Iran's Nuclear Ambitions.
Lewis, Jeffrey
Iran's Nuclear Ambitions, by Shahram Chubin. Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2006. 244 pages. $10.36.
Shahram Chubin is a distinguished scholar and one of the most insightful observers of Iran's domestic politics and foreign policy. He has tackled a complex subject--Iran's development of nuclear capabilities, which many believe will be used to build nuclear weapons--that demands familiarity with everything from Farsi to physics. The very tough positions adopted in Iran, the United States, Britain, France and Germany since Iran was revealed to be violating its international nuclear-safeguards agreement in 2002 seem to be pressing the parties toward a military confrontation, an Iranian bomb, or both. Even without accepting all of his conclusions, it may be recognized that Chubin has sifted and assembled an enormous amount of public information to produce a single, readable account of one of the most vexing problems in contemporary international relations.
In the opening chapter, "The View from Tehran," Chubin sets the stage by describing recent developments in regional security issues from an Iranian point of view. In particular, Chubin emphasizes the role of revolutionary ideology in shaping how Iranian leaders view recent nonproliferation efforts, as well as U.S. military actions in Afghanistan and Iraq.
In a subsequent chapter titled "Nuclear Energy Rationale, Domestic Politics, and Decision Making," Chubin adds to the small body of literature aimed at understanding how Iran makes nuclear-related decisions. Chubin highlights key features of Iran's domestic politics and the bureaucratic structure of Iran's nuclear decision making, drawing particular attention to the possibility that some hardliners in Iran may rather welcome confrontation with the West.
The author then considers how a nuclear weapons capability might change Iran's regional behavior ("Fear of a Nuclear Iran"). A significant portion of this chapter addresses whether Iran seeks to acquire nuclear weapons at the earliest possible date, or merely a "nuclear option" for the future. In his cautious estimate, Iranian decision-makers probably have yet to decide definitively.
In "Iran's Negotiating Strategy," Chubin provides an account of Iranian negotiating strategy since 2002 as an instrument of an essentially unified drive to buy time and increase Iran's nuclear capabilities. A companion chapter on Western diplomatic efforts, "The International Response," considers the course and success of diplomatic efforts by the United States, the "EU-3" (Britain, France and Germany), Russia and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). Astutely, Chubin treats the IAEA as a diplomatic actor in its own right.
After following the twists and turns of negotiations between Iran and the international community since 2002, Chubin considers how the United States, Iran's neighbors and Israel might react to an Iranian nuclear capability. Here he draws pessimistic conclusions. Although he proposes that the United States offer a "grand bargain" to manage the strategic challenge posed by Iran, Chubin doubts that Tehran will accept such an arrangement. So why attempt an effort so clearly foredoomed? It is necessary, Chubin concludes bleakly, "to educate American and other citizens to the fact that the United States had gone as far as it could to settle the broad range of contentious issues peacefully" (p. 147).
This view is perhaps too grave. Notwithstanding his attention to Iranian domestic politics, in reaching this dreary denouement Chubin relies more fundamentally on an account of state-level behavior based on relative power, national interests and strategic culture, as opposed to the behavior of people within organizations. Chubin is pessimistic because he finds Iran to be aggrieved, pragmatic, opportunistic and narcissistic (pp. 44, 215). And it has "body language" that suggests "a state with something to hide." In brief, Chubin believes that Iran will continue to seek nuclear weapons for "prestige and domestic legitimation, regional status, and a greater voice in international relations" (pp. 55-56).
Is this the right way to think about why states build nuclear weapons? Whereas Chubin's dominant metaphor for the Iranian state is that of an individual personality, in the most compelling comparative scholarship on why states do or do not "go nuclear," organizational factors rise to the top. In his careful study of why states chose to forgo nuclear weapons, James Walsh found that the most common accounts of nuclear decision making, which rest on questions of national and international power, resources and norms, fail to account for the many countries that have chosen not to build nuclear weapons. Institutional theories, especially those involving organizational politics and regime dynamics, fare much better in explaining the 132 nuclear decisions and outcomes he analyzed (Bombs Unbuilt: Powers, Ideas and Institutions in International Politics, Unpublished Dissertation, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2001). As Walsh concludes: [B]uilding or not building the bomb is a matter of politics, a contest over choices by interested players. Getting or giving up the bomb is not determined by threats or technology or money. Rather, it is determined by an identifiably small group of organizations and individuals working within a particular decision process. Domestic and international institutional arrangements structure the decision politics, as does the propitious confluence of events and advocates. (p. 269).
This difference in perspective may permit us to indulge in a pessimism somewhat softer than Chubin's. Interpreting nuclear proliferation as a struggle between competing internal factions for control over a series of decisions in this particular case allows for some hope. Negotiations may yet provide an opportunity to shape decision processes within Iran, as its scientists and engineers move through the various steps to build a nuclear weapon. These choices may look quite different, for example, if Foreign Ministry officials are involved rather than if the decisions are made within national nuclear bureaucracies.
Support for this view appears in Paul Kew's careful review of Iranian safeguards violations, reporting and negotiations. Kerr concludes that international diplomatic efforts may have succeeded for a time at reining in what quite possibly had been a clandestine bomb program operating below the attention of senior policy makers ("Divided from Within," Bulletin of the Atomic Scientist 62:6, November/December 2006, pp. 17-19). Chubin's near-exclusive emphasis on Iran's nuclear program after 2002 may have obscured some of these factors. Although Iran's contacts with the A.Q. Khan nuclear black-market network date to the mid-1980s, we are left with important unanswered questions about the identity and motives of those responsible for such contacts.
The pitfalls of treating states as more-or-less unitary actors become still more evident when Chubin discusses U.S. policy toward Iran. Overall, Chubin is as critical of U.S. policy toward Iran as he is of Iranian policy, lending the book a welcome tone of even-handedness. Yet his implicit view of bureaucratic activity as little more than a reflection of political factors introduces a potentially serious distortion to his analysis. Chubin contends that the U.S. intelligence community has underestimated how close Iran is to building a nuclear weapon, even speculating that an intelligence estimate was cooked up to support a political decision in late 2005 to engage Iran: For those advocating regime change, it was important to demonstrate that there remained time for [a graduated, deliberate approach] (and a sanctions policy) to be viable, which may have accounted for the 'new intelligence estimate' in August 2005 that assessed Iran to be technologically further away from a nuclear weapon than many had assumed (p. 93).
In a footnote, Chubin further elaborates that the new "estimate, however, might well be tainted. Before this National Intelligence Estimate (NIE), U.S. estimates, such as that by Defense Intelligence Agency Director Lowell Jacoby in February 2005, were 'within five years.'" Chubin also points to dissenting papers by nongovernmental experts that placed Iran "three to five years away" from a nuclear device (pp. 187-88).
A close examination of the public record produces a different view. The document in question, a "memo to holders," was commissioned not in August but in January 2005 by the acting chair of the National Intelligence Council (NIC) to update an NIE on Iran's chemical, biological and nuclear capabilities produced in 2001. The update was completed in May 2005 (see Dafna Linzer and Walter Pincus, "U.S. Reviewing Its Intelligence on Iran; Council Working on New Assessments of Country's Rulers and Arms Programs," The Washington Post, February 12, 2005.).
The intelligence community had good reasons to revisit its estimates at this hour. As early as the October 2003 interim report of the Iraq Survey Group, it was reasonably clear that Iraq did not possess militarily significant stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction, casting doubt on comparable estimates for other countries. Thanks to the activity of IAEA inspectors to verify Iran's suspension of enrichment activities under the terms of the November 2004 Paris Agreement, by January 2005 the intelligence community would have had access to enough new information to justify an update to its Iran WMD estimate. In February 2005, U.S. officials told Agence France-Presse that the "memo to holders" was "self-initiated" by the intelligence community, adding that "[i]t is not that somebody has requested it."
Technical troubles witnessed by IAEA inspectors in Iran in the fall and winter of 2004-05, and not political considerations in Washington in the summer of 2005, appear to have guided the intelligence community's revised estimate. Recent public statements by John D. Negroponte, then-director of national intelligence, suggest that a new forthcoming NIE on Iran's nuclear program will not significantly alter the revised estimate of five to ten years before Iran can build a nuclear device.
This question of timing exerts a material influence on conclusions about policy. If Iran is a decade or more away from building a bomb, diplomacy might do more than simply lay the groundwork for war; it might instead provide the propitious events, in Walsh's terms, that catalyze decision making in Iran against the desirability of building a nuclear weapon. This is not to say that Iran is not making progress toward mastering enrichment, but merely that time for diplomacy remains.
Jeffrey Lewis, executive director, Project on Managing the Atom, Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, John E Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University
