I. INTRODUCTION

Six years ago, in mid-2006, Iran had no centrifuges spinning and possessed no enriched uranium. Robert Joseph, the US under secretary of state for arms control, declared that year: ‘we cannot have a single centrifuge spinning in Iran. Iran is a direct threat to the national security of the United States and our allies’.1

Today, as President Barack Obama prepares to begin his second term, Iran has installed over 9,000 centrifuges, and has produced 6,876 kg of uranium enriched to 3.5 per cent, known as low-enriched uranium (LEU).2 By the end of 2012, Iran could easily have enriched enough uranium to 20 per cent (still LEU, but described here as medium-enriched uranium, or ‘MEU’, for clarity) to suffice for one nuclear bomb, if that were enriched further to weapons-grade. Iran instead chose to convert much of its MEU stockpile into reactor fuel, but it is not clear whether it will continue to do so.3

The quickening pace of Iran's nuclear activities, and its growing degree of ‘nuclear latency’ – a state's temporal and technical proximity to acquiring a usable nuclear device – has produced a sense of urgency amongst a number of countries, including Arab rivals of Iran. Iran's dogged pursuit of nuclear technology in the face of unprecedented pressure has also placed new stresses on the Iranian state itself. Indeed, a former senior Iranian diplomat, Seyed Hossein Mousavian, observes in his recently released memoirs that ‘the nuclear crisis has been the most important challenge facing the Islamic Republic's foreign policy apparatus since the 1980–88 war between Iran and Iraq’.4

The first quarter of 2012 was especially fraught. Fears of an Israeli military attack on Iranian nuclear facilities peaked, European and American sanctions on Iran intensified, and Iran enriched uranium at its fastest-ever pace. A round of talks during 2012, beginning in April in Istanbul and concluding in June in Moscow, briefly eased this tension. However, these negotiations have failed, with Iran expecting but being refused sanctions relief, and the West remaining dissatisfied with Iran's continued enrichment and lack of co-operation with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). The dialogue has now been downgraded to expert-level rather than political-level, reflecting the dim prospects of a settlement. Although the domestic political flux in the United States has now eased, making it easier for the second Obama administration to demonstrate flexibility in nuclear talks, Iran's own politics are not going to stabilise until at least June 2013, when President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad will be replaced. This means that, despite the encouraging prospect of direct US-Iran talks beginning as early as November or December 2012, diplomacy might still struggle to find traction over the short-term, as sanctions begin to bite deeply.

In the interim, Iran's growing stockpile of enriched uranium, some of it enriched almost to the point of weapons-grade quality, casts a shadow over this process. With every passing month, Iran is perceived to have shortened the time it requires to acquire nuclear weapons, should it choose and attempt to do so. Chapter II explores how far Iran stands from a nuclear weapon in technical terms, whether it wants nuclear weapons at all, and how the US and Iran, as well as other participants in this crisis, might come to an agreement that addresses each of their concerns.

While it would be extremely difficult for Iran to successfully dash for nuclear weapons without being detected and subsequently attacked, this does not mean that it is impossible for it to do so. Moreover, as outlined in greater detail in Chapter III, any military action, particularly if undertaken unilaterally by Israel, would probably cause a delay of only two to three years to Iran's nuclear programme, and would have the adverse effect of pushing it further underground and further out of the sight of international inspectors and spies. Although one might say that the Iranian nuclear crisis began in 2002, with the public revelation of undeclared nuclear sites, many of the last decade's concerns date to the very beginning of Iran's nuclear programme in the era of the Shah. Yet, despite the present state of elevated tensions, the stand-off might very well stretch on for years without settlement. Even war is more likely to produce a metastasised crisis than resolution. In a very real sense, therefore, we are already in a seemingly ‘permanent crisis’, one that has lasted far longer than the short, sharp confrontations that characterise international politics.

Objectives

The purpose of this study is threefold. The first objective is to situate Iran's nuclear programme in the context of the security concerns of all of the interested parties, including Iran itself. The nuclear dispute is embedded in a set of overlapping security disputes between Iran on the one hand and the United States, Arab regional powers, Israel and the broader ‘West’ on the other. Even within the umbrella group for nuclear talks with Iran – the six states (the US, UK, France, China, Russia and Germany) known collectively as the P5 + 1 – individual members have different strategic or ideological rationales for engaging with or putting pressure on Iran; different thresholds for what would constitute a nuclear-weapons-capable Iran; and different levels of antipathy to Iran's broader foreign policy. Chapter II of this study examines how Iran's nuclear programme, which enjoyed widespread international support in the 1960s and 1970s, became the most scrutinised nuclear programme in history, subject to unprecedented interference and sabotage. This section also explores Iran's changing position within broader regional and global security issues, structures and alignments.

The present level of Iranian-Israeli antagonism is fairly recent, with the two states having co-operated extensively in the 1970s and 1980s, in part out of mutual fear of Saddam Hussein's revisionist Iraq.5 The policies of European states towards Iran have also evolved over the past decades. Some European states resisted American calls to put pressure on Iran in the 1990s, but it is also European states – France and the UK, in particular – that have been the most enthusiastic about its application over the past six years. In other words, diplomatic alignments and even interpretations of national interests have proven flexible.

Moreover, some of the obstacles to a settlement of the nuclear issue – including Iranian distrust over the reliability of international guarantees and American scepticism over engaging with Iran on non-nuclear security issues – have their genesis in older, security-related aspects of the interaction between the interested parties. Iran's own threat perceptions in the face of changes in the Middle East, from the unrest in Syria to the possible re-establishment of Iraq as an Arab power, to the rise of Turkish influence, will affect Tehran's calculus regarding the option of building nuclear weapons. A coda to Chapter II examines how the Arab Spring has affected Iranian security and how, for instance, the fall of the Assad regime in Syria might affect Iran's position in nuclear talks.

The second objective is to situate this examination of Iran in a comparative and thematic context. A large volume of information is available on, for instance, the historic efficacy of economic sanctions; on the influences that weigh upon states when deciding whether to pursue nuclear weapons; and on the ways in which states can and cannot use nuclear weapons as instruments of coercion or aggression.

Too often, Iran is seen to be sui generis. In fact, the experience of Iraq in the 1990s or South Africa in the 1980s can help to inform an assessment of how Iran will be affected by, and respond to, intense multilateral economic and political pressure. The experience of Iraq in the 1980s and early 1990s can improve understanding of how Iran's bureaucratic arrangements and management of the nuclear programme will constrain the pace at which it develops. The experience of emerging and former nuclear powers, like India, Pakistan and South Africa, can provide indications as to how a nuclear Iran might define its nuclear posture and doctrine. These are imperfect comparisons but, given the opacity of the Iranian political system and speculative nature of these questions, such precedents are nonetheless useful. Chapter IV, which looks at the implications of a nuclear Iran, asks whether and how Pakistan's experience in using nuclear weapons might be usefully applied to Iran.

The third objective is to consider how policy responses by the West will and should evolve were Iran to resume its alleged nuclear-weapons programme, continue to undertake some degree of near-weaponisation or weaponisation,6 or test and deploy nuclear weapons.

Current efforts to consider this question publicly run into two types of problems. The first is that, as James Dobbins and his co-authors observe, ‘Western policymakers shy away from addressing this prospect, lest they seem to be acquiescing to something they deem unacceptable and want to prevent’.7 President Obama declared in March 2012 that ‘Iran's leaders should understand that I do not have a policy of containment; I have a policy to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon’.8 This was a rhetorical flourish rather than a nuanced statement of policy, but it highlights the cognitive – and political – challenges of thinking through and articulating a Plan B, lest prevention fail.

Indeed, there are multiple definitions of failure, in this context. Iran could stop just short of weaponisation, thereby remaining below President Obama's articulated threshold, and still exhibit behaviours thought to be characteristic of some nuclear-armed states, such as heightened risk-acceptance and self-confidence. By some accounts, even possession of a Significant Quantity9 of fissile material would accord a country nuclear-weapon status.10 Although this is clearly an unhelpfully low threshold – by such measures, Iran would be nuclear-armed as soon as it acquired more than approximately 380 kg of MEU – it reflects the fluidity of the concept of nuclear capability. This fluidity means that policy must be responsive and adaptable.

It is therefore imperative to lay the intellectual groundwork for policies that address the challenges of a nuclear Iran – whether this entails containment, coercion, engagement or all three – rather than assume that such an outcome (an Iranian nuclear weapon) cannot come about. Chapter IV of this Whitehall Paper argues that a nuclear Iran could take many forms, but that there would be incentives for Iran to assume a limited nuclear posture. It also contends that, regardless of what form any Iranian nuclear weapons might take, Tehran's ability to use its nuclear weapons as instruments of coercion is constrained in important ways by geography, conventional military capabilities, and the logic of nuclear strategy.

The second problem is that in some cases where authors have described the consequences and policy challenges of a nuclear Iran, there has been an assumption that Iranian weaponisation would spark an inevitable arms race. These assessments are part of a longstanding debate between proliferation pessimists and optimists.

Yet, it is important to understand and assess the full range of incentives and constraints faced by any would-be proliferant rather than assume a dystopian proliferation cascade. Historically, analysts have consistently over-estimated the likelihood that weaponisation by one state will cause its rivals to follow suit. This paper sets out a variety of reasons why Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Egypt might be considerably less likely to seek nuclear weapons than has been hitherto argued.

Chapter II opens by describing Iran's nuclear trajectory since the 1950s, and particularly since the nuclear crisis recognisably began, a decade ago, in August 2002. This section places these nuclear developments in the broader context of Iran's foreign and security policies, with the intention of understanding the factors driving Iran's nuclear ambitions. Chapter II also asks how Iran has historically responded to pressure, and whether 2003 – the year when Iran is thought to have paused its nuclear-weapons programme – offers lessons in this regard.

Finally, this section asks how the Arab Spring has affected Iranian policy since 2011, and whether the collapse of the Syrian regime would alter Iran's security calculus and, by extension, its nuclear thinking.

Chapter III focuses on the current status of activity to contain or resolve the Iranian nuclear crisis. It analyses why diplomatic talks have failed; how changing political conditions in Washington and Tehran might make it easier to strike a deal; and whether the campaign of sanctions, sabotage, assassinations and cyber-warfare launched against Iran's nuclear programme has been successful. This section also looks in more detail at the military option, concluding that any strike against Iran would be deeply counterproductive, and outlines a set of principles that should shape any compromise with Iran.

Finally, Chapter IV examines a scenario in which Iran obtains nuclear weapons. While recognising that this remains highly unlikely, this section asks what factors would shape Iran's nuclear posture; how Iranian behaviour might be affected; and whether other states would respond with nuclear weapons of their own. It questions the assumptions and logic of alarmist studies – those which see a nuclear Iran as fanatical, unresponsive to deterrence and certain to precipitate a wave of unstoppable nuclear proliferation – whilst outlining the very real risks that would flow from such a failure of Western policy.

Notes

¹Seymour M Hersh, ‘The Iran Plans: Would President Bush Go to War to Stop Tehran from Getting the Bomb?’, New Yorker, 17 April 2006.

²International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), ‘Implementation of the NPT Safeguards Agreement and Relevant Provisions of Security Council Resolutions in the Islamic Republic of Iran’, GOV/2012/37, 30 August 2012, p. 3.

³LEU ordinarily refers to any uranium enriched below the level of 20 per cent, and HEU (highly enriched uranium) to any uranium enriched to a greater degree. Here, the term MEU (medium-enriched uranium) is used to denote uranium enriched to that boundary level, so as to capture an important difference between this and lower-grade quantities.

⁴Seyed Hossein Mousavian, The Iranian Nuclear Crisis: A Memoir (Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2012), p. 1.

⁵Trita Parsi, Treacherous Alliance: The Secret Dealings of Israel, Iran, and the U.S. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), ch. 2.

⁶In this study, the term ‘weaponisation’ denotes the fabrication of a usable nuclear device.

⁷James Dobbins, Alireza Nader, Dalia Dassa Kaye and Frederic Wehrey, Coping with a Nuclearizing Iran (Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 2011), p. ix.

⁸Barack Obama, ‘Remarks by the President at AIPAC Policy Conference’, The White House, 4 March 2012.

⁹A Significant Quantity is defined by the IAEA as ‘the approximate amount of nuclear material for which the possibility of manufacturing a nuclear explosive device cannot be excluded’. The present threshold for uranium is 25 kg of Uranium-235 (U-235) in HEU or 75 kg of U-235 in MEU (which would be present in roughly 380 kg of MEU). These thresholds are contested by critics, who argue that they should be revised downwards considerably. See IAEA Safeguards Glossary: 2001 Edition, International Nuclear Verification Series No. 3 (Vienna: International Atomic Energy Agency, 2002), p. 23.

¹⁰Jacques E C Hymans, ‘When Does a State Become a “Nuclear Weapon State”? An Exercise in Measurement Validation’, Nonproliferation Review (Vol. 17, No. 1, March 2010), p. 161.