The US–Israeli military campaign against Iran is unlikely to extinguish the sparks of the regime’s nuclear program, one of the world’s top arms control experts says. This raises the prospect that diplomacy and deterrence will be needed to manage the Iranian nuclear threat in future.
Jeffrey Lewis, director of the East Asia Non-Proliferation Project at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies and founder of the respected Arms Control Wonk blog, told ASPI’s Stop the World podcast he’s sceptical that military force can resolve the proliferation challenge with countries such as Iran.
While Washington and Jerusalem have maintained that the risks of a nuclear-armed Iran are intolerable and cited the nuclear program as a core justification for Operation Epic Fury, Lewis said deterrence has historically been the default mechanism for managing nuclear adversaries such as the Soviet Union and North Korea.
‘One of the reasons that I was sceptical of this military action is, as undesirable as it would be for Iran to build nuclear weapons from a US and an allied security perspective, it is a manageable problem,’ he said.
We do still have the ability to work nuclear deterrents as a solution to that problem. And it’s something that we have had to do with North Korea. I wanted to avoid that outcome in North Korea as well. That government is not any more charming than the Iranian government.
‘And yet, this is … sort of the central lesson of the nuclear age,’ he added.
Lewis said confusion about US objectives reflected that regime change was inextricably tied to removing the nuclear threat in the minds of many advocates of the war.
When certain people say that they are concerned about preventing Iran … really from getting a bomb, their fundamental goal is that as long as there is an Islamic Republic, they will be worried about proliferation. So they don’t see these as being separate things.
Lewis said while above-ground sites had been destroyed, underground sites had not, including storage for a reported 440 kg of highly enriched uranium, and mysterious military facilities at sites such as Pickaxe Mountain near Natanz, which are buried deep underground where even the most powerful bombs cannot reach.
‘You have this kind of open question of, if you destroy all the things you know about, what do you believe might be left over that you don’t know about?’ he said.
‘That’s one of those … questions that you can’t really answer unless you do what we did in Iraq and you occupy the country and then you have the Iraq Survey Group run all over the country for months.’
Early Friday Australian time, after the podcast was recorded, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Iran was no longer able to enrich uranium, though he did not give further details or evidence.
Nuclear weapons technology, Lewis pointed out, is more than 80 years old—roughly the same vintage as the microwave oven. Just as building large rockets was once the exclusive province of superpowers and is now ‘a charming hobby of a billionaire,’ the knowledge required to build a nuclear weapon is increasingly difficult to suppress.
‘The reality of the nuclear age is that these capabilities can spread and that vulnerability is a thing that we have to learn to manage,’ Lewis said, which was why the combination of diplomatic and military-deterrent solutions was the most realistic answer.
That said, he acknowledged that theories of deterrence developed during the Cold War might have limitations if the number and strategic temperament of nuclear powers expanded too widely.
‘We do want to limit complexity because we want these problems to be small enough that we can wrap our very human sized brains around them.’