The nearly month-long 2015 Review Conference of the Parties to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) commenced at United Nations headquarters in New York on April 27th. These review conferences to assess the operation of the treaty are held every five years.
The NPT’s objective is to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons and weapons technology to non-nuclear weapons states. In return, the nuclear states are supposed to move towards complete nuclear disarmament, a goal that President Obama has strongly endorsed. Finally, the NPT is intended to promote cooperation in the peaceful uses of nuclear energy.
Proponents of the NPT claim that it has been a great success to date, although much more needs to be done to fully achieve the treaty’s goals. They point as evidence of success to the fact that, since the treaty has gone into effect, global stockpiles of nuclear weapons have reportedly fallen by more than two thirds and several countries such as South Africa and Libya have given up their nuclear weapons programs. The United States and Russia signed and ratified the new START treaty, limiting the numbers of deployed strategic nuclear arsenals of the two largest nuclear powers.
However, considering that North Korea already has nuclear bombs and Iran is on the verge of possessing sufficient enriched uranium to quickly break out and produce nuclear weapons, the NPT’s goal of complete nuclear disarmament and of stemming nuclear proliferation is a pipe dream. Nevertheless, the Obama administration is committed to chasing rainbows, irrespective of risks to national security from its plans for precipitous reductions in the U.S. nuclear arsenal. Moreover, the Obama administration is trying to sell its flawed negotiations with Iran over that rogue state’s nuclear program as an important step in securing non-proliferation.
Secretary of State John Kerry linked the Iran negotiations to the NPT in his remarks to the NPT conference on April 27th. “Now it’s important to remember that the NPT has always been at the heart of these negotiations,” Kerry said. “From day one we have been focused on bringing Iran back into compliance with its obligations under the treaty.” In that same address at the United Nations, Kerry stressed the importance of verification to make sure that Iran does not cheat. “Obviously verification is at the heart of the NPT, and one of the most important things that we can do to support our nonproliferation goals is to strengthen the IAEA [International Atomic Energy Agency] safeguards in order to ensure that the agency has exactly what it needs in order to be able to verify safeguard agreements,” Kerry said.
Herein lies the fundamental problem. The Obama administration is heading down a path with Iran that ultimately will make further nuclear proliferation more likely, not less. After years of negotiations to date with accompanying IAEA inspections, Vice President Joe Biden has admitted that Iran already has “paved a path to a bomb's worth of material.” However, in trying to make the case for reaching a more far-reaching final deal with Iran anyway, Vice President Biden went on to say that “Iran could get there now if they walked away in two to three months without a deal." The administration’s logic is that with a deal Iran’s breakout time to being able to produce a nuclear bomb would be extended to about a year during the time the deal’s restrictions on uranium enrichment, centrifuges and research and development remain in force. But that is simply kicking the proliferation can down the road. The agreement, if drafted along the lines of the Obama administration’s fact sheet parameters, would not dismantle or permanently reduce Iran’s nuclear enrichment and production capacity to levels far below what are needed to produce nuclear weapons at all and would not prevent Iran from importing nuclear arms or the means to develop them. And that is assuming the final deal conforms to the fact sheet parameters, which Iran is already denying represents what they have agreed to. Iran is demanding further concessions that President Obama appears willing to consider granting.
Even if Iran complies scrupulously with every provision of a final agreement, which would be a first for Iran, the end result after 13 years, when restraints on Iran’s enrichment program would presumably be lifted, will be a disastrous undermining of the entire NPT regime. Iran will then be in a position to break out and develop a nuclear bomb with virtually no opportunity at all for the rest of the world to take measures to prevent. President Obama himself said that a “more relevant fear would be that in Year 13, 14, 15, they have advanced centrifuges that enrich uranium fairly rapidly, and at that point, the breakout times would have shrunk almost down to zero.”
Thus, the best case scenario is a delay of perhaps 13, 14 or 15 years until Iran is free to join the nuclear arms club, passing the problem of a rogue terrorist-sponsoring state in possession of nuclear weapons to our children and grandchildren. And that is assuming that Iran plays by the rules. An inspection regime is only as good as the country being inspected allows it to be. In Iran’s case, its long record of cheating and stonewalling speaks for itself. And moving forward, there cannot be any effective verification on the terms that Iran is demanding.
Iran is rejecting snap inspections and insists on placing military facilities off limits to inspections altogether. Iran is still stonewalling the IAEA in providing answers to questions the agency has about possible past military dimensions to its nuclear program, including development of an explosive nuclear device. According to the IAEA’s Director General Yukiya Amano, Iran has yet to fully cooperate. Moreover, he said that the IAEA is not in a position to verify that all of Iran’s nuclear enrichment activities are declared or accounted for and will not be able to do so without more robust inspections than Iran appears ready to permit.
Adding further reason for concern about Iran’s true intentions, an active Iranian nuclear procurement network linked to two blacklisted firms under sanctions has been uncovered, according to a recent confidential report by a United Nations sanctions panel seen by Reuters.
At the NPT conference, Iran tried to divert attention from its own program and violations of the NTP to which it is a party as well as of past UN Security Council resolutions. Speaking on behalf of the 120 member Non-Aligned Movement of which his country is currently the chair, Iran’s Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif declared that nuclear disarmament is the greatest priority and called for a legally binding phased elimination of all nuclear weapons. “We call upon the nuclear-weapon states to immediately cease their plans to further invest in modernizing and extending the life span of their nuclear weapons and related facilities,” Zarif said.
Zarif declared that the notion of nuclear deterrence is “irrational,” meaning in his mind that we might as well all disarm and just trust that Iran will go along since the deterrent effect of mutually assured destruction no longer applies in today’s world anyway. Considering the Iranian mullahs’ belief in end of times theology in which mayhem and destruction play a key part, he is probably right at least as far as Iran is concerned. For example, Ayatollah Ali Akbar Hashemi-Rafsanjani, one of Iran’s most influential ruling clerics, showed little concern for the consequences of a nuclear attack when he said in 2012: "If a day comes when the world of Islam is duly equipped with the arms Israel has in possession, the strategy of colonialism would face a stalemate because application of an atomic bomb would not leave anything in Israel but the same thing would just produce damages in the Muslim world."
Zarif also made Israel the punching bag in his NPT speech. “Israel is the single most violator of this international regime (NPT) which is the requirement of the international community,” Iran’s foreign minister claimed.
Israel is not a NPT party. Neither are India and Pakistan. North Korea withdrew from the treaty and became a nuclear armed state, threatening its neighbors and the U.S. with nuclear attack. Yet Zarif reserved his sharp critique solely for Israel, demanding that Israel alone “renounce possession of nuclear weapons.” He insisted that Israel put all of its nuclear facilities under IAEA oversight, something which Iran itself is refusing to do.
Israel has not threatened to destroy Iran, or any other country for that matter. Iran’s leaders have repeatedly called for Israel’s annihilation. The true measure of whether a country possessing nuclear weapons poses an imminent threat to international peace and security is its behavior towards other countries. Iran, not Israel, is the aggressor. To the extent Israel possesses nuclear weapons, Arab countries in the region such as Saudi Arabia have not deemed it necessary to obtain their own nuclear weapons. They don’t feel threatened by Israel. However, Iran is another story. The prospect of Iran as a nuclear armed state is apparently sufficient to cause these same states to seriously consider for the first time pursuing nuclear weapons of their own.
Zarif did not stop with simply casting blame on Israel for doing what it believes it needs to do to defend its citizens against the existential threats of annihilation issued regularly by Iran’s leaders. While insisting that there should be no restrictions on the export of nuclear materials, technology or equipment for peaceful use of nuclear energy, Zarif made one exception. He called in his speech for prohibiting the transfer of all nuclear technology to Israel.
No matter how noble the goals of the NPT may be, nuclear proliferation is inevitable as long as countries like Iran and North Korea are able to produce nuclear bombs and missile systems to deliver them. In their case, President Reagan’s adage of “trust but verify” would have to be changed to something like “verify fully and remain vigilant.” The Obama administration’s willingness to make concession after concession to Iran in order to secure some sort of deal is more aptly described as “trust and verify only what Iran is willing to show.”
