As Israel sets its sights on Iran, the US declares nuclear targets out of bounds
This week, according to a report in the Washington Post, an active and fully involved President Joe Biden finally set a limit on what Israel could do with the untold numbers of American bombs that Israel has recently been dropping on Gaza, the West Bank, and Lebanon. The Israeli government led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been debating how and when to respond to an earlier Iranian missile attack on Israel and an anxious world has been watching as the military madness of the Middle East, fueled by American weapons, continues to escalate.
Biden had stepped up, the Post reported, and told the Israelis that “he would not support an Israeli strike on nuclear-related areas” in Iran. Biden and Netanyahu had had their first talk in seven weeks, and the Israeli leader got the message. He agreed to limit Israel’s retaliation to military targets in Iran and avoid any nuclear or oil installations. The Post described the Israeli turnaround “as a sign of restraint” that could avoid a wider war. The newspaper’s assessment came amid what can already only be described as a wider war.
Why is Biden, on his way out of office, continuing to seek the limelight instead of doing all he can to promote the competence and strategic know-how of Kamala Harris, his vice president who is now struggling, amid some adverse internal polls, to defeat Donald Trump in an election three weeks away? If Harris does not win next month, Biden’s pettiness and need for attention in these last weeks will not be forgotten. Harris was on Biden’s call with Netanyahu, but she should have been taking the lead on all serious foreign policy matters in these weeks. Biden seems intent on upstaging his loyal vice president, and doing so on the front pages of the nation’s major newspapers.
The sad fact is that the president has lost the support of many young Americans through his continued backing, in the form of tens of billions of American dollars in military aid, of Ukraine’s war against Russia and Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza and against Hezbollah in Lebanon. Netanyahu has long believed that Iran is intent on becoming a nuclear power. In fact, as I reported in the New Yorker in 2011, the US intelligence community has concluded in two secret assessments, known as National Intelligence Estimates, that there is no evidence that any of the enriched nuclear materials in Iran have been diverted to a secret nuclear weapons program. There is no such program in Iran, although its nuclear industry continues to produce and store uranium that has been enriched to 60 percent. (Uranium at that level of enrichment has no medical use and is not powerful enough for a bomb, but publicly storing uranium at that level is seen not as an arbitrary choice by some nuclear arms control experts here. Rather, it can be understood as a chilling political message to enemies: “We have gone as far gone this far in response to provocation from Israel and other enemies without producing weapons-grade uranium, but we are capable of doing so.”)
There’s something bizarre in the spectacle of a US president negotiating with Israel about what targets to hit instead of doing whatever he can to stop further bombing. Why is a president of the United States negotiating with the leader of any nation, ally or not, about which targets his air force is going to attack next? And why are he and his foreign policy aides telling the media about it?
The tragic truth is that Biden and his foreign-policy team, headed by Secretary of State Antony Blinken and National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan, will depart office having left the United States mired in wars in Ukraine and the Middle East with no immediate way out. Russia is more than holding its own in its war with Ukraine, with no end in sight, and is now in the process of upgrading Iran’s sophisticated S-300 air defense missile system with the next generation of technology, capable of tracking the most advanced ballistic missile firings.
I have been reporting on Iran’s suspected bomb program for more than two decades. In 2011 one of Iran’s senior diplomats confided to me that he was appalled by his country’s official lying about its secret purchase of what are known as dual-purpose goods: machinery that could be made capable of enriching raw uranium ore to the 5 percent level needed to drive a nuclear power plant, and but also to the 90 percent enrichment level needed to develop a nuclear bomb.
The hardline Iranian revolutionary government that came to power in 1979 after the overthrow of the pro-American Shah was convinced even a decade later that the path to nuclear arms would be blocked to Iran on the open market. The regime also believed, correctly, that any effort to buy the equipment and low-grade uranium ore needed to run a nuclear reactor for peaceful use could never take place on the open market. Its double-dealing efforts on the nuclear black market quickly became known to the International Atomic Energy Agency, a watchdog tasked with getting all nations to comply in peaceful uses of the atom. It was headed from 1997 to 2009 by Mohamed ElBaradei, an Egyptian diplomat who was skeptical that Iran was ever scrambling for weapons-grade uranium.
I got to know ElBaradei during his directorship, after he had concluded on behalf of the IAEA that the Iranian leadership had come to terms with its wrongdoing on the black market. At that point, Iran got IAEA approval to activate their one reactor for commercial energy use. The US and Israel remained skeptical but continued their close monitoring of the Iranian nuclear program at Natanz, Iran’s main enrichment center 200 miles southeast of Tehran. The goal of the surveillance was to ensure that none of the partially enriched uranium was diverted for use, once fully enriched, in a bomb. There has yet to be evidence, then or now, of a diversion of any enriched material at Natanz and any other Iranian nuclear site for potential military use.
In October 2015, after years of intense negotiations, there was a major breakthrough in the control of the bomb. The United States, China, France, Germany, Russia, the United Kingdom and the European Union joined with Iran in signing a treaty putting restrictions—to be monitored by tamper- and radiation-resistant cameras—on all aspects of Iran’s nuclear operations, including enrichment and possible diversion activities. In return, the signatories agreed to ease an extreme set of sanctions that had been put in place on Iran, including those involving trade and transactions with the international financial system. One hundred billion dollars soon flowed into the Iranian treasury. The treaty, formally known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, was fiercely opposed by Donald Trump, who won the presidency the next year. Trump withdrew from the JCPOA agreement in the spring of 2018, to the dismay of most in the worldwide arms control community, after promising that he would negotiate a better deal. He did not do so before leaving office.
With the JCPOA gone, the rigid Iranian leadership surprised some by announcing it would continue the nuclear enrichment monitoring obligations that were imposed by its membership in the IAEA. Netanyahu continued his public insistence that Iran was cheating its way to a bomb.
There turned out to be a poorly understood condition to do with monitoring in the JCPOA treaty that has enabled many of Iran’s enemies to suggest in recent years that Iran’s nuclear officials have been cheating in an effort to move quickly to the bomb. Avril Haines, director of the Office of National Intelligence, reported to Congress last July that Iran has “undertaken activities that better position it to produce a nuclear device, if it chooses to do so.” Similarly, Rafael Grossi, the director general of the IAEA, angered some on his staff early this year when he claimed Iran was “not entirely transparent” about its nuclear program at an international meeting in Dubai. Grossi further distressed IAEA technical experts by saying that he and others were “concerned about the ability of my inspectors to be able to put the jigsaw puzzle together again.”
The inevitable impression left by such remarks was that Iran, no longer bound by the JCPOA strictures, was finding ways to accumulate weapons grade uranium and improve its potential to become the only other nuclear power in the Middle East besides Israel, which has yet to publicly acknowledge its nuclear capability. It is believed to have a fleet of more than one hundred warheads—likely far more than that—in storage or ready to be fired on command in underground bunkers. Inevitably Israel is concerned about any competing nuclear power in the Middle East, but nuclear parity is unlikely to occur anytime soon.
In a recent exchange, a former high-level IAEA official expressed exasperation to me at what he saw as the willingness of the senior managers in Vienna, home of the agency’s headquarters, to cast doubt publicly on the efficacy of the current IAEA camera coverage of Iran’s major nuclear facilities. The implication was that some of the vital camera coverage had been lost with the cancellation of the JCPOA. This was not so, he told me: the Iranian government is still required by the IAEA to provide round-the-clock camera coverage of the main “enrichment plant at Natanz” and other enrichment plants scattered around the nation. The office of Director General Grossi also gets reports, he said, “on the cyclonical machines”—centrifuges—“that spin at high speed to produce low-enriched fuel for commercial reactors and, at concentrations of 90 percent or more, fuel for nuclear weapons.”
The bottom line is that Iran is still producing large quantities of uranium that in some cases is being enriched to 60 percent of purity for reasons explained above, but there is no evidence of an active bomb program at any of the known Iranian nuclear research facilities. US and allied intelligence services have looked hard for evidence of an underground facility filled with scientists and technicians capable of fabricating a hotter-than-hell collection of spun-up uranium gas into a solid nuclear core that could be fitted into a bomb or a rocket. So far, I have been told, the US, even with the world’s best spotters of underground exhaust pipes, has yet to spot an Iranian underground nuclear weapons facility.
So there is no evidence of an Iranian nuclear bomb amid an awful lot of partially enriched uranium that is far from making a bomb that can go boom. Will such facts stop Netanyahu from his constant talking of the Iranian nuclear threat? Not likely. He has his own muse, and his own demons, and a lot of blood on his hands.
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