The Day After Iran Gets the Bomb
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Ignoring this recent history, a July 2004 Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) Task Force on Iran report suggested a grand nuclear bargain to the ruling clerics in Tehran. Under the CFR proposal,
Iran would be asked to commit to permanently ceasing all its enrichment and reprocessing activities, subject to international verification. In return, the international community would guarantee access to adequate nuclear fuel supplies, with assurances that all spent fuel would be returned to the country of origin, and to advanced power generation technology (whose export to Iran is currently restricted).
But Tehran's leaders have already rejected this approach; saying "pretty please" won't help. The Islamic Republic wants to retain these capabilities because it wants to use the "legend" of nuclear power to mask its break-out capabilities. Iran's negotiating record with the IAEA shows that the only nuclear bargain it finds of interest is one that runs out the clock, playing on the delusions of the willfully naïve and the appeasers until Iran has enriched enough uranium for a modest arsenal. France, Britain, and Germany have further encouraged Iran toward intransigence by allowing it to break the IAEA seals on centrifuge production equipment with impunity.
The chronology of Iranian nuclear development, which has accelerated rapidly since the September 11, 2001, attacks on America, strongly supports the view that Iran's leaders believe they can deter an American conventional attack with the threat of nuclear retaliation. "Iran's national defense doctrine has been based on the assumption that it will, one day, fight a war with the United States, plus its Arab allies and Israel," writes Iranian analyst Amir Taheri.
The central assumption of Iranian strategists is that the U.S. cannot sustain a long war. It is therefore necessary to pin down its forces and raise the kill-die ratio to levels unacceptable to the American public. In the meantime, Iran would put its nuclear weapons program in high gear, and brandish the threat of nuclear war as a means of forcing the U.S to accept a ceasefire and withdraw its forces from whatever chunk of Iranian territory they may have seized.
Iran's leaders have become increasingly bold in brandishing the threat of using nuclear weapons against Israel should the Israelis attempt a conventional strike against Iran's nuclear facilities. This is dramatically different from the Cold War logic of mutually-assured destruction, since it states that Iran would escalate a conventional conflict into a nuclear exchange.But they have also hinted that they seek nuclear weapons (and the missiles needed to deliver them) to give them new offensive capabilities. Iran's Defense Minister Ali Shamkhani told reporters after a September 25, 1998, military parade that Iran would strike "in a way the Israelis cannot imagine" in the event Israel should launch a preemptive attack on Iran. "Today, we are much stronger than in the past. The most clear example is the Shahab-3. It will make the Israelis ponder about putting an end to the arms race one day," he said. Banners with the slogan, "Israel must be wiped off the map" in both Farsi and English, were hung from the Shahab-3 missiles put on parade. Shamkhani explained: "We have written on the warhead of the Shahab-3 that this will not land in any Islamic country. . . . Of course, this program will be pursued, and we will have the Shahab-4 and even the Shahab-5 to respond to our defense needs."
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