My fellow FPA blogger Rob Grace asks why I think Iran is determined to develop nuclear weaponry, and whether it might not just be shooting for breakout capacity—the ability to build an atomic bomb quickly, perhaps upon giving sudden notice of NPT termination. Good questions.
In November 2003, the IAEA reported that over two decades Iran had failed to report dozens of activities to the agency that it should have reported. Senior officials at the agency told me when I visited the following spring that the pattern and scope of Iran’s transgressions was without precedent in the IAEA’s history.
The safeguards system operated by the IAEA is basically an elaborate network of trip wires. Iran had tripped wires like no country before it, and so the burden of proof was now on it to offer up convincing evidence that it was not in fact developing nuclear weaponry.
This precisely was what the European frontline countries, France, Germany and the UK, together with the United States and the IAEA, have been demanding of Iran in the intervening years. (Contrary to impressions here, the Europeans and the IAEA have generally taken a tougher line than the United States has, perhaps because Iran is so well placed to make life very difficult for American GIs in Iran.) Again and again, Iran has failed to provide adequate access and evidence.
That being the case, Iran must be presumed to be developing a nuclear weapons capacity as fast as it thinks it safely can, and that it will actually build the weapons as soon as it is in a position to do so.
As for the issue of whether the Iranians definitely want to build nuclear weapons or merely want a breakout capacity, it seems to me in this case to be rather a distinction without a difference. I see no to think they won’t break out and build atomic bombs the second they can do so.
To return to my starting point: Considering that the activities that successive Iranian governments failed to report before 2003 would have been completely legal if they only had reported them, why did they not report them? There must have been a centrally coordinated decision not to report the activities because the Iranian leadership knew that the activities collectively would suggest a nuclear weapons program, exposing the country to sanctions or even attack.
