National overview
Iran probably already has the bomb. Here’s what you need to do about it
Washington’s policymakers are being misled by the intelligence and defense communities who grossly underestimate Iran’s nuclear threat, just as with North Korea. Washington’s mainstream “worst-case” thinking assumes that Iran does not yet have nuclear weapons, but could “break out” to have one or a few A-bombs developed within a year, which the intelligence community would believe detect in time for warning and preventive measures. Rowan Scarborough recently reported in the Washington Times that “during a private conversation in July 2017 in front of a Japanese-American audience,” the Pentagon’s director of Net Assessment, James H. Baker, informed that “Iran, if it chooses, ‘safe’ may possess nuclear weapon over 10-15 years. Another common “worst case scenario” is that Iran could comply with the Obama administration’s Joint Plan of Action (JCPOA) and move legally to nuclear weapons in ten to 15 years. The Trump administration canceled the JCPOA for legitimate reasons, but the Biden government promised to revive it. Contrary to these views, we warned in February 2016 on these pages that Iran could probably already deliver nuclear weapons by rocket and satellite: We are judging, from the UN International Atomic Energy Agency. [IAEA] reports and other sources, that Iran probably already has nuclear weapons. . . . prior to 2003, Iran manufactured nuclear weapons components, such as bridge wire igniters and neutron initiators, with non-cleavable explosive experiments from an implosion device and worked on the design of a nuclear warhead for the Shahab III missile. When our Manhattan project reached this stage in World War II, the US was only a few months away from making the first atomic bombs. That was Iran’s status 18 years ago. And the Manhattan Project used techniques from the 1940s to invent and use the first nuclear weapons in just three years, with a purely theoretical understanding. So by 2003, Iran was already a threshold for nuclear missile. But for at least the past decade, the intelligence community has annually assessed that Iran can build nuclear weapons within a year or less. On the other hand, less than a month ago, independent analysts from the Institute for Science and International Security estimated that Iran had an outbreak time of just three months for its first nuclear weapon and five months for a second. And there is no reason to believe that the intelligence capabilities of the United States and the IAEA are so perfect that they can certainly detect Iran’s secret efforts to build nuclear weapons. Indeed, the US and IAEA did not even know about Iran’s clandestine nuclear weapons program until Iranian dissidents exposed it in 2002. The IAEA and the American intelligence community have long been weak watchdogs. IAEA inspections have failed to detect clandestine nuclear weapons programs in North Korea, Pakistan, Iraq and Libya. In 1998, the intelligence community’s “Worldwide Threat Assessment” did not warn that only a few months later, Pakistan and India would openly “nuclear” a series of nuclear weapons tests. US intelligence often underestimates nuclear threats from Russia, China and North Korea. This is likely to be done with Iran now as well. Contrary to popular belief: Iran can build sophisticated nuclear weapons by relying on component testing, without nuclear testing. The US, Israel, Pakistan and India all used the component testing approach. The American Hiroshima bomb has not been tested and has not been more sophisticated American thermonuclear nuclear warheads for the past 30 years. Pakistan and India’s nuclear tests in 1998 were done for political reasons, not out of technological necessity. The IAEA inspections are restricted to civilian areas and are restricted to military bases, including several highly suspected underground facilities where Iran’s nuclear weapons program almost certainly continues clandestinely. Images of one vast underground site, heavily protected by SAMs, show how high-voltage power lines end underground, potentially delivering enormous amounts of electricity, consistent with the industrial-scale uranium enrichment centrifuges’ power. So the IAEA reports on Iran’s enriched uranium supply are almost certainly not the whole story. The US intelligence assessment that Iran suspended its nuclear weapons program in 2003 is contradicted by Iran’s nuclear archives, which were stolen by Israel in 2018, indicating Iran’s ongoing nuclear weapons program (reported on several sites in 2006, 2017 and 2019) and by Iran rapid resumption of uranium enrichment to prohibited levels. It shows an existing ability to rapidly produce uranium from weapons. Reports from the Congressional Electromagnetic Pulse (EMP) Commission elaborate on these and important related issues. Most estimates suggest that Iran needs five to ten kilograms of uranium-235 or plutonium-239 highly enriched (more than 90 percent) uranium to make a nuclear weapon, as with the first coarsely designed A-bombs that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki. . But a good design only needs one to two kilograms. Crude A bombs can be designed with uranium-235 or plutonium-239 enriched by only 50 percent. Iran’s nuclear and missile programs are not only indigenous, but are significantly aided by Russia, China, North Korea and probably Pakistan. While the intelligence community uses a nuclear test in the country as confirmation that a country, including Iran, has developed a nuclear weapon, it leaves it wide open to deceive itself, our leadership and our allies. Iran and North Korea have close working relations, North Korea will do anything for Iranian oil, and Iranians were apparently at some of North Korea’s nuclear tests. North Korea could easily have exchanged information with Iran and even tested Iranian nuclear weapons as well as their own – if there is any difference – without the US and its allies knowing whose weapons are being tested there. North Korean scientists in Iran are known to help the Islamic Revolutionary Guard’s space program “provide coverage for the development of ICBMs. As we warned five years ago, it is unlikely and reckless to assume that Iran has refrained from manufacturing nuclear weapons for more than a decade, when they could have done it clandestinely: Iran probably has nuclear warheads for the Shahab III. medium-range missile, which they tested for making EMP attacks. . . . And at a time he chose, Iran was able to launch a surprise EMP satellite attack on the United States, as they apparently did with the help of North Korea. Why has Iran, like North Korea, not become completely nuclear? There are several explanations. First, North Korea is protected by China and lives in a safer environment, where South Korea and Japan are reluctant to support US military options to disarm Pyongyang. By contrast, Iran’s neighbors, Israel and moderate Arab states, are much more likely to support airstrikes to disarm Tehran. As we warned five years ago, Iran probably wants to build enough nuclear missiles to make its capabilities irreversible: Iran can build a nuclear missile force, partially hidden in tunnels, as proposed by unveiling an extensive underground missile system. . . . Iran is building a large, deployable, surviving, war-fighting missile force – to which nuclear weapons can be quickly added while being manufactured. In addition, Iran wants to retain the fiction of its non-nuclear status. It has far more economic and strategic benefits from the JCPOA and threats to make it ‘nuclear’ than North Korea openly has ‘nuclear’. Unsurprisingly, Iran could abandon the deterrent benefits of an open nuclear attitude as it builds on the surprising future employment of nuclear capabilities to advance the global theological agenda of the ayatollas and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard, the world’s largest and most sophisticated terrorist organization. So what can we do to overcome this almost certain threat? Some better options are unfortunately much more difficult at this point. Weapons control non-solutions such as the JCPOA, will only make matters worse, just as weapons control did with North Korea, by offering false hope as the nuclear threat grows. Iran’s disarmament of nuclear capabilities by air strikes or an invasion would be very risky, as we do not know where all its nuclear missiles are hidden. The US was prevented from disarming North Korea when the country’s nuclear missile capability was merely emerging. Regime change by sponsoring a popular revolution could be a practical solution – the Iranian people would overthrow their Islamic government if they could. But the regime has proven that it suppresses the popular uprising, and can use the American involvement, whether alleged or real, in an attempt to do propaganda, as before. But there are things we can do at the moment, including: hardening U.S. electric grids and other life-sustaining critical infrastructure against a nuclear EMP attack, described in Iran’s military doctrine and the easiest and most damaging nuclear threat to the regime would be. The White House and STRATCOM must now consider Iran as a nuclear missile threat, increase the investigation through national technical verification tools and through human intelligence to detect nuclear weapons capabilities, and prepare preventive options should action be required. Strengthen the national defense of missiles and use especially modern defense on space. For example, the Brilliant Pebbles project of the 1990s, canceled by the Clinton administration, could begin deployment within five years, costing about $ 20 billion in today’s dollars and essentially all ballistic missiles carrying more than a few hundred miles range, including Russia and China. Our national survival should not just depend on the first or deterrent. The American people are defended rather than avenged. Ambassador R. James Woolsey is a former director of central intelligence; William R. Graham was President Reagan’s Scientific Adviser and Acting Administrator of NASA, and was Chairman of the Congressional EMP Commission; Ambassador Henry F. Cooper was Director of the Strategic Defense Initiative and Chief Negotiator at the Defense and Space Talks with the USSR; Fritz Ermarth was chairman of the National Intelligence Council; Peter Vincent Pry is Executive Director of the EMP Task Force on National and Homeland Security and has served on the Congressional Strategic Posture Commission, the House Armed Services Committee, and the CIA.