might as well do it yourself. The United States has much greater military capabilities than Israel does and so we could do a much more thorough job of destroying these sites than the Israeli military could possibly do. And of course we're right next door in Iraq as well as our aircraft carrier capabilities and the long range bombers. So we could do it much better than the Israelis could. The question is, what would it achieve and at what cost? Estimates range from a couple of years delay to maybe 10 years delay of Iran achieving a nuclear weapons capability. What does that buy you? Kind of depends on what you think about the stability of the Iranian regime. If you think the Iranian regime is going to collapse at some point and be replaced by a more moderate regime that we can negotiate with, maybe buying time makes sense. On the other hand if you think that attacking the Iranians is only going to strengthen the hard liners and their hold on power, then maybe it doesn't make sense. Maybe you should try to have a hands off policy and wait for them to collapse of their own accord. The danger, of course, being they might not collapse and they might develop nuclear weapons in the interim. 

And then at what cost? Aside from the financial cost of course and the potential cost in the lives of our soldiers, there's the cost involved in what the Iranian response might be. And people often focus on Hezbollah. Iran has a long reach. They've got Hezbollah. Hezbollah could, which it hasn't done, Hezbollah essentially was behind the Marine barracks bombs in 1983 which killed over 200 American Marines, but they have not targeted American troops since then or American interests. They've fought Israel or fought control of Lebanon. That could change. That would be very serious if it did change because Hezbollah, unlike al-Qaeda, is a very capable terrorist organization. It's a very capable organization which, if they turn whole-heartedly to anti- American terrorism, could impose very serious costs on the United States abroad and very possibly here at home as well. So there's certainly possibilities for Iranian retaliation even aside from straightforward Iranian military retaliation and even aside from what Iran could do in Iraq to destabilize things there. 

So although the military option is always there, it's always possible, one has to balance the risks and the dangers and the alternatives. The other alternative, of course not here, is simply living with it. Just letting the Iranians develop the bomb and just saying we're going to deter them. That's, in some ways, probably the most likely outcome. We've done it before. We did it with Russia, with did it with China, we've done it with many other states as well. We could probably do it again. The Israelis are obviously less happy about that scenario than we are, given that they feel that they are in fact under the gun from potential Iranian weapons, whereas we would not be. So it's not clear that Israel would be willing to go along with that option. But that is the basic lay of the landscape. 

So I would say the story is not over. We are not done yet. All of these options are still possible. Strengthening sanctions all the way up to potentially American military force. So it's a very live issue. So stay tuned. That's all for now. Thank you very much. (applause)