There’s a big lie at the center of the Iran nuclear deal
In his news conference last week, President Obama repeated his main pitch for the new Iran nuclear deal, claiming “we built in a one-year breakout time” — that is, how long it would take Iran to produce enough highly enriched uranium for a nuclear weapon, if it broke the agreement and rushed to do so. But repeating a lie does not make it true.
The President's claim is based on three phony assumptions: 1) that an Iranian nuclear weapon would require about 60 pounds of highly enriched uranium; 2) that Iran would start with no more than 660 pounds of very low enriched uranium; and 3) that Iran could use only about 5,000 centrifuges for enrichment.
Three more realistic assumptions reveal that Iran’s breakout time under the deal would be only about three months, not much longer than it is today.
First, a widely cited study by the Natural Resources Defense Council reports that even a bomb-maker with “low technical capability” would need less than 30 pounds of highly enriched uranium to make a nuclear weapon with an explosive yield approaching that of the Hiroshima atomic bomb. (The study says a “high technical capability” bomb-maker could do it with just 9 pounds.) If Iran needs at most 30 pounds, not the 60 assumed by Obama, the breakout time is cut in half from 12 to 6 months.
Second, contrary to Obama’s repeated promises, the deal’s fine-print allows Iran to keep uranium enriched to nearly 20%, which incorporates nine-tenths of the enrichment needed for weapons-grade, thereby providing a massive head-start to the bomb.
“All remaining uranium oxide enriched to between 5% and 20% will be fabricated into fuel for the Tehran Research Reactor (TRR),” says the agreement. This means Iran gets to retain hundreds of pounds of near 20%-enriched uranium in solid form, which could be converted to gas in weeks for further enrichment to weapons-grade. Even if Iran diverted only one-sixth of this uranium stockpile, it could cut the breakout time by another third, from 6 to 4 months.
Third, in a real-world dash for the bomb, Iran would use not merely the 5,000 centrifuges it is allowed to operate under the agreement, but some of the 14,000 extra centrifuges it is permitted to keep ostensibly as backup.
Even Harvard University supporters of the deal concede that reconstituting backup centrifuges is “not a prohibitively lengthy task” and could be accomplished in as soon as “weeks.” During the first two months of a breakout, Iran could reinstall a thousand more efficient second-generation centrifuges, nearly doubling its enrichment capacity, thereby reducing the breakout time by another month, from 4 to 3 months.
But breakout time is only one example of how the new agreement delivers much less than had been promised. Rather than “anytime, anywhere” inspections, it provides for a 24-day request to access suspicious facilities, including military sites, during which time Iran could hide or destroy evidence of cheating.
The agreement also permits Iran, after 10 years, to develop much more efficient centrifuges to massively expand its enrichment capacity. Breakout time would shrink to mere days, so that Iran could produce enough highly enriched uranium for a bomb before we even knew it, let alone could take action to prevent it.
In return for marginally constraining its nuclear program, Iran would receive not marginal but total lifting of sanctions. This is dangerously asymmetric. The windfall just from unfreezing its assets is estimated at over $100 billion, which could fund Iran’s nuclear program, regional aggression and terrorism.
Proponents of the deal ask “What is the alternative?” The answer is to tell Iran that we would be willing to lift all sanctions — but only if it really freezes its nuclear program — and to threaten surgical air strikes if Iran expands its program in pursuit of the bomb.
Obama suggests that the threat of another war is too horrible to contemplate and that “we give nothing up by testing whether or not this problem can be solved peacefully” by making concessions to Iran in return for pledges of cooperation. A very similar argument led to ceding Germany a big chunk of Czechoslovakia, which enhanced the Nazis’ wealth and power, to obtain “peace for our time.” By refusing to stand strong and risk a small war in 1938, we got a much deadlier one soon after. Congress should keep that history in mind as it contemplates appeasing Iran.
Kuperman is associate professor and coordinator of the Nuclear Proliferation Prevention Project at the University of Texas at Austin, and editor of “Nuclear Terrorism and Global Security: The Challenge of Phasing out Highly Enriched Uranium.”
Obama’s promised 1-year breakout is a fiction