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Walpole wouldn't say in his open testimony what accounted for Iran's overachieving, but it isn't particularly hard to guess one reason. The Iranian missile program might as well be stamped "From Russia, with love." A week after Walpole's testimony, CIA director George Tenet told Congress that Russia is the "first choice" of rogue states "seeking the most advanced technology and training." According to Tenet, "Russia continues to supply significant assistance on nearly all aspects of Tehran's nuclear program. It is also providing Iran assistance on long-range ballistic-missile programs." In other words, Russia is conspiring with Iran to create perhaps the most dire looming missile and nuclear threat to the United States and its allies. Everything that the U.S. has said recently about Iraq and weapons of mass destruction applies with equal — perhaps more — force to Iran, a larger country than Iraq that is more directly involved in terrorism. Since Sept. 11, it has been a commonplace to say Russia has "joined the West." Maybe it has, but if so, it is on the model of West Germany in the 1980s, which blissfully provided the assistance necessary for Iraq to come close to a nuclear capability by the time of the Persian Gulf War in 1991. Russia's role as
the supplier of choice to a charter member of the "axis of evil"
should no longer be an afterthought in the U.S.-Russia relationship. Instead,
the U.S. should use the considerable diplomatic and economic tools at
its disposal to convince the Russians to pull back on their weapons assistance
to Tehran. But between Russian intransigence as a matter of policy and
the difficulty of controlling the renegade Russian military-industrial
establishment as a matter of practice, Iran's weapons drive may be unstoppable.
Ultimately, the U.S. needs to think in terms, not just of preventing,
but of defending against and possibly preempting the Iranian threat. Enter Russia. Iranian officials seemed to spend most of 2001 signing arms agreements with the Russians, inking deals worth several billion dollars. Russian assistance hurried the development of Iran's current medium-range missile arsenal. And Tehran couldn't develop the longer-range missiles it now seeks — the already-tested Shahab-3, capable of reaching Israel, Turkey, and Egypt, and more advanced follow-ons perhaps capable of reaching the U.S. — without North Korean and Russian help. Meanwhile, Iran has an $800 million contract with Russia to build a light-water nuclear reactor in Bushehr. Since Russia and Iran have traditionally not been cozy, this seems an unlikely relationship. But, as Ariel Cohen of the Heritage Foundation says, "proliferation makes strange bedfellows." Iran is one of the most important sources of cash for the Russian defense industry. And for the old Cold Warriors in the Russian security establishment, anything that increases the power of enemies of the United States is a good thing. Also, Iran has helpfully minimized its complaints about Russia's brutal campaign against Muslim separatists in Chechnya. Finally, Russia has — perhaps short-sightedly — never been as uptight about proliferation as the U.S., and defends Iran's right to "peaceful" atomic power. "Peaceful" atomic power, however, is a chimera. A nuclear bomb technically isn't that difficult to build. The key is acquiring the necessary fissile material. Iran could try to steal it or buy it on the black market, or simply make its own. The Bushehr reactor is scheduled to be finished by 2003. Russia says it will take back from Iran the reactor's plutonium-laden spent fuel, but there's no guarantee that Iran won't divert the plutonium to its own purposes. Russia has so far been mostly unmoved by U.S. complaints over Bushehr. It argues that if it stops building the plant, a European country will only fill the breach. There's something to be said for this argument, unfortunately. Russia can also point to the uncomfortable fact that the United States itself has agreed to build not just one, but two light-water reactors for North Korea, as part of a deal Pyongyang extorted from the Clinton administration. The U.S.-North Korean deal is premised on the myth that light-water reactors — in contrast to heavy-water reactors — are inappropriate for making weapons. But it's not so. According to The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, a light-water reactor "would routinely discharge in spent fuel as much as a few hundred kilograms of plutonium each year. If the fuel burn up was reduced, perhaps during a national security crisis, the reactor could produce significant quantities of weapons-grade plutonium." The starkest question, as Ariel Cohen points out, is why Iran needs a nuclear program for energy anyway, since it has more natural gas than it knows what to do with. Russia and Iran constantly invoke the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), under whose purview Bushehr will operate, as a guarantor of Iran's purity. But the IAEA practically exists to be outwitted by aspiring nuclear powers, which sign on to the Non-Proliferation Treaty precisely to get the technology that would otherwise be forbidden to them. This was Iraq's strategy in the '70s and '80s. Iran is simply duplicating it. An official close to "supreme leader" Ali Khamenei said in a candid moment: "The reason that Iran becomes a signatory to international conventions is to pave the way for access to modern technology which developed countries have made commitments to provide." It is little comfort that IAEA is on the scene. As Iran analyst Kenneth Timmerman argues, intent is the key factor in determining whether a government will use its "peaceful" nuclear program to pursue a weapon. But intent is something the IAEA can never determine with enough objective certainty to justify a crackdown on a country's nuclear program, which is why Iraq and North Korea were able to doublecross it. As for inspections, they are cooperative, meaning the agency will almost never find something a country is determined to hide. Iran will inevitably have something to hide. There is no split in the government over security policy, as the "moderates" support pursuing nukes too. The weapons nicely fit the aggressively anti-Western and anti-Israeli vision at the regime's heart. Hashemi Rafsanjani, the powerful chairman of Iran's Guidance Council, has talked of "the elimination of the Israel problem with the use of one nuclear bomb." Since Hezbollah is an Iranian production, an Iranian nuke would not just be an "Islamic bomb," but potentially a "Hezbollah bomb," its deterrent effect leveraged on behalf of Islamic terrorists. For Russia, "joining the West" should mean not helping this process along. The Clinton administration was temperamentally incapable of getting tough with the Russians. President Bush shouldn't be so polite. Raising the volume on the issue is important, since Russia has occasionally been embarrassed into backing out of Iran deals, and the U.S. has economic leverage over Russia, some of it directly touching on the unruly Russian missile and nuclear sectors: commercial space launches, deals for the U.S. to buy back Russian uranium, etc. In the new international environment defined by a U.S. war on terror, Iran should be near the top of the agenda between the U.S. and Russia, displacing what are now less-pressing concerns such as NATO enlargement. But there are limits to America's influence on Russia, especially if our main levers are economic. As Michael Eisenstadt of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy argues, since Moscow sells arms and technology to Tehran not just to make money but "to advance important security interests, Russia seems unlikely to halt its transfers in response to economic sanctions." This doesn't mean that the U.S. should abandon its push, by any means possible, to stifle Iran's weapons programs. "The U.S. has succeeded in imposing significant costs and delays on Iran's efforts," Eisenstadt writes, "through such traditional tools as export controls, demarches, arm-twisting, and economic sanctions." But, in the end, trying to keep weapons technology from Iran is a little like trying to keep heroin out of New York City — where there's demand, there will be supply. The U.S. has to plan to nullify the coming Iranian threat as much as possible with its own capabilities, including a missile defense (which looks more important to our ally Israel than ever) and an ability to preemptively attack in a crisis (see my "The Nukes We Need," March 25). And it must begin to address the root of the problem, which is less loose technology controls than the nature of the Tehran regime itself. Ultimately, the best U.S. non-proliferation policy is working to topple the mullahs who seek the weapons in the first place. |
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hat's
the difference between "most likely" and "probably"?
It may not seem like much, but in the precisely expressed National Intelligence
Estimate — an occasional summary of the work of U.S. intelligence
agencies — it can mean a lot. In 1999, the estimate said that the
U.S. would "most likely" face a missile threat from North Korea,
would "probably" face one from Iran, and would "possibly"
face one from Iraq, all in the next 15 years. In March, CIA official Robert
Walpole told Congress that Iran had caught up to North Korea and joined
it in the "most likely" category — a quantum jump in Iran's
potential threat to the U.S. 
