How
Washington and Moscow
could work together
against the Iranian bomb
By
Jonathan
Power
June 14, 2002
LONDON - Why is Washington so worried about Iran
building a nuclear bomb, if it is? It never worried that
much about India and Pakistan. Indeed in this case it was
perhaps rather too insouciant, never contemplating that
Al-Qaeda's friends in Pakistan's military and
intelligence services might attempt to gain control of
it. The reason is simple: most if not all the
powers-that-be in Washington have long ago convinced
themselves that nuclear deterrence is a good thing,
cooling war passions rather than aggravating them. And,
secondly, they believe that the security of the U.S.
would not be affected by a nuclear war between India and
Pakistan or even between India and China. Millions would
die, of course, but the damage would be
localised.
Doesn't the same go for an Iranian nuclear bomb?
Moreover, Iran in more than two hundred years has never
started a war with anyone and, despite the history of
recent antagonism towards the U.S., it has never come to
the point of preparing for war. Of course, it maintains a
state of extreme hostility towards Israel and funds
Hezbollah, the Palestinian guerrilla movement, yet it has
made no attempt to make even a token deployment of its
own military forces in Israel's direction. It has had to
fight Saddam Hussein's Iraq and both sides might well
have used nuclear weapons if they had been at hand. But
then again, they might well have been frightened from
destroying themselves as well as the other side and
decided not to. Even if they had the rest of the world
would not have been too seriously affected since their
common border lies well away from non-Iranian/Iraqi
population centres.
Yet when President George Bush went to Moscow two
weeks ago Iran's supposed nuclear bomb program was the
point of contention. Russia feels it is ommitted to
building a civilian nuclear reactor in Iran, even though
with its vast oil and gas reserves Iran should be one of
the last countries to need nuclear energy. The Americans
are preoccupied about nuclear proliferation and a secret
protocol they unearthed between Russia and Iran that
showed that at one time Russia was prepared to sell Iran
uranium-enrichment equipment that would not only reduce
Iranian dependency on Russia for nuclear fuel, it would
give the Iranians the possibility of building up their
own stockpile of fissile material suitable for building
nuclear weapons.
The Russian nuclear establishment, as befits a large
nuclear power, is a mighty one, with many companies,
numerous research institutes and an enormous cadre of
trained nuclear scientists. As was well demonstrated with
the long drawn out battle with Washington over the
Russian decision to sell cyrogenic rocket engines for
inter-continental missiles to India, the Russian
bureaucrats are adept in manoeuvring against their
political masters, waiting for key persona who are
against them to change their jobs or be booted out, all
in the good cause, they say, of keeping their hard
pressed fiefdoms in business. With the Indian case the
tug of war went on for nearly a decade and in the end
India got most of what it wanted.
Thus, looking at the record of the U.S.-Russian
negotiations as just published by the London-based
International Institute for Strategic Studies, one can
see the same tactics. The bureaucrats bested President
Boris Yeltsin and look again as if they might be doing
the same with Vladamir Putin. In one of the papers
written jointly by two formerly highly placed
non-proliferation experts in the State Department and the
White House Robert Einhorn and Gary Samore admit partial
defeat with trying to stop the Russian-Iranian deal. Now
they feel it is time to argue for more modest aims. One
mistake made by Washington, they concede, was to aim to
high: to persuade Moscow to cancel everything, even the
work on what would be only a civilian power reactor
operating under the severe safeguards of the
International Atomic Energy Agency. As the authors have
belatedly realized: "If the U.S. sticks with its present
approach, it could end up with the worst of all worlds-
additional transfer of power reactors to Iran, continued
clandestine and perhaps overt Russian fuel cycle
assistance, inadequate constraints on Iranian nuclear
activities and persistent U.S.-Russian tensions over the
matter".
The way out of the present impasse, I suggest, is for
Bush to embrace Putin on this issue as he has on other
contentious matters. To tell Putin, as they work together
on a widening brief of nuclear related issues, that he
trusts him to supervise the Iranian deal with the kind of
detailed attention that would make it impossible for the
Iranians to use Russian technology and know-how for
ulterior purposes. Bush would work on the assumption that
the last thing Moscow wants is a nuclear-armed state on
its southern border and that Moscow is in the best
position to observe if Iran is up to any devious
activity. Washington, of course, can lay out a detailed
program of what it expects Moscow to keep an eye on.
Moscow and Washington would make themselves partners
in this anti-proliferation work, as they have become on
nuclear disarmament and the war on terrorism. The
punitive way has few positive results to show for itself
after ten years of trying. Cooperation could hardly do
worse. And anyway if Iran got its nuclear bomb, despite
Russian policing, who would they use it on?
I can be reached by phone +44
7785 351172 and e-mail: JonatPower@aol.com
Copyright © 2002 By
JONATHAN POWER
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