IRAN NUKESThe Iran Nuclear Deal the World Deserves Takes Us Back to the Basics
The current nuclear negotiations on Iran need to reflect Iran’s requirement to demonstrate it does not have a nuclear weapons program and secondarily on eliminating the means to enrich uranium and the existing stocks of enriched uranium.
The current nuclear negotiations on Iran need to reflect Iran’s requirement to demonstrate it does not have a nuclear weapons program and secondarily on eliminating the means to enrich uranium and the existing stocks of enriched uranium. The goal should be reestablishing the norms and obligations of nuclear nonproliferation on Iran, not further perpetuating additional exemptions to them or creating new ones.
Too often, nuclear negotiations with Iran have become too bogged down and, in essence, lose the forest for the trees. That focus on individual details overwhelmingly favors Iran. Detailed proposals about nuclear limits and step by step plans are intended to wear U.S. negotiators down and have them get lost in the details of what sanctions are removed when and what nuclear capability limits are sufficient. Reinventing the wheel of nonproliferation limits and monitoring and carving a special, unusual nonproliferation status for Iran is what led us here in the first place. Focusing on limits on nuclear capabilities, while largely deemphasizing the main cause of concern, has got us into the present debacle.
Instead, the United States should focus first on obtaining and verifying Iranian commitments not to build nuclear weapons. That includes Iran providing the IAEA an accurate and complete nuclear declaration and allowing full access to all relevant sites and persons. Iran has never taken the steps necessary to determine compliance with its obligations under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). This effort was essentially abandoned in the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). Iran must acknowledge and end upfront its work on nuclear weapons prior to any sanction’s relief. Both Iraq and South Africa did so, the former through a tough cease fire agreement in 1991 and the latter voluntarily. Iran should choose the latter to avoid the former. And that should be the choice offered to Iran.
The status quo favors the United States, with Iran’s ability to make nuclear weapons severely degraded by the war, and its stocks of enriched uranium bottled up in sealed tunnel complexes, easy to monitor from above.
