I deliberately skipped the three paragraphs on religion and still
found the thesis compelling, if not definitive. -Ed
Iran and Nuclear Latency
Juan Cole
Informed Comment: October 06, 2009
When you tool around the blogosphere and the news sites, the discourse about
Iran's nuclear program is maddeningly contradictory. But I think a single
hypothesis can account for all the known facts. These are:
1. Iran is making a drive to close the fuel cycle and to be capable of
independently enriching uranium to at least the 5 percent or so needed for
energy reactors and also to the 20 percent needed for its medical reactor.
2. Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei gave a fatwa in 2005 that no Islamic state
may possess or use atomic weapons because they willy nilly kill masses of
innocent civilians when used, which is contrary to the Islamic law of war
(which forbids killing innocent non-combatants).
3. Iranian officials have repeatedly denied that they are working on a
nuclear bomb or that they aspire to have one.
4. US intelligence agencies are convinced that Iran has done no
weapons-related experiments since 2003, and that it currently has no nuclear
weapons program.
5. Israel forcefully maintains that Iran's nuclear program is for weapons
and has repeatedly threatened to bomb the Natanz enrichment facilities.
6. Iran recently announced a new nuclear enrichment facility near Qom.
Those who insist that Iran is trying to get a bomb have a difficult time
explaining why Khamenei forbids it as un-Islamic and why the president and
others all deny it. It is possible that they are lying, but their denials
at least have to be noted and analyzed. The skeptics also have to explain
away why the 16 US intelligence agencies say after exhaustive espionage and
investigation that there is no weapons program now and that there hasn't
been one for some time.
Those who agree with the CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agency, as well as
with the International Atomic Energy Agency, that there is no evidence for
Iran having a nuclear weapons program have to explain Iran's insistence on
closing the fuel cycle and being able to enrich uranium itself.
The answer I propose, which explains all the anomalies elegantly and
concisely, is that Iran is seeking nuclear latency. Latency is the
possession of a nuclear energy program and of reactors, which would allow
the production of an atomic bomb on short notice if an extreme danger to
national autonomy reared its ugly head. Nuclear latency is sometimes called
the 'Japan option,' because given its sophisticated scientific establishment
and enormous economy, Japan could clearly produce a nuclear weapon on
short notice if its government decided to mount a crash program.
The reason for the construction of the Qom facility, in this reading, would
be that the Natanz facility is too easily bombed or struck with missiles.
Moreover, the Israelis and some Americans have repeatedly threatened to
strike it. A nuclear enrichment program such as that at Natanz, which is
subjec to being wiped out by a military strike, cannot truly provide nuclear
latency.
The Qom facility was necessary in the regime's eyes if the latency strategy
was to be preserved.
The regime has every reason to maintain latency and no reasons to go further
and construct a nuclear device.The latter step would attract severe
international sanctions.
I was on an email list where someone expressed suspicion of Supreme Leader
Ali Khamenei's 2005 fatwa against the possession and use of nuclear weapons
by an Islamic state.
One suggestion was that Khamenei is not a real Shiite jurisprudent and has
eschewed having followers inside Iran. But, no, Khamenei is a mujtahid or
independent jurist and has the standing to issue a fatwa or considered
ruling on the law.. A mujtahid may always decline to accept muqallidun or
followers, which Khamenei appears to have done for Iranian nationals,
without that affecting his legitimate right to issue fatwas. The theory of
ijtihad or independent jurisprudential reasoning holds that the law inheres
in the reasoning processes of the jurisprudent; whether the jurisprudent has
followers or not is irrelevant to the discovery of the law in a particular
instance. Moreover, as rahbar or supreme leader,, Khamenei's pronouncements
on such matters might even be seen as a hukm or standing command. Finally,
since he sets policy on such matters, what difference, in any case, would it
make what exact jurisprudential standing his fatwas enjoy?
The only real question is whether he is lying and insincere. That would be a
dangerous ploy on his part, in a state premised on Islamic jurisprudence, as
Fareed Zakaria has pointed out.
As for the general Islamic law of war, it forbids killing innocent
non-combatants such as women, children and unarmed men; ipso facto it
forbids deploying nuclear weapons. It was suggested that Iran has chemical
weapons and that these would as much violate the stricture above as nuclear
warheads. I do not agree that Iran has a chemical weapons program, but in
any case chemical weapons have for the most part been battlefield weapons
used against massed troops or in trenches. Having such a program does not
imply intent to kill innocent civilians. Whereas making a bomb does imply
such intent, and is therefore considered by most Muslim jurisprudents
incompatible with Islamic law.
Khamenei seems to me to have decided some time ago on a policy of nuclear
latency, for two reasons. Nuclear reactors lend Iran a hope of energy
independence. Iran produces 3.8 million barrels per day of petroleum and
uses about 2 mn. b/d itself. It is likely that soon Iran will use up all of
its daily petroleum production, leaving it without the petroleum income
windfall upon which its government depends. At that point, Khamenei fears,
Iran would be dragooned back into the neo-liberal, America-centric order
that had dominated Iran under the shah. Second, nuclear latency would help
fend off aggressive attempts at regime change by the Western powers or
Israel.
Nuclear latency has all the advantages of actual possession of a bomb
without any of the unpleasant consequences, of the sort North Korea is
suffering.
Even if my thesis that Iran seeks nuclear latency were accepted, isn't there
a chance that in the future the leaders of the Islamic Republic might seek a
weapon?
Scott Sagan noted in one of his essays that one impetus to seek an actual
bomb is regime and national pride in the country's modernity. But this
motivation does not exist in the case of Iran, since the Islamic Republic is
a critic of the alleged horrors of modernity and because
it defines nuclear bombs as shameful, rather than something to boast about.
Moreover, latent nuclear states sometimes give up their latency and
foreswear even a nuclear option. Brazil and Argentina mothballed their
programs in the 1980s, either because they saw each other as insufficiently
threatening or because their move to democratic rule lessed the power of the
military-industrial complex in each country that had been plumping for nukes
(Sagan thinks it is the latter).
The problem for the West is that nuclear latency is not illegal under the
Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. And conveniently for Khamenei, nuclear
latency is not incompatible with Islamic law. That is why the US and its
close allies have to pretend that Iran is actually going for a bomb, despite
the lack of good evidence for serious weaponization; they are using this
pretense as a way to attempt to forestall a Japan option, which is what they
really object to, since it is a geostrategic game changer for the region in
and of itself. Unfortunately for them, the General Assembly is unconvinced,
and China and Russia are reluctant.
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