The Convention Wisdom (CW) about Iran on display
This article in Slate by Jacob Weisberg starts off good, talking about the “two clocks” ticking off the time remaining until Iran has nukes and until the theocracy falls.
It rapidly deteriorates:
The most common estimates of the time needed for Iran to get enough fissile material and assemble a bomb range from three to eight or 10 years. (The Iraqi example counsels skepticism about all such forecasts.)
To this I respond do the math. Assuming conventional, not state-of-the-art, centrifuge technology and 3,000 centrifuges, you get around 30 kg of weapons grade U-235 per year. Iran will have its first 3,000 centrifuges up and running in a few months. If they are at the trained orangutan level of competence they can produce a tactical nuke in a little over a year-and-a-half. If they are reasonably competent as weaponeers, which is the way to bet, they can produce at least a single 1 megaton thermonuke in less than a year. In realistic planning, you go on the basis of capabilities, and 30 kg of weapons grade U-235 confers some pretty serious capability. Enrichment could start before all 3,000 are running. One of the nice things about centrifugation over gaseous diffusion is modularity. So the time to get 30 kg is probably less than a year. And, there is also the simple fact that Iran is going to keep adding more centrifuges up to a final number of 50K+. That’s over 500 kg/year of weapons grade U-235.
At the moment, the Bush administration’s policy seems to be taken straight from the self-sabotage playbook—quite a thick volume when it comes to America’s relations with Iran. Were our goal to persuade the Iranian regime to hasten its nuclear race while binding it more closely to a weary and discontented populace, it’s hard to see how we could be advancing it more effectively.
If you believe that we have 10 years - or even 3 years - to play around with, maybe you can make this statement. Iran couldn’t “hasten its nuclear race” under any circumstances because it is already pushing things as fast and as hard as it can. If Iran stops its enrichment activities and that can be verified (given the IAEA’s track record, I consider reliable verification a dubious possibility) then and only then can we sit down and talk.
Such belligerence seems unlikely to produce the result we desire for a variety of reasons. For one, our bluster is essentially empty. The United States lacks plausible military options for taking out Iran’s nuclear program and dealing with the potential reaction, especially now that we are bogged down in Iraq.
Unbelievable. Hell, I put together the attack plan 3 1/2 years ago and it was probably overkill given that I required total destruction of all Iranian facilities plus ancillary targets in less than 24 hours. Here was how I described the plan:
My scenario envisioned a disarming attack targeting all nuclear facilities, airfields, SAM installations, and anti-ship missile installations, along with some military formations, bridges, and command & control facilities. My final version was completed in June 2003. Since my computer at the time was a 1.1 Ghz P3 running Windows ME, I scaled things back a bit on the U.S. side. In the scenario, I used only 2 carrier battle groups (CVBGs) – I figure an actual attack will use 6. TLAMs (tomahawk land attack missiles) were limited accordingly. I assumed limited land-based air - about a quarter of what would likely be used - but included a squadron of B1B’s and 6 B-2s from Diego Garcia. I threw in special ops for attacks on selected installations. Attack date was mid-2006. After running the scenario several times, my worst result on the U.S. side was 2 helos and an F-18.
Give me 4 carrier battle groups and I could come up with the same basic plan without using land-base air (except for the B1B’s and B-2’s). The CW folks have no conception of the military power we have at our disposal. If you destroy all of the facilities necessary to produce weapons grade uranium and plutonium then you really do have several years to pursue diplomatic options.
Under this proposal, Iran would suspend its efforts at uranium enrichment, the United States would hold off pushing for further U.N. sanctions, and we’d all settle in for a long palaver over mint tea and pistachio nuts.
OK by me - I said the same thing above. The U.S. has always said to the Iranians that they had to stop their enrichment activities. My question to Weisberg is, “What do we do if they don’t stop?” The nuclear alarm will be going off in months, not years. Arguably, you need to attack long before that alarm is set to go off.
Here’s a great final quote: “you cannot bring democracy to a country by attacking it.” The person quoted has probably never heard of Germany or Japan.