Only Possibility Of Blocking Iranian Nukes Is That Israel Might Launch Military Strike

European Missile Defense System Would Become Final Bulwark Against Nuclear Iran

The United States has failed to prevent Iran from producing nuclear weapons, and the consequences of that failure will be ugly, according to John R. Bolton, former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations.

There also is "zero" chance that President-elect Obama, after taking office Jan. 20, will order a military strike to take out Iranian nuclear production sites, predicted Bolton, a senior fellow with the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), a Washington think tank. He spoke at an AEI panel forum on Iranian nuclear timelines and Western options.

That leaves one slim chance of preventing Iran from building its first nuclear weapon: Israel might launch an air strike to knock out Iranian nuclear sites. But, Bolton noted, Israel, too, is going through a change of administrations, and a new government may not be in place for months.

Barring any Israeli strike, Bolton said, there is nothing standing in the way of Iran going nuclear.

Negotiation and persuasion failed to prevent Iran from going nuclear, and so too did increased economic sanctions and United Nations sanctions, Bolton noted. Further talks, he predicted, never will persuade Iran to surrender its nuclear program.

Bolton cited a report by a U.N. institution, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), that Iran has produced sufficient low-enriched uranium to build one bomb, though the IAEA says probably Iran will need a bit more fissile material before it can construct the first weapon, and also would have to further refine those materials. (Please see full story in Space & Missile Defense Report, Monday, Dec. 1, 2008.)

"Iran has achieved its objectives," Bolton said. "All the debates … are over," and the years of fruitless negotiations that attempted in vain to coax Iran into abandoning its nuclear ambitions.

If Tehran announces it wields nuclear weapons, that will enable it to intimidate its neighbors in the region, and perhaps major nations as well. Tehran will reap "a dramatic increase in Iran’s influence in the region," Bolton predicted.

An Iran wielding the bomb would constitute "a very massive destabilizing force in the Middle East," according to Danielle Pletka, AEI vice president of foreign and defense policy studies, who moderated the forum.

While a nuclear Iran is a disturbing threat, she said even more worrisome might be if Iran or Pakistan were to begin selling nuclear weapons and/or technology to terrorists.

Some military analysts predict that in such a situation, other Middle Eastern nations will rush to develop nuclear arms as well, making the Middle East a nuclear-armed powderkeg.

Like it or not, Bolton said, the United States now must deal with the reality of a nuclear-armed Iran.

European Missile Defense

To that end, the U.S. Missile Defense Agency (MDA) is developing interceptors for a planned European Missile Defense (EMD) system.

The EMD would include a radar in the Czech Republic and interceptors in ground silos in Poland. Both the Czech and Polish administrations have approved the EMD, and the Czech upper chamber of parliament also has backed it. That leaves only the lower Czech chamber and the Polish parliament before construction of the EMD may begin. NATO, too, has endorsed the EMD plan. (Please see full story in Space & Missile Defense Report, Monday, Dec. 1, 2008.)

What is chilling here is that Iran has no experience as a nuclear power, according to Gary Milhollin, director of the Wisconsin Project on Nuclear Arms Control.

Even such advanced nuclear powers as the United States and the former Soviet Union, in the decades of the Cold War, occasionally came close to making mistakes, Milhollin said. One side or the other erroneously would assume the other was about to launch a nuclear strike.

If Iran made such a grievous miscalculation, "that could be very bad for themselves and everyone else," Milhollin said.

While developed nations have attempted to prevent proliferation of nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction among nations across the globe, and to terrorist groups, that struggle for peace hasn’t been going well, a new commission report shows, drawing alarm from Capitol Hill. (Please see separate story in this issue.)

An audience member asked whether Iran, upon developing nuclear weapons capabilities, might use such a weapon on a missile to detonate an atomic blast high over the United States, about 300 miles up, and thus create and electromagnetic pulse.

Such a pulse would incapacitate things that use electricity in the United States and parts of Canada and Mexico. The electrical power grid would go down, with power out to police and fire stations, hospitals and other customers. Vehicles and trains would halt. Planes would fall out of the sky. While relatively few people would die at first, no food shipments would move from suddenly inoperative farms to cities, and millions would starve to death within weeks.

But Bolton said it is unlikely that Iran soon will have such technological capacities for creating an EMP.

What Iran unquestionably has, he and Milhollin indicated, is the knowledge — and designs — for building nuclear weapons. "There is no question they’ve got extensive weapons information," Bolton noted. "From what we know, Iran has the designs," Milhollin said. And Iran is producing nuclear materials needed to build a weapon. What Iran still must obtain, he suspects, is the ability to downsize any nuclear weapons it builds so they can be fitted atop ballistic missiles.

Rather, he worries far more about Iran selling nuclear weapons to terrorists, and said that U.S. hopes of being able to identify the origins of any atomic device detonated in the United States may prove overly optimistic.

"The possibility of masking the origin of weapons is quite high," Bolton said.

Milhollin voiced another fear: what if the Iranian government is overthrown, and rebels get their hands on nuclear weapons?

"Iran is not particularly stable," he said, adding that he worries about what might happen to weapons if the government is overthrown.

For that matter, he noted, the Pakistani government isn’t all that stable, and Pakistan already has both nuclear weapons and missile delivery systems.

Another problem, Pletka said, is that Iran could be tempted to recklessness by the fact that it never has paid a high price for its obstinate refusal to forsake its nuclear production program. "They have never paid any price whatever," she said.

A U.S. military strike might well fail to take out all Iranian nuclear facilities, especially since Iran could have duplicated some of its nuclear facilities at clandestine sites, and since U.S. intelligence on Middle Eastern matters often has been abysmal. Further, there are memories of a failed U.S. strike on Iraqi facilities many years ago.

"I think a military strike [on Iranian nuclear sties] would be a step in the dark," fraught with uncertainties, Milhollin said. Further, it would be an act of war, and Iran might well retaliate against U.S. forces. If so, how could those forces handle a third war, when they already are struggling with two armed conflicts, in Afghanistan and Iraq? Milhollin asked.

For such a strike to be effective, it would have to catch Iranians completely off guard, before they have time to move nuclear processing and possibly weapons production equipment to other locations, Milhollin observed. But that would mean Obama would have no chance to rally American public opinion behind such a strike.

And, he added, there is a major doubt as to whether U.S. intelligence agencies know all of the sites where Iran is conducting its nuclear programs, so that any strike might miss key assets.

"Our intelligence operations haven’t been very good," Milhollin observed.

Bolton, on the contrary, said he believes U.S. intel agencies do know where those assets are located, and they "can be destroyed" by a U.S. strike. But with the United States already bogged down in two wars, and a Democratic administration about to take office, "I don’t think there’s going to be an attack."

That said, while "I don’t think the military option is very attractive, it is much more attractive than a nuclear-armed Iran," Bolton warned.

If there is to be no U.S. strike against Iranian nuclear weapons ambitions, and negotiations and sanctions have failed to stop Tehran, then what is the alternative? An audience member asked.

"There isn’t any plan," Bolton responded. "Iran is going to get nuclear weapons. We have lost this race." Rather than initiating a military strike, "We are going to allow it to happen," and watch Iran go nuclear, he said.

Similarly, Milhollin said that "we’ve been whistling by the graveyard for a long time," ignoring the failure of Western powers to curb the Iranian atomic appetite.

Perhaps, he said, Iran could be bought off, but to persuade Tehran to surrender its nuclear program "would require tremendous incentives," and in the West, "the will is not there" to meet that price.

Once Iran proclaims it commands a nuclear arsenal, then the question will be what Iran intends to do with them.

"The use of the nuclear weapons by Iran will be primarily political," to give Tehran more leverage in dealing with other nations, including neighboring Middle Eastern states. Iran will "reap the benefits" of joining the nuclear club, he said.

However, if Iran builds an array of nuclear weapons over coming years, as expected, just having five nuclear weapons detonating in American cities would be "catastrophic," Milhollin said.

Issue Confronts Obama

During his long months of running for the presidency, then-Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) said he would look closely at ballistic missile defense (BMD) programs.

But more recently, he has said the United States requires missile defense, while adding that he wishes to see each BMD program prove itself in tests before funding it fully.

On other issues, he also has shown an ability to evolve his positions as he receives more information.

For example, he has pledged strong support for Israel, which could benefit by early warnings of an attack from Iran if the EMD system is built.

He selected Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-N.Y.), a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, to be secretary of state in his administration. During the campaign, in which she ran unsuccessfully against him for the Democratic presidential nomination, she said that if Iran employs a nuclear weapon against Israel, the United States would annihilate Iran.

During the campaign, he also said flatly he would pull U.S. troops out of Iraq swiftly, then said it would occur by a 16-month timeframe. And more recently, he has said that combat troops would be pulled out by 2011, though troops for training Iraqis, performing other tasks and protecting Americans might remain after that.

And specifically on the threat of nuclear proliferation in nations such as Iran, Obama last week indicated clearly that he comprehends that danger.

"The spread of nuclear weapons raises the peril that the world’s deadliest technology could fall into dangerous hands," Obama said. "Our dependence on foreign oil empowers authoritarian governments and endangers our planet." (Please see separate story in this issue.)

Still, he was elected in part on an anti-war platform, and presenters at the AEI forum don’t expect him to launch any strike against Iranian nuclear facilities.

"After Jan. 20, there is zero chance of [a U.S. strike] against the Iranian nuclear program," Bolton said.

That leaves missile defense as a possible shield against Iranian nuclear blackmail.