On Saturday, President Donald Trump brought the United States into Israel’s war against Iran. American planes and submarines struck three sites in Iran, including two nuclear enrichment facilities—at Natanz and Fordow—and a complex near Isfahan that was believed to contain stores of uranium. The Israeli government had been pushing for Trump to strike, in part because the Fordow site was believed to be reachable only with American aircraft and weaponry. Prior to Israel’s attack on Iran, which began a little more than a week ago, Trump had repeatedly stated that he wanted to make a nuclear deal with Iran, despite, in his first term, having pulled the U.S. out of Barack Obama’s nuclear deal with the country.
On Saturday night, in a televised address, Trump claimed that the three sites were “completely and totally obliterated,” and said that Iran must now “make peace,” warning of more attacks if they did not. The actual extent of the damage is not yet known, nor is it clear if and how Iran will retaliate. (Trump had announced on Thursday that the decision on whether to strike would be made “within two weeks” and that there remained a possibility of negotiation.)
Late on Saturday, I spoke by phone with James M. Acton, the chair and co-director of the Nuclear Policy Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed why even a successful strike might do less damage to the Iranian nuclear program than the Trump Administration hopes it will, whether the action could lead to a larger conflict with Iran, and why Trump’s decision to pull out of Obama’s nuclear deal wrecked the best chance to curtail Iran’s nuclear program.
What are your first impressions of what happened tonight?
I’m kind of appalled, to be honest, as an American citizen—appalled that the President would start military action without congressional authorization. That’s my immediate reaction. But, as a nuclear-policy analyst, I’m very worried that this is the beginning of a prolonged conflict, not the end of one.
Why is that?
In a lot of the coverage I have been seeing, and in a lot of the advocacy for what President Trump ended up doing tonight, there has been the impression that this would be a one-and-done thing—the President would authorize a strike, Fordow would be destroyed, the Iranian nuclear program would be ended, and it would be a very quick, completely decisive military intervention. There’s two reasons why I think that’s wrong. The first one is immediate Iranian retaliation. Iran has many short-range ballistic missiles that can reach American bases and American assets in the region. Israel has not particularly targeted that infrastructure. It’s been primarily focussed on Iran’s longer-range missiles that can reach Israel. So I’m expecting to see some pretty dramatic attempted retaliation by Iran, and I think that puts enormous pressure on the President to respond again. That is the first pathway to immediate escalation in the short term.
In the slightly longer term, I believe it’s very likely that Iran’s going to reconstitute its nuclear program. I think Iran is likely to withdraw from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (N.P.T.) and thus kick out inspectors. The N.P.T. prohibits non-nuclear-weapon states, such as Iran, from acquiring nuclear weapons, and requires them to accept International Atomic Energy Agency (I.A.E.A.) safeguards, such as inspections, to verify that commitment. That puts us in the position where an American President or Israel might start striking Iran again and again.
I don’t want to speculate about exactly how successful these strikes were, but, if the strikes did what Trump has claimed, how much of a blow would that be to the Iranian nuclear program?
My answer may be a slightly unsatisfactory one, but it depends on how much else is destroyed. There are two key things that worry me. The issue is not just destroying fixed sites. Iran also had a bunch of highly enriched uranium that was once believed to be stored in tunnels underneath Isfahan. And the Iranians have claimed that they’ve removed that material. And then, secondly, there’s a whole bunch of components for building centrifuges that were being monitored when the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (J.C.P.O.A.) was enforced and are now no longer being monitored.
The J.C.P.O.A. is the 2015 nuclear deal, which was negotiated by the Obama Administration, and which exchanged a lessening of sanctions on Iran for nuclear inspections and limits on enrichment, and which Trump pulled out of in 2018.
Exactly. If the highly enriched uranium and the centrifuge components are small, that means that they’re portable. They can be moved around the country; they can be hidden. So, if what the U.S. has done is destroy the big sites that we know about, the enrichment facilities, but hasn’t destroyed the highly enriched uranium and the centrifuge components, I think Iran can probably reconstitute relatively quickly, perhaps within one or two years. It’s very hard to put an exact time on this. If the operations have managed to destroy some of the highly enriched uranium, or all of the highly enriched uranium, and the centrifuge components, then the reconstitution timeline is likely to be longer. What I would point out is that under any scenario the reconstitution timeline is going to be much shorter than the ten to fifteen years of the J.C.P.O.A. That’s how long the deal was supposed to last for. It is also worth pointing out that people argue that the J.C.P.O.A. was a bad deal because it only lasted that long. Even that was a bit misleading.
Why?
Because some parts of the J.C.P.O.A. lasted twenty years, some lasted twenty-five years, some actually were indefinite. It was actually quite a complicated arrangement, the way the J.C.P.O.A. phased out over time. Limits on enrichment and uranium-stockpile sizes lasted ten or fifteen years. The I.A.E.A.’s right to monitor centrifuge components lasted twenty years. The prohibition against weaponization activities had no time limits. But, even under the ten to fifteen years that was often quoted, we’re now likely dealing with a reconstitution timeline under any scenario that’s substantially shorter than that.
A central point you have made, which I have seen you make in the past, is that the alternative to this strike and the Israeli action was not nothing but was in fact the deal that Trump exited in 2018. Was that deal succeeding?
I think the J.C.P.O.A. was working very well. The U.S. intelligence community assessed that Iran was complying with the deal. Iran’s program was heavily limited, and it was heavily inspected. To my mind, it was working very well when Trump pulled out. And I do think there was a slim but real opportunity for diplomacy over the past few days. Obviously, there was no possibility of reconstituting the J.C.P.O.A. But you had this interesting situation where Israel had started an attack; it couldn’t destroy everything in Iran, including but not limited to Fordow, and the American threats gave Trump some leverage. And Trump at times appeared interested in trying to use that leverage to negotiate. I do feel there was some kind of window for diplomacy there. I’m just very sad that that window was never taken, and there wasn’t a good-faith attempt to try and take advantage of it.
The lack of good faith was from Trump, or from the Iranians, too?
We don’t know. But what I would point out is that a serious negotiation can’t be done in forty-eight hours or however long it was since Trump announced that he was going to give the opportunity for diplomacy. He said this week that he would make a decision within two weeks. So my feeling is that there was never any real attempt on the part of the U.S. to follow up on that and actually try to negotiate some kind of diplomatic settlement here.
Do you think any negotiated deal would have been similar to the J.C.P.O.A.? Or do you think that the Trump Administration wanted to negotiate a different deal, given that Trump claimed the Obama deal was such a disaster?
It is a tough question to answer, although we had some leaks about negotiations earlier this year. Some of the ideas that were coming out about that really were starting to sound a bit like some of the ideas in the J.C.P.O.A. If I had been advising the Administration over what to do, given the imminence of escalation, given the time urgency once Israel had started to attack, I would have urged them to go for something incredibly simple, something that could be negotiated very quickly but that would give you a high degree of short-term assurance—something like a cap on enrichment levels, which would have been something that could easily be verified. It would be a very clear signal that the Iranians wanted to de-escalate. It really would reduce their proliferation potential, and then you would try and build upon that in time. That’s the kind of diplomatic approach that over the last few days I think would have been feasible. But the J.C.P.O.A. was more than a hundred pages long. You could never negotiate even a modified version of that in two weeks. But you could have done something simple.
One point that opponents of the Obama deal have made is that Iran could have been using hidden sites to enrich uranium beyond what was allowed. But you have argued that that isn’t actually a case for military action. Why?
One of the big challenges with all I.A.E.A. inspections everywhere is, Does the I.A.E.A. know where everything is? And there was always some risk with the J.C.P.O.A. that Iran would have a secret facility or more than one secret facility in which it might be violating the deal. The existence of a secret facility in and of itself would be a violation of its I.A.E.A. obligations, and the J.C.P.O.A. contained a whole bunch of provisions designed to make it easier for inspectors to try to locate a clandestine facility.
One of the big criticisms of the J.C.P.O.A. was that these provisions were inadequate. But my argument is that there’s actually a bigger problem with military action, because if Iran has secret facilities that we don’t know about, then we can’t try to bomb and destroy them. And the effect of bombing and destroying will probably harden Iran’s resolve to make the political decision to build a nuclear weapon, potentially using those clandestine facilities that we don’t know about. Moreover, if Iran kicks out inspectors, as I think is pretty likely now, then one of the key ways we had to try to find clandestine facilities has evaporated. So, if you’re worried about clandestine facilities, my view is that bombing actually has made the problem worse than it would have been under a diplomatic arrangement.
You talked about the “political decision” to make a nuclear weapon. Iran has said that its nuclear program is peaceful. Both the United States and Israel under different governments have seemed very skeptical of that. Are you implying, when you talk about a political decision being made in the future, that that decision hasn’t been made?
I would distinguish between two things here. The first is Iran wanting the ability to build a nuclear weapon on short notice, and the second is Iran having made the political decision to actually go ahead and build the bomb.
So you are saying that you think they want the first one? It’s not simply a peaceful nuclear program, but that doesn’t mean that they were on the verge of taking the final step?
I think they’ve always wanted the capability to build a bomb on short notice. They’ve dialed up and down that program over the years. To build a nuclear bomb, you really need to do two things. Firstly, you need sufficient fissile material, meaning highly enriched uranium or plutonium. And, secondly, you need to know how to turn that material into an actual, usable, deliverable nuclear device. That is called weaponization. And they stopped their weaponization activities, according to U.S. intelligence, in 2003. That’s something the U.S. has said publicly and repeatedly. Tulsi Gabbard said that in testimony back in March. But I do believe that one of the reasons why they were continuing with enrichment was to maintain this capability to build a nuclear weapon on short notice. In that sense, even though they stopped weaponization activities in 2003, I don’t think the Iranian program has ever been purely peaceful.
Now, one of the things that Netanyahu came out and implied in justifying the Israeli attack just over a week ago now was that Iran had actually started to build a nuclear weapon. But we have had a lot of intelligence leaks from the U.S. that disagree with that conclusion. And part of my concern now is that if the U.S. was right, if Iran hadn’t actually made the political decision to build a bomb, these attacks are going to lead it to make that decision.
Earlier this year, the I.A.E.A. found that Iran had failed to comply with its non-proliferation obligations. What was that I.A.E.A. decision about and what did it suggest to you?
The I.A.E.A. had found evidence of Iranian nuclear activities. It had found traces of uranium at three different sites that had never been declared to the I.A.E.A. And under the rules—under the I.A.E.A.’s agreements with states—states are allowed to do more or less anything short of actually assembling a nuclear weapon, but they have to declare it to the I.A.E.A., and they have to allow it to be inspected. Iran never really explained what had gone on at those sites. It was obfuscating the activities of inspectors. It was probably lying to them. You know, as I’ve tried to make clear throughout this interview, I don’t think the Iranian program was peaceful. The question for me was: Is military action the best way of actually stopping it from getting the bomb?
When did these violations happen?
The undeclared activities all predated the J.C.P.O.A. In fact, they appear to have ended by around 2003, when Iran is believed to have stopped its weaponization program. And material and equipment was stored at a site that Iran tried to sanitize in 2018, after Trump pulled out of the deal. But the I.A.E.A. still detected nuclear material. So the key activities both predate and postdate the J.C.P.O.A., although Iran was technically in non-compliance the entire time for failing to declare the materials.
There has been a lot of speculation that what the Israelis are hoping for in the medium term or just short term is regime change. That makes a certain amount of intuitive sense, given your answers today, because what you seem to be saying is that you don’t think the Israeli strikes or the American strikes are an even medium-term solutions to the Iranian nuclear program.
I think that’s right. One of the things that surprised me about the Israeli strikes was the extent to which they were going after regime-related targets in a way that suggested their goals were broader than merely destruction of the nuclear program. And Netanyahu has openly said that he believes the death of the Supreme Leader would end the war more rapidly. So I think the Israelis, or at least Netanyahu, genuinely seem to hope that the strikes will precipitate regime change. The question that I would have is: Why do we necessarily think that a new regime would renounce the nuclear program and would give up on a nuclear weapon? One possibility is the current regime gets replaced by something that’s even harder-line, perhaps some kind of military junta of some description. That kind of regime seems pretty unlikely to give up the nuclear program. But even a more pro-Western democratic regime, which I think is quite unlikely to emerge, would not necessarily give up the program just because of how wrapped up it is in Iranian self-image these days. So it’s just not clear to me that even regime change would actually lead to what the Israelis hope it would do on the nuclear front. ♦
James Acton holds the Jessica T. Mathews Chair and is co-director of the Nuclear Policy Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. A physicist by training, Acton is currently writing a book on the nuclear escalation risks of advanced nonnuclear weapons and how to mitigate them. His work on this subject includes the International Security article “Escalation through Entanglement” and the Carnegie report, Is It a Nuke?.
An expert on hypersonic weapons and the author of the Carnegie report, Silver Bullet?, Acton has testified on this subject to the U.S. House of Representatives Armed Services Committee and the congressionally chartered U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission. He has also testified to the U.S. House of Representatives Appropriations Committee on nuclear modernization.
Acton’s publications span the field of nuclear policy. They include the Carnegie report, Reimagining Nuclear Arms Control (with TD MacDonald and Pranay Vaddi), and two Adelphi books, Abolishing Nuclear Weapons (with George Perkovich) and Deterrence During Disarmament. With Mark Hibbs, he co-wrote Why Fukushima Was Preventable, a groundbreaking study into the root causes of the accident.
Acton is a member of the International Advisory Council for the Luxembourg Forum on Preventing Nuclear Catastrophe. He has published in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, Dædalus, Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, Science & Global Security, and Survival. He has appeared on CNN’s State of the Union, NBC Nightly News, CBS Evening News, and PBS NewsHour.
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