The Daily Clarity

Why can’t Iran have nuclear weapons?

The world doesn’t want Iran to go down the path towards uranium enrichment and on to membership of the nuclear weaponry club. Everyone says Iran shouldn’t be allowed to develop nuclear weapon capability, and we agree. However, if you are the US diplomat tasked with negotiating the cessation of the program, and happen to be across the table from Ahmadinejad and his advisers, it seems a simple question to answer as to why their nuclear weapons program should be curtailed. However, think about that scenario, and the Iranian’s ask you, ‘why can’t we, specifically us Iranians, have nuclear weaponry, in your opinion?’ It appears an innocuous question, but in fact is one charged with making you answer without expressing a basic moral judgement about who is ‘good or bad,’ and without appearing to apply double standards. 

Your first line, as this hypothetical diplomat, is to respond that it is a policy to oppose the proliferation of nuclear weapons. That line is easily parried by your opposition. They could cite the reversal of a recent 30 year old US ban in supplying commercial nuclear materials to India. India is not a signatory to the non-proliferation treaty and the deal carried little to no oversight requirements, and further, specifically excluded any right to inspect India’s military nuclear facilities. Your next line may be regional, that you have concerns about the provisioning of such technology specifically in the Middle East region, as you have security concerns. That again, is a hard one to support. The US has recently agreed to supply the United Arab Emirates with nuclear materials. In addition, there is the issue of Israel’s nuclear opacity policy. They are widely known to have 200 or more nuclear warheads, though officially they neither confirm or deny it. So, the arguments you can mount on a logical level are really not supportable. You would be forced to admit that the issue is that it is Iran, specifically, that you want to deny nuclear weaponry to. You are forced to reveal you are making a moral judgement based on a theoretical predilection model  that they might deploy such weaponry at time of crisis.

This changes the lnguage of any subsequent debate. It also raises a question for both Israel and Iran. Where or against who would they ever actually deply such weaponry?  It would be tantamount to both political, military, civil and environmental suicide in such a contained region. It would be an act of last resort. Iran could also argue that its record indicates that it has less of a predilection for overt military action, excluding its proxies, than Israel has shown. Our diplomat  could then counter that a nuclear weapon capability would shift the regional balance of power. That again, is a little problematical. The balance of power has already been shifted, when the US deposed a neighboring Sunni governed state, Iraq, thereby freeing Iran from having to look over its shoulder towards its border, and enabling it to look out to a broader role in the region. So one can see that the poor beleaguered hypothetical diplomat tasked with convincing Iran to curtail nuclear weapon development, has a very shaky foundation from which to begin negotiations.

So, if the US wants to stop Iran from ‘going nuclear’, it has two weapons at its disposal. These are threat or conceding to some of Iran’s demands to placate them into stopping the program. In essence, the carrot or the stick. We are making a moral judgement that Iran should not have nuclear weapon capability, that is clear. It is also a decision we support, though we would also like to see several other nuclear armories disbanded such as India, Pakistan and Israel to name but a few. However, Iran knows the US is making a moral evaluation. It has so far proven impervious to threat and sanctions. The prospect of a pre-emptive strike either by the US, Israel or together is seeming unlikely. The US may not have the stomach for another war front. The US would also not want Israel to act independently on such a strike, as it is not clear they could decimate the Iranian facilities, and the security and political fallout would be massive and potentially detrimental to US and Israeli interest. The US could try inciting Iranian domestic groups and perhaps cause an overthrow of the current regime. The US has done this before, which has had mixed results and, in part, is part of the long-seated distrust the Iranians demonstrate towards the US. So therefore, the US is left with the use of the carrot. This raises a whole new series of questions as to what it would take for Iran to voluntarily curtail their nuclear program. We do not intend to answer those questions in this article, but we hope that the US has already prepared its response, as we have a feeling those answers may be needed in the next few months.