Friday, December 7, 2007

Nuclear Limbo Enhances Iran’s<

By Elaine M. Grossman
Global Security Newswire

WASHINGTON — This week’s U.S. intelligence revelation that Iran suspended its nuclear arms effort in 2003 — but might resume work at any time and produce a weapon between 2010 and 2015 — could make Tehran more powerful on the international stage than if it had already built a bomb, Columbia University scholar Gary Sick said yesterday (see GSN, Dec. 3).

Iranian leaders might use the threat of reinstating their military project to influence politics and diplomacy around the globe, beginning perhaps in the Persian Gulf region, he said.  At the same time, not having actually built a weapon, Tehran would be relatively insulated from becoming a U.S. military target and might successfully argue that existing international sanctions should be lifted.

Some three decades after the shah of Iran secretly sought a “surge” capacity that would allow the Persian Gulf nation to build a nuclear weapon within 18 months, Tehran’s contemporary leaders appear to have halted their military project just a year or two short of completion, Sick said at an event sponsored by the Center for National Policy.

“If you’re looking for political clout in the region, having the potential threat of a nuclear weapon is almost as useful — and perhaps more useful in terms of leverage — than actually having a bomb that makes you a target,” the Middle East expert said. 

“You are really better off to say, ‘OK, if don’t want to play ball with me, if you want to make my life difficult [or] if you want to attack me, I have this capability [to build a weapon] and I’ll exercise it.  You want to think about that before you adopt your policies with regard to me,’’” he said.

Sick estimated that about 40 nations around the globe have similarly developed a nuclear and technological infrastructure that could produce an atomic weapon in relatively short order.

Experts have told him that Japan is so close to a weapons capacity that Tokyo “could do it, sort of, over a long weekend.”  Other countries, including Brazil, Argentina, Taiwan and Sweden, are less far along in their development and would need more time to produce a weapon if they chose to do so, Sick said.

Other current and former nuclear powers covertly developed a weapon more quickly than Iran has proceeded — among them, South Africa, India, Pakistan and Israel, the scholar noted.  He speculated that Iran might intentionally have taken a slow approach to a process that began in 1985.

“We’re now at 22 years and counting, and Iran has maybe 3,000 centrifuges, maybe running well and maybe not,” Sick said.  “[It could be] they’re really not in as much of a hurry to produce this thing.”

However, that slow approach might yet change, Sick warned.

Hard-line Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in October launched what appears to be a play for increased domestic power, forcing out top nuclear envoy Ali Larijani and replacing him with Saeed Jalili (see GSN, Oct. 22).  Western diplomats have said Jalili appears to reflect the president’s more rigid stance on nuclear issues (see GSN, Nov. 30).

Ahmadinejad also made headlines the same month when he publicly denied reports that Russian President Vladimir Putin had offered a secret proposal to end the nuclear standoff during talks with Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei (see GSN, Oct. 19).

Sick views these developments as likely indications of an unprecedented domestic power grab by Ahmadinejad.

“There may be a kind of slow-motion coup under way in Iran,” he said during his presentation.  Iran’s ruling mullahs “suddenly realize they’ve got a tiger by the tail” in the form of a president who “doesn’t play by ordinary rules,” he said.  “They’re not quite sure what to do about it.”

Sick added:  “This next year may be one of the most critical in terms of Iranian domestic politics since the [1979] revolution.”

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