Does Nuclear Agreement Prevent Iran From Getting The Bomb?

In proliferation, diplomacy has failed to prevent the last four members of the nuclear club from getting the bomb—North Korea, Pakistan, India, and Israel.

Now, this new agreement with Iran shows little promise that diplomacy will halt that country’s nuclear program.

The main aim of this deal is to prevent Iran from creating a nuclear bomb.

This deal is being encoded into a new United Nations (UN) resolution that will make it an international legal arrangement. The arrangement gives veto welding powers to the five permanent members of the UN Security Council plus Germany (the P5+1). The ability of the UN to increase transparency regarding Iran’s nuclear program is entirely dependent on these 6 countries agreeing to let the UN do its work and not obstructing the UN through the use of a veto.

Is this a victory for diplomacy?

The question over granting UN nuclear inspectors access to Iranian military bases is a good illustration of what is wrong with this agreement.

This “deal” guarantees that there is no way to make sure that the Iranian government is not hiding nuclear related projects at one or more of its military locations.

Under this agreement, inspectors will be granted access to military sites inside Iran if and only if the Iranian regime allows it to. Proper policing of the Iranian regime will be impossible the way this deal is written.

The dispute mechanism negotiated within the deal works like this: if UN inspectors want to visit an Iranian military base, they send a request to Iran; however, the regime then has two weeks to reply. If Iran says no, the agency can force a vote on the issue with the P5+1, and that process can take as long as an additional 24 days. These 38 days give the Iranian regime the time necessary to scrub clean a site in order to avoid detection of any violations. Of course, that is assuming that Russia would ever vote to force Iran to allow inspectors within its military instillations.

The lack of transparency afforded by this deal is causing anxiety in the Middle East, and could potentially kick-off a nuclear arms race in that region. It is believed that Iran’s longtime adversary Saudi Arabia has already begun taking steps to create their own nuclear capabilities by working with Pakistan. Two more of Iran’s opponents, Egypt and Turkey, have also expressed renewed interest in getting the bomb.

Furthermore, there is the issue over the potential lifting of the United Nations arms embargo. This is an embargo on conventional weapons and ballistic missiles in and out of Iran. It was put in place in 2006 as part of a strategy to drive Iran to the bargaining table, but now that an agreement has been reached, Iran wants the embargo removed.

China and Russia wanted the embargo lifted immediately so they could sell arms to Iran. The United States and European states wanted to keep it on almost indefinitely.  A compromise was reached with a mix of five years on conventional arms, and eight for ballistic missiles.

Iran’s ability to once again buy and sell heavy conventional weapons threatens other Gulf leaders in the Middle East. A renewed conventional arms race has begun. The Gulf Cooperation Council is currently looking to increase its defense capabilities against ballistic missiles including an early warning system. An integrated defense system among the Gulf States will easily cost tens of billions of dollars.

Iran’s traditional adversaries, including Saudi Arabia and Israel, have begun increasing their land forces, their air forces, their surface to air forces, and their overall war fighting capability. These countries are not just worried about conflict with Iran. There is fear that Iran will once again freely give arms to its proxies.

Iran is the de facto leader of the alliance between Shi’ite Muslim states, because the biggest effect the Iranian Revolution of 1979 had on the Middle East was to encourage the most uncompromising elements within the Shi’ite community to fight a regional counteroffensive against what was then a Sunni status quo. 

Syria has long been an important mechanism for arming pro-Palestinian militant groups to fight Israel inside Gaza. With the civil war in Syria refusing to abate, Hamas currently lacks the ability to re-arm itself against Israel like it once did in the past; therefore, Hamas now depends more heavily on Iranian power.

The Lebanese Hezbollah has long operated as an instrument for Iran. The U.S. State Department now concedes that Hezbollah, with Iran as its state sponsor, is considered the most technically capable terrorist group in the world.

Finally, Iranian supplies to the Taliban and other groups within Afghanistan cannot be underestimated. Insurgents have long moved freely across the border Iran shares with Afghanistan, and Iran has been a safe haven for members of the Taliban, al-Qaeda, and others hiding from Western intelligence.

Iran is populated primarily by Shi’ites, and it remains a security (mukhabarat) state whose rulers focus on retaining their power and privilege by focusing on military and security forces at the cost of societal modernization. Islamic revivalism has stunted Iran’s march toward “Western” modernization, and has created a growing social split within the country.

Iran’s official language of Persian (Farsi) helps to keep Iran culturally isolated from much of the Middle East where Arabic is the dominant language. While Persian and Arabic share an alphabet, they are completely different languages with completely different pronunciations. This causes difficulties with Iran sharing in cultural products such as news, entertainment, and religious services with the majority of the Middle Eastern region.

This fact is especially important to remember when we consider Iran’s communications (or lack thereof) with other countries in the Middle East. A lack of clear communication could complicate and escalate any conflict brewing in the region due to conventional weapons proliferation.

Iran, under the shah, wanted 22 nuclear reactors for energy, and at the time the United States supported this position. Iran only ever built one, but it has plans, it says, for others, but it’s taken a very long time to get to the point where it can build them. The question is, is Iran’s current regime also moving toward a weapon.

Iran was already supposed to declare everything that it was doing on the nuclear front with the United Nations, but Iran has never cooperated with the international community in terms of giving it access to its scientists or in providing information on what it has been doing. Iran has blocked the United Nations at every turn, and there is no reason to believe that Iran will change its behavior with this new deal.