Matt Yglesias

IAEA Staff Pushing for More Aggressive Report on Iran

One interesting aspect of the Iran nuclear debate has been the behind-the-scenes disagreement from various western intelligence agencies as to what exactly the Iranians are doing. Everyone agrees that their enrichment activities could be helpful in building a nuclear weapon, but the US intelligence community reached the judgment some time ago that Iran was not actively researching warhead construction. Israeli intelligence hotly disputes this, with the French and German intelligence agencies somewhat closer to the Israeli position than the American one. More recently, British intelligence came around to agreement with France and Germany. But Mohammed ElBarredei, head of the IAEA and the guy who tried to warn the world that the Bush administration was full of it on Iraqi nuclear issues, has been in the US camp. Today, however, comes word that the IAEA staff seems to think ElBarredei has this wrong and they’ve concluded that Iran has acquired “sufficient information to be able to design and produce a workable” nuclear weapon.

The Success of Disarmament

French air craft carrier Charles de Gaulle (wikimedia)

France acknowledges that nuclear weapons on the Charles de Gaulle are a thing of the past. Robert Farley observes:

Nevertheless, comparing the number of deployed nuclear weapons in the world today to the number in the 1980s shows a drastic reduction in nuclear arsenals, at least on the part of France, the United Kingdom, the United States, and Russia. The shift hasn’t been universal, as China has modestly increased its nuclear arsenal, and North Korea, India, and Pakistan have become acknowledged proliferants. The exact number of Israeli weapons remains unknown. Still, reducing the overall number of nuclear weapons was a dearly held goal of arms reductionists in and out of government in the 1970s and 1980s, and we’ve seen progress towards that goal under just about any conceivable metric.

And the odds are good for further reductions. Steep bilateral reductions between the United States and Russia appear to be on the table and should go forward. When that’s done, we should attempt to bring China into the picture and get them to agree to stop growing their arsenal and just let the United States and Russia progressively move to smaller and smaller arsenals. Of course substantial challenges remain with the so-called “rogue” states, but even here a diplomatic resolution of the situation with Iran still seems to be potentially on the table, and the DPRK isn’t going to be around forever. I think people tend toward postures of undue pessimism on global governance issues. The fact of the matter is that even though there are a lot of challenges, tremendous progress has been made over the years and the odds of further progress are quite good if people don’t simply give up.

Indonesia Ready to Sign Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty When We Are

Hasan Wirajuda (DOD photo)

Right now there are nine countries who would need to sign the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty for it to go into effect, Indonesia, the United States, China, Israel, India, Pakistan, Egypt, Iran, and North Korea. Yesterday, during an event at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Indonesian Foreign Minister Hasan Wirajuda said Indonesia is prepared to sign the CTBT if the United States is. Obviously, some of those other countries are going to be tough gets. Nevertheless, any forward motion to this goal is welcome, and I think this underscores the importance of the United States showing leadership on this topic.

For some info on the general topic of the CTBT, I would recommend this and this from the Arms Control Association, and this from the Nuclear Threat Initiative.

The larger issue, however, is the context of Barack Obama’s pledge to commit the United States to work toward the eventual global abolition of nuclear weapons. That’s an important goal, and I think it actually is an achievable one, but it’s clearly not a goal that’s achievable in the short term. So the idea has to be to combine clear articulation of the goal with solid commitment to incremental steps that the non-nuclear weapons states of the world can see as gestures of our good faith. Working toward serious bilateral arsenal reductions with Russia is one important piece of this puzzle, and the CTBT is probably the other most important piece. After all, if we seriously intend to be moving beyond nuclear weapons then clearly moving beyond nuclear weapons tests is going to be an important intermediary phase.