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When Iran Goes Nuclear

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David Wood

Chief Military Correspondent

Posted:
04/26/10

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Almost no one outside of South Asia noticed this week when India fired some 90 artillery rounds across the border into Pakistan. No injuries were reported in the 30-minute "unprovoked'' barrage, according to Pakistani news reports.

But for anyone thinking about the perils of a nuclear-armed Iran, the little disturbance at Shakargarh, in the hotly disputed Kashmir border region between nuclear-armed Pakistan and nuclear-armed India, was a jolting reminder of how fragile is the web of luck, happenstance and good intention that so far has kept the world from thermonuclear war.

The White House now is struggling to find a strategy to prevent Iran from building its own nuclear weapons arsenal. Economic sanctions, which the United States first imposed on Iran in 1979, haven't worked. Crippling sanctions -- a blockade of Iran's oil ports -- likely would start a war as the Iranian regime fought for life. Standing U.S. policy for years has been to refuse to rule out a military strike, yet President Barack Obama's top advisers acknowledge than an attack would be ineffective, and a long war unthinkable.

Faced with these grim options, some have begun to wonder if a nuclear-armed Iran would really be so bad. Think again.

When Indian rocket launchers wrecked two Pakistani tank brigades at Shakargarh in 1971, neither India nor Pakistan had nuclear weapons. Good thing: Pakistan's military was shattered and the nation humiliated. It had lost half its territory (the new nation of Bangladesh) and India held 90,000 Pakistani prisoners of war.

Now, Pakistan and India have nuclear arsenals estimated to contain 70 to 90 warheads on each side.

This week's artillery attack at Shakargarh is meaningless, perhaps. But just days ago Pakistan unleashed a mock attack on India, a massive rehearsal of its war plan for a preemptive strike against its larger neighbor. It was the largest such exercise in 21 years and an impressive show. But in any conventional war, Pakistan would get clobbered by India's far larger armed forces, which often rehearse their own massive preemptive strike across the border.
That is why "any future conflict between these two states will escalate to a nuclear exchange,'' said John McCreary, formerly a top intelligence analyst for the Pentagon's Joint Chiefs of Staff. "Pakistan must use its nuclear missile force to survive an Indian conventional attack.''

Transfer this scenario to the Persian Gulf and it gets uglier. Iran with nuclear weapons and long-range missiles on one side, Israel with nuclear weapons and a high-tech strike force on the other. Iran with a declared intention of obliterating Israel; Israel with the declared goal of survival. Each side, like Pakistan and India, engaging in low-level or proxy terrorist harassment.

President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran has declared that "Israel must be wiped off the map.'' The Israelis have not been shy about using force either. "I don't think the Iranians, even if they got the bomb, are going to drop it immediately on some neighbor,'' Defense Minister Ehud Barak of Israel said recently. "They fully understand what might follow. They are radicals, but not total 'Meshugenah,' '' he explained, using the Yiddish word for "crazy."

Barak, a former Israeli prime minister, was referring to the potential punishing power of the combined military power of Israel and the United States, including the nuclear arsenals of both countries. That deterrent force, according to conventional thinking, is what kept the United States and the Soviet Union at a standoff for five decades of Cold War.

Can the same theory be safely relied upon in the Middle East, to deter a nuclear-armed Iran from pushing its way around?

Is it possible, Sen. John McCain asked the other day, that "the old rules of two-dimensional deterrence'' can be "applied to a volatile region with multiple nuclear powers and possibly less rational actors?'' Probably not, he answered himself at a hearing of the Senate Armed Services Committee: "We should have no illusions about the catastrophic consequences of Iran developing a nuclear weapons capability."

Oddly enough, McCain was seconded by William J. Burns, an under secretary of state who testified that a nuclear-armed Iran "would be catastrophic. . . . I don't think anyone should underestimate what is at stake.''

Relying on traditional deterrence against a nuclear-armed Iran would be a mistake -- that is the cautionary conclusion of a two-year study at the U.S. Army War College's Strategic Studies Institute. It saw three problems with trying to deter Iran:

- The regime is split into factions, making it difficult to know whether to deal with clerics or civilians like Ahmadinejad, the military or the ultra-hard-line paramilitary Revolutionary Guards.

- Rather than threatening to launch a nuclear attack, a nuclear Iran would likely be more aggressive in backing terrorist attacks or even minor conventional or very low-level nuclear operations against U.S. interests in the region -- nuclear sea mines along the Persian Gulf's oil routes, for example. Such operations would complicate U.S. decisions about whether a nuclear response would be justified.

- Domestic political instability could affect how Iran's leaders play their nuclear weapons card, making it difficult to predict how they would react in a crisis.

The West's recent experience with Iran suggests that working with its rulers to build a stable practice of deterrence would be more confounding than was dealing with the Kremlin in the 1960s and 1970s. The awkward grappling with each other over Iran's nuclear program and potential sanctions is a case in point (imagine trying to negotiate with Tehran in a crisis over a hotline, if one existed).

"Iranian leaders tend to believe that the best defense is a good offense, and under strain are prone to lash out rather than to moderate their policies or yield to external demands,'' writes Suzanne Maloney, an Iran expert at the Brookings Institution's Saban Center for Middle East policy.

"For Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, and even more so for the younger generation hardliners who surround Ahmadinejad, there is no middle ground for dealing with Washington or the West. In their view, any act of compromise would merely initiate a perilous process of intensifying pressure intended to eliminate the Islamic Republic,'' she explained.

So much for cooperation, even of the suspicious and grudging sort that long characterized U.S.-Soviet exchanges.

If deterrence failed, the United States maintains a powerful nuclear force that could, if required, pulverize any potential nuclear aggressor.

But the trick with nuclear-armed opponents, as former Defense Secretary James Schlesinger pointed out last year, is to stop a potential aggressor before the trouble starts, not to retaliate afterward. That requires a constant and patient engagement with allies and foes, not just making sporadic threats.

Unfortunately, Schlesinger said last year, that skill has eroded badly.

This "larger purpose of our nuclear forces, our nuclear deterrent, has sometimes been neglected within the Department of Defense as a whole,'' Schlesinger told Pentagon reporters.

As chairman of a blue-ribbon panel that spent a year examining U.S. nuclear deterrence, Schlesinger said he had found that expertise in the art of nuclear deterrence had faded since the end of the Cold War two decades ago. (Schlesinger's panel was formed after several earlier incidents in which the U.S. Air Force lost track of several of its nuclear weapons.)

"The services, as we discovered, have tended to understate the unique aspects of deterrence, and . . . failed to fully recognize the psychological and political consequences of our deterrent forces,'' Schlesinger said.

Bottom line, he added: "Interest in deterrence at the highest levels of DOD [Department of Defense] has diminished.''

In the year since then, the Pentagon has scrambled to revamp its deterrence theory and practice, codified in the Nuclear Posture Review released last month.

The impact of what the White House says is a strengthened deterrence will be clear enough as India and Pakistan continue to elbow and jostle each other.

And, as Iran moves toward acquiring its own nuclear force, in the Persian Gulf.

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Averting Nuclear Terror

April 15, 2010
President Barack Obama's nuclear summit in Washington largely focused on how the international community can prevent nuclear terrorism. Since the 9/11 attacks, this has been a special preoccupation of the US intelligence establishment for good reasons. One month after the attacks, George Tenet, the head of the CIA, told President Bush that one of his agents, who had the codename "Dragonfly" reported that al-Qaeda possessed a ten kiloton nuclear bomb, that had been stolen from the Russians, which had slightly less the explosive force of the atomic bomb the US dropped on Hiroshima.
Worse still, Tenet reported that his agent had evidence that the bomb had already been smuggled into the US--specifically, he added that it was in the city of New York. American electronic monitoring of internal al-Qaeda conversations in the previous six months picked up references to an "American Hiroshima." Prof. Graham Allison, the former dean of the Kennedy School at Harvard University, reported the story of the US nuclear alert from an al-Qaeda bomb in his book, Nuclear Terrorism. He tells how the Bush administration hid Vice President Cheney for weeks, because it feared that al-Qaeda had the capacity to kill off the entire top leadership of the US with a nuclear terror attack.
In the end the report by "Dragonfly" to the CIA turned out to be false, but it caused enormous efforts to study the nuclear threat to the US from terrorist groups. There were other disturbing reports that Allison shares in his book. The Soviet Union had manufactured 132 miniaturized atomic bombs that could fit into a suitcase. The Russians admitted that 84 suitcase bombs were missing. And just one month before the 9/11 attacks the US had hard intelligence that two Pakistani nuclear scientists met with Osama bin Laden in a secret al-Qaeda headquarters outside of Kabul. Both had worked on the Pakistani nuclear program. Only after the US pressured the Pakistani leadership were the two scientists arrested and interrogated.
Meanwhile the only state to have been threatened by a nuclear terrorist attack has been Russia. In November 1995, Chechen terrorists produced a crude dirty bomb--which spread radioactivity but does not cause a nuclear explosion. They placed the dirty bomb in a Moscow city park but did not explode it in order to warn the Russians what they could potentially do. According to the CIA, in 2004, roughly two dozen international terrorist groups were seeking to develop weapons of mass destruction. It should not be difficult to build a global consensus against nuclear terror, considering the many states it could affect.
Yet, President Obama faces certain difficult dilemmas in dealing with the threat of nuclear terror. On April 6, he decided to revise the military doctrine of the US regarding the use of nuclear weapons. In his announcement he specifically said that states that signed the 1968 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and comply with their treaty obligations will not be threatened by US nuclear forces. The US public response to the new nuclear doctrine did not appear to be supportive. Three days after the doctrine was announced Fox News published a disturbing poll that 74 per cent of Americans now felt that the US was weaker than it was ten years ago. Perhaps they felt that the US was pulling back from its global role.
In this spirit, Obama's critics quickly pointed out that there were many scenarios in which the US nuclear deterrent had contributed to security in the past, but would no longer be affected by US nuclear forces. A state that attacked the US with biological weapons could not be threatened with nuclear retaliation any longer. Previously, the US had been ambiguous about such situations, but now Obama wanted to clarify what US nuclear deterrence covered and did not cover. During the Cold War, US nuclear policy was based on "extended deterrence"--that a conventional attack on US NATO allies or on South Korea might lead to a nuclear response by the US. It was no longer clear what now happens to those former security guarantees.
The new Obama doctrine has implications for the threat of nuclear terrorism. What if a state has not formally crossed the nuclear threshold, but it gives sanctuary to an international terrorist group planning to use nuclear weapons against the US and its allies? When the US was more ambiguous about how it would react, even under such situations states would fear that if terrorist groups that operated on their soil engaged in such activity, then they might face a retaliatory response from the US. Now that ambiguity has been removed, and the number of cases in which the US would use its nuclear power has been severely narrowed.
Obama is hoping by reducing the role of nuclear weapons he will help make them irrelevant and thereby strengthen nuclear non-proliferation. The underlying assumption of his policy is that rogue states seek nuclear weapons because other states like the US have them. But what if Iran wants nuclear weapons in order to establish its hegemony in the Middle East and not because of the size or use of the US nuclear arsenal?
In fighting global terrorism, in general, it is difficult to create deterrence against groups like al-Qaeda, especially if they believe in martyrdom and are willing to sacrifice their lives for religious reasons. In order to contain terrorism, the states that sponsor terrorist organizations must be firmly threatened if they give sanctuary to groups, like al-Qaeda. For this reason, the US attacked the Taliban in Afghanistan, after 9/11.
Right now, the barriers that once existed for transferring state-of-the-art conventional weapons to terrorist groups are dropping away; for example, both Iran and Syria are providing long-range rockets and even Scud ballistic missiles to Hezbollah. The next leap for these states--to provide weapons of mass destruction--to terrorist groups is getting far less far fetched.
In order to prevent al-Qaeda and other organizations from moving to the adoption of nuclear terrorism, the strongest forms of pressure must be applied against the states that provide it with assistance of any sort. This is especially important because there are states that have murky ties to al-Qaeda, like Pakistan and Iran. If states know that they might risk full retaliatory response by the US, then they will be more prone to firmly use their security forces to root out the terrorist infrastructure. But if they are confident that US and Western military force is totally irrelevant to their situation, then the danger of nuclear terrorism unfortunately might well increase.

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The Frightening Side of a Nuclear Iran

February 17, 2010
Tags:Ahmadinejad, Barack Obama, Iran, Iraq, nuclear
In the corridors of power in Washington, it is increasingly recognized privately that the US will not be able to halt the Iranian nuclear program and therefore the Obama Administration's Plan B is to rely on deterrence. They hope that the US and its allies can deter Iran the same way that they deterred the nuclear weapons of the Soviet Union during the Cold War. But they fail to take into account that Iran is not run today by secular communists but rather by a radical version of Shiite Islam that has spread across much of the Iranian leadership.
The Twelver Shiism practiced in Iran and throughout most of the Shiite communities in the Islamic World is based on the idea that the descendants of the Prophet Muhammad though his daughter, Fatima, and son-in-law, Ali, have a special spiritual status--especially the twelfth descendant, who is supposed to re-appear as the "Anointed One" or Mahdi, in the future. He is also called "Lord of Time."
For Shiites these descendants are the rightful leaders of the Islamic community and not the Caliphs, who were chosen to lead Islam by the Sunnis. According to Shiite tradition the Twelfth Imam went into a state of being hidden in the year 874 at the age of six, but his return will usher in events that will culminate with the destruction of the world and the end of days. Both Judaism and Christianity have a concept of the end of days, but in Iran a radical interpretation of Shiism has gathered strength in elite circles that believes the arrival of the Mahdi is not a fixed date in the distant future but rather can be accelerated by man.
Generally, Iran has witnessed in the last decade a massive revival of the belief in the imminent arrival of the Mahdi. In 1983, Ayatollah Khomeini outlawed the main group that advanced the idea of the Mahdi's imminent arrival, the Hojatieh Society, but now its members have become openly active with government support. For example, there is a mosque outside of the Iranian holy city of Qom, known as the Jamrakan Mosque, where a well is located through which, by local legend, a pilgrim can communicate with the Twelfth Imam, even though he is still in a state of hiding. Jamrakan may have historically been a minor and run down center for pilgrimage, but in the last ten years, the Iranian government has invested hundreds of millions of dollars in the site. It has become an important center for popularizing the cult of the Twelfth Imam.
More disturbingly, the growing obsession with the imminent arrival of the Twelfth Imam as the Mahdi has been popular among the Revolutionary Guards and their Basij corps. Their faith in the Mahdi grew on the battlefields of the Iran-Iraq War. President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad comes from the same religious milieu. Speaking in 2005 at the UN General Assembly, he added a prayer: "...hasten the reappearance of the Imam of the times and grant to us victory and prosperity." After his speech in 2005, he said that he was surrounded by a halo of green light while he spoke for 27 to 28 minutes. That same year, Ahmadinejad met with the French foreign minister, Philippe Douste-Blazy, asking them: "Do you know why we should wish for chaos at any price." He then explained: "Because after chaos, we can see the greatness of Allah."
After his 2005 election victory, the first religious figure Ahmadinejad consulted with in the city of Qom was Ayatollah Mesbah Yazdi, whose journal deals with the return of the Mahdi; in 2005 it wrote that the Koran calls on Muslims "to wage war against the unbelievers and prepare the way for the advent of the Mahdi." A Yazdi disciple has given the religious justification for the use of nuclear weapons. Yazdi was a teacher at the Haqqani School which trained senior officers in the Revolutionary Guards and the Iranian intelligence services. He continues to appear in various events sponsored by the Revolutionary Guards. This month Ahmadinejad decided to increase funding by 143 % to Yazdi's religious institute and other radical groups that spread the belief in the Mahdi.
Of course the President of Iran does not have exclusive control over the Iranian nuclear program, though he is a partner with Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and the Revolutionary Guards commanders in deciding Iranian defense policy. Khamenei has been a political ally of Mesbah-Yazdi, who supported his becoming Supreme Leader after the death of Ayatollah Khomeini. Khamenei's influential son, Mojtaba, has been Yazdi's student at his seminary in Qom.
There are also other key officials in the Iranian national security establishment who share Ahmadinejad's Mahdist beliefs, including the former head of the Iranian Atomic Energy Organization. Ali Akbar Vilayati, Iran's foreign minister for nearly two decades, was a Hojatieh member. He now serves as foreign affairs adviser to the Supreme Leader, and yet is still active in a newer organization examining the arrival of the Mahdi.
The Commander of the Revolutionary Guards, General Mohammad Ali Jafari, declared in 2008: "Our duty is to prepare the way for an Islamic world government and the rule of the Lord of the Time". In 2009, both the Revolutionary Guards and the Basij were undergoing indoctrination using materials from the Hojatieh Society concerning Shiite doctrines on recognizing the arrival of the Mahdi. The Revolutionary Guards will undoubtedly control Iran's nuclear weapons along with the civilian leadership when they become operational.
It is far easier for intelligence agencies to monitor Iranian capabilities than Iranian intentions. It is especially difficult to penetrate the minds of the Iranian leaders to understand to what extent their religious views affect their political behavior. There are reasons for the West to be seriously concerned. When Iraq invaded Iran in 1980, within two years, the Iranian army captured back all the territory that it lost, so that the Iran-Iraq War could have ended in 1982.
But the Iranian leadership kept the war going for six years, sacrificing hundreds of thousands of Iranian soldiers in order to achieve their ideological goals of exporting the revolution. When Ayatollah Khomeini decided to agree to a cease-fire in 1988, the only Iranians who objected were the Revolutionary Guards. The hard question that needs to be answered in Western capitals, and in Israel, is to what extent is deterrence a reliable defense doctrine against a military leadership harboring this kind of world view.
Useful Sources: Dore Gold, The Rise of Nuclear Iran: How Tehran Defies the West (Regnery: 2009), Abbas Amanat, Apocalyptic Islam and Iranian Shi'ism (I.B. Taurus, 2009), Muhammad Sahimi, "The Man in the Shadow: Mojtaba Khamenei" Frontline: Tehran Bureau, July 16, 2009.