The deal with Iran is done. Called the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, it contains neither novel nor new “anywhere, anytime” inspections as called for by U.S. Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz – one of the deal’s key architects – earlier this year. The deal does however require many new things of Iran that are quite nice to have. But it treats them that way, as a kind of favor, of a provisional nature, and with unspecific terms for how very detailed names of equipment and data really will be monitored, stored, contained, and surveilled, let alone specific enforcements against violations.
The Iran deal could give birth to a heavily proliferated world, one in which fears present since the creation of nuclear bomb-making technology are realized. The United States has indeed moved from a nonproliferation regime of denial to a permissive one of limited approval for sensitive nuclear technologies. And, the United States has not kept pace, legally or technologically, in verifying Washington’s ability to get a timely warning that somebody else is working on the bomb. In Iran’s case, all this nuclear liberality is for the confused notion that the international community is preventing Iran from getting a nuke for another 15 years. But that isn’t the case. Iran will have a very free atomic hand in the future thanks to the deal.
But worse than all of that, the deal places huge stress on the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to come to a final assessment of Iran’s “Possible Military Dimensions” (PMD) by December 15 of this year. Because of the limits on IAEA verification of the Iranian PMD (limits in the deal that we find out are not really limits anymore) and the total lack of any Iranian admonition or even a statement or admission about its historical proliferation, the deal is defective.
The IAEA and PMD
The PMD became a large item when the IAEA Director General reported them that way to the world on November 8, 2011. It’s a technical list of 13 things Iran did with its nuclear program that are military in nature and could only be for weapons. The IAEA had never done that before – not even for Iraq, Libya, or North Korea, at least before there was a deal.
If the IAEA Director General, Yukiya Amano, decides to declare all military concerns settled on December 15 of this year – which he certainly will be under some pressure to do – then the IAEA will have made a kind of armistice on behalf of the world that many will say leads to peace. But that path is fraught with the potential of war. The problem is in how the IAEA will draw its conclusions and on what information it will rely in doing so. Will it be under the 2013 Iran-IAEA Framework for Cooperation or the “Roadmap for Clarification of Past and Present Outstanding Issues”? –A map on which there are red lines for the IAEA, but few for Iran. Based on both, and what’s in the deal, I am not at all confident the military dimensions of Iran’s program can be resolved by December 15.
First, the PMD do not come from anything the IAEA found or Iran declared. They are declassified intelligence items from at least 10 IAEA member states. IAEA Director General Amano took the meritorious decision and described them in November 2011. But now he has to make the final assessments regarding all of them based perhaps on more intelligence but also a fair amount of multilateral work his agency is just not equipped to do, let alone by December 15 given the many ways Iran can still haltingly cooperate with it.
The deal says that any “requests” for access to Iran’s military sites “will not be aimed at interfering with Iranian military or other national security activities…[.]” That is also the only place in the relevant deal document where the word “military” is mentioned in connection with inspections. So there are no “anywhere” inspections in the final deal, and if there are, they are cleared with Iran, so they aren’t even truly “anytime.” They are done on Iran’s timeline. This will all make working the PMD issue harder.
Second, The IAEA is not qualified to investigate ballistic missile re-entry vehicles (what normal people call warheads and that are included in Iran’s PMD). They do well with declared nuclear material, and not so well with verifying “the absence of undeclared nuclear materials or activities involving them.” The answer to the problem of undeclared material is the additional protocol. Done in 1998, it was meant to allow the IAEA to investigate the full nuclear fuel cycle—most of which Iran will have under the deal in 15 years. Iran had one of those from 2003 to 2006, which it applied provisionally and then suspended and never ratified. Under the deal, there is no timeframe specified to a date certain when Iran would ratify that additional protocol. There are a few verification measures mentioned in the deal that go beyond the additional protocol, i.e., the “additional protocol plus” experts like Olli Heinonen said would be needed, but not all of them. So with respect to the additional protocol, not enough is new or novel nor very compelling in the deal to resolve truly the PMD as it is all done in a precatory manner.
Real or Imaginary Limits on a Weapon? — The Ultimate Military Dimension
Deal supporters are often beguiled by the voluntary limits Iran has placed on its program to get sanctions relief. And they love the idea of a final stockpile of 300kg of enriched uranium since that total number is how they get to assure us that Iran could not “breakout” of the deal and race to uranium that is more highly enriched in less than a year. But the deal gives three exceptions to 300kg: for Russian fuel assemblies, for fuel assemblies for the Arak heavy water reactor in Iran, and for additional fuel fabricated in Iran not for Arak. Assembled and fabricated fuel now only comes to Iran from Russia. So, a Russian exception was probably needed, and the other two are very small amounts. However, the deal allows Iran to research and develop ever-faster spinning centrifuges. So, Iran will have vastly more capable enrichment technology, more than 300kg of low-enriched uranium and potentially the ability to fabricate fuel for its Russian-supplied reactors as well as to enrich fuel for them. At that point, in 15 years, 300kg or not, Iran would be quite capable of withdrawing from the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) with all it needed for a weapon, including, of course, the work that it could likely progress in doing on warheads and ballistic missiles noted in the PMD. That is also because nothing limits those big-ticket nuclear weapons items.
Iran Admits to Nothing but Will Never Do It, Again
The deal does say what Iran would not do to make a nuclear weapon for its duration, but it only includes four of the 13 items reported by the IAEA as Possible Military Dimensions in 2011, two of which the deal’s Joint Commission could approve for export to Iran – multi-point detonators and x-ray and other machines that can assist in building nukes. It says nothing about what Iran would not do to make the means to deliver weapons to a target – i.e., missiles and warheads, which are included in the IAEA PMD.
What I find most fascinating about the deal is that it amounts to an admission from Iran that it had a nuclear weapons program in four areas. Section T in the JCPOA’s Annex 1 contains a list of all the PMD Iran “will not engage in.” Okay, but what about those in which it did engage? And the nine other things the IAEA reported to the world as PMD that section T does not address? If Iran did have and do the four things listed in section T, when did it stop engaging in them? Who worked on them? (Many of the sanctioned entities listed the deal’s terms for a slew of Iranian proliferators, for a start.) You see, we need a complete baseline of Iran’s past in order to limit and truly verify its nuclear present in order to protect ourselves in the future. We do not need Iran to foreswear things, like the deal allows it to do; rather we need an account from Iran of what it did.
Dump the Deal
Leaving Yukiya Amano to be Iran’s hand-wringing expert on what it did is unjust and unprecedented. It ought to take as much time as it should take, unlimited by constraints on access and timing, for the IAEA to do the job the world tasks it to do in Iran.
It’s for these three areas related to the PMD that I am against the deal. Like Dorothy Parker, I believe this is not a deal to be tossed aside lightly; it should be thrown with great force since its verification of PMD runs the gamut from A to, well, A.
Thomas C. Moore is an independent consultant on all matters related to WMD, with a strong focus on nonproliferation and Russia and Eastern Europe. He was for ten years a Senior Professional Staff Member on the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations. While there, he focused on verification issues, in particular IAEA safeguards and bilateral US-Russian arms control. A proud Kansas Jayhawk, he divides his time between Kansas and DC. He also has a blog, papermissiles.com. [He does not know everything.]
longwalkdownlyndale 
rangerrebew 
john 
Dave 
Barrack Chamberlain 
Tyrone Bomba 
M.McGannon 
Mark T 
I guess the big question for me when it comes to folks who are against the deal is what exactly is their alternative? Don’t get me wrong, there were going to be problems with any deal, because it involves compromising with a pretty nasty regime in Tehran, but it’s not clear that the alternatives (war with Iran, just letting the current sanctions regime collapse after we reject a deal our coalition partners find incredibly reasonable) are any better.
When no options are perfect (or even good) it is still possible to pick a relatively worse option, the deal is the least worse option in this case and thus is the best choice to make.
Some leaders in Iran have issued fatwas against making nuclear weapons so why did we need a “deal” in the first place? Of course the word taqqiya comes to mind with anything Iran “promises.”
Iran has its own national interests. Just about every other country in the world including Saudi Arabia Britain France Germany Russia China all like the agreement.
Who doesn’t generally the same idiots that thought invading and occupying Iraq was a good idea
An the alternative to a deal is what? Even if it’s a ‘bad’ deal the alternative is likely the same as if there was no deal. At least the nations involved in the negotiations opposed to Iran acquiring a nuclear weapon capability can say that the effort was made. Heaven forbid, there is always time for war if that proves to be the sole alternative.
Peace in our time.
if England had gone to war at that time before they had any operational Spitfires Germany would have been the winner
Deal or no deal — this particular one or another — the present regime in Iran isn’t going to stop going after its goals of destroying Israel, crippling US power globally, and becoming the Mid-East’s regional hegemon. Everything underneath that grand strategic overarch is simply tactics.
What President Obama has accomplished here is to move the date of that final reckoning to one that likely will come after he’s left office. This treaty is to nuclear non-proliferation what Obama Care has been to medical reform — it puts short term political advantage above any practical solution to the problem ostensibly being dealt with.
In that way he can claim his domestic legacy was to set America on the final part of the path to fully socialized medicine, while internationally he was THE president who only ended American wars; he didn’t start any.
All that noted, if the other anti-Iranian regional nations — namely Israel, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Kurdistan — pool their resources, there’s no reason they can’t defeat and overthrow the mullahs. I’m not talking an occupation of Iran; I’m talking a decapitation war strategy, followed by partition of Iran among all its seven major ethnic groups.
Every one of them gets to be its own nation and, afterward, they’ll be too busy killing each other — with AKs and RPGs — to be able to worry about going after anybody else farther away from home with nukes.
How much time have you spent working the region?
First, Israel has and will continue to be able to take care of itself. They are a nuclear power, they don’t have to worry about a direct conflict with Iran
Second, has it occurred to you that after a long war with Iraq, where Iraq was supported by the west, It’s neighbors Iraq and Afghanistan being invaded again by the west, Syria in a civil war and unstable Pakistan, the Iranians want regional power simply to be left alone?
I don’t agree with their set up with the Supreme Leader/President or anything the IRGC stands for, nor their support of insurgents, however going to war with Iran and then trying to split the country into seven regions isn’t going to fix anything. Iran has been one of the few stable countries in the last 100 years compared to its neighbors.
Not sure if you have been paying attention or not the last 20 years, but invading much smaller countries e.g. Afghanistan and Iraq hasn’t exactly worked out to well for anyone involved.
So you little idea here, is ½ baked at best.
“All that noted, if the other anti-Iranian regional nations — namely Israel, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Kurdistan — pool their resources, there’s no reason they can’t defeat and overthrow the mullahs. I’m not talking an occupation of Iran; I’m talking a decapitation war strategy, followed by partition of Iran among all its seven major ethnic groups.”
Why would the Saudis work with anyone? They’ve been bankrolling terrorists for decades and have been fine with the instability as long as it doesn’t roll across their border.
There are Kurds, however there isn’t a former Kurdistan and they’re just trying to hold on to their own area
Kuwait? Ok
Israel, supporting the Arabs…….HAHA!….in what fantasy land is that going to happen…..
How are you going to overthrow the current government and get rid of the IRGC and then split up the country without an occupation force? You’d end up with a bigger cluster FOOK than what we have no in Iraq.
Fantasy idea you have there
Saudi Arabia has already said it likes the agreement. Those countries that you mention ? weren’t they the same ones that funded ISIS?
From 1976 through 1980, and again from 1984 through 1988, I worked as an analyst for the NSA, the USAF and US Army. My specialty was at first the “Arab problem,” but I later twin-qualified on the “Soviet problem.” My security clearance was “top secret codeword,” which, in the terminology of those times, was the same one the president carries.
As to the various invasions of the region “not working out well,” actually they’ve generally gone smoothly. The trouble occurs afterward, when we’ve put in place occupation policies that, in essence, try to maintain the political boundaries originally set up by the failed imperialisms of 1918-19 and 1945-48.
Further, in my scheme, Israel doesn’t “support the Arabs” on the basis of any abstract principle, it would do so for the purposes of maximizing the efficiency of one military campaign. I have no illusion such temporary cooperation would also work to solve all the other problems of the region.
The Kurds presently have some 25 brigades mobilized, in the form of their militarized police and regional guards. They’re excellent but under-equipped light infantry, due to our failed policy of continuing to send aid intended for them through Baghdad instead of directly to Irbil.
(That could be fixed; see note above about the futility of trying to maintain the failed imperialisms of the mid-20th century.)
The Kurds’ role on the ground wouldn’t be offensive; rather, it would be to keep open Irbil’s airport as a staging base for the Israeli AF.
As to the Saudis, my appraisal is they will indeed “work with” anyone who will help them overturn what they see as becoming an existential threat to their regime. That same consideration is slowly but steadily working into the political consciousness of the larger region: if the US/West can’t be depended on to bring about a meaningful settlement, that action will have to originate closer to home OR the hegemonic status of Iran will need to be accepted.
I’m betting on the former. (In this regard, also reference Israel’s continued purchase of ICBM and cruise missile capable Dolphin-2 submarines, which can strike across Iran from positions deep in the Indian Ocean. Four a presently deployed with eight more on order.)
To ‘overthrow’ the current Iranian government you do so by killing pretty much everyone presently involved in running it. That done, leadership within the suppressed minorities inside the countruy will take the opportunity to stake their claims to independence. Further, we don’t need to care much what happens after: the object is to keep a rogue regime from getting atomic weapons. If that regime is replaced in such a way that low-level sectarian warfare takes its place for the next decade or so, all that’s still better than a-bombs popping off.
I know my plan sounds extreme in the context of today. Looking back at it from the day after the first Iranian nuke goes off, it’ll seem like common sense.
Bomba Saudi Arabia has already said that they like the agreement.
The invasion and occupation of Iraq removed Iran’s most formidable enemy
Why should we not expect Iran to become a regional power? The Sunnis are not our friends. Sunnis were behind 9/11 and al Qaeda. You sound like a Frank Gaffney clone
To quote Robert McNamara: “You’re damned if you do. And damned if you don’t.”
(2003)(The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara)