Joe Cirincione, the President of the nuclear non-proliferation-focused Ploughshares Fund, explains why Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney “further undermined his national security credentials, showing a fundamental misunderstanding of nuclear threats” with remarks he made during a private fundraising dinner in May. “Iran’s nuclear program has nothing [...]]]>
Joe Cirincione, the President of the nuclear non-proliferation-focused Ploughshares Fund, explains why Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney “further undermined his national security credentials, showing a fundamental misunderstanding of nuclear threats” with remarks he made during a private fundraising dinner in May. “Iran’s nuclear program has nothing to do with dirty bombs”, writes Cirincione, and a potential president should be well aware of that fact:
]]>Dirty bombs (which have never been used) are very different from nuclear bombs, which trigger a chain reaction in a small core of fissile material — highly-enriched uranium or plutonium — to produce a massive explosion. The explosion produces heat, blast, and radiation that all cause catastrophic damage.
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Iran’s production of enriched uranium has nothing to do with dirty bombs. The core problem is that Iran is enriching uranium it says is for reactor fuel but could be turned into fuel for nuclear weapons. The most important reason to contain Iran’s nuclear program is to prevent a dangerous, destabilizing nuclear arms race in the Middle East and an emboldened Iranian regime — not to prevent Iran from giving terrorists nuclear materials for a dirty bomb. And it is crucial that anyone involved in the discussion of Iran’s nuclear program — and certainly the Republican presidential nominee — understand this.
The hype about the latest IAEA report about Iran’s nuclear program was much more frightening than the actual content. Yesterday, Joseph Cirincione, the president of the Ploughshares Fund, an organization devoted to preventing the spread of nuclear weapons, informed a seemingly stunned Tony Birtley that most of what’s been revealed “is not new”.
Tony [...]]]>
The hype about the latest IAEA report about Iran’s nuclear program was much more frightening than the actual content. Yesterday, Joseph Cirincione, the president of the Ploughshares Fund, an organization devoted to preventing the spread of nuclear weapons, informed a seemingly stunned Tony Birtley that most of what’s been revealed “is not new”.
Tony Harris: What does it say that’s significant to you about the work that Iran is doing now?
Joseph Cirincione: What’s significant actually is that there isn’t that much currently going on, almost all this work is pre-2003. It’s all old data. It all came from that laptop you referred to, the laptop of death, that was disclosed in 2004. There’s suspicions of some work and there’s evidence of some work still going on, particularly computer modelling, but there doesn’t seem to be any evidence of a crash program to build a warhead. That’s what’s so significant. It’s very clear from this report that Iran has not, HAS NOT, made a decision to go to a nuclear weapon, that a nuclear weapon is not imminent or inevitable and thus there’s still time to use diplomacy to convince Iran not to go ahead and build a nuclear weapon.
The intelligence community’s views should be familiar. They have not changed much in three years: Iran’s leadership is internally divided, under severe pressure from U.S.-led international sanctions [...]]]>
The intelligence community’s views should be familiar. They have not changed much in three years: Iran’s leadership is internally divided, under severe pressure from U.S.-led international sanctions and – most importantly – undecided on whether to build a nuclear weapon. Expanding on a judgment first expressed in a Bush-era National Intelligence Estimate from 2007, [Director of National Intelligence James] Clapper recently reaffirmed that “Iran’s nuclear decision-making is guided by a cost-benefit approach, which offers the international community opportunities to influence Tehran.”
It is precisely this decision-making process that the U.S. and its allies are attempting to influence.
Despite the braying of neoconservatives and other hawks, Cirincione and Leonard think the Obama administration policies have been at least partially effective: the international community has embraced and elevated the level of pressure, and Iran’s nuclear progress has been slowed. “So we have time,” they write. “The question now is what to do with it.”
Cirincione and Leonard think the administration should “do no harm”, “turn up the engagement”, and “think creatively” in order to break the current impasse with Iran. Sound advice. Read the whole post here.
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