![](\"https:\/\/www.ncr-iran.org\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/2\/2013\/02\/natanz3.jpg\" "\\"natanz3\\"")
By Reuel Marc Gerecht and Mark Dubowitz*<\/p>\nBy Reuel Marc Gerecht and Mark Dubowitz*<\/p>\n
Source: The Washington Post
Iranian President Hassan Rouhani is lying when he says the Islamic Republic has never had any intention of building an atomic weapon. Defecting Iranian nuclear engineers told U.S. officials in the late 1980s that the mullahs\u2019 program, then hidden, was designed exclusively for such arms.<\/p>\n
Everything Western intelligence services have tracked since then matches those early revelations.
U.S. participation in the upcoming negotiations doesn\u2019t appear to be premised on an expectation of Iranian veracity.<\/p>\n
If it were, President Obama wouldn\u2019t send his secretary of state until Tehran had come clean about its past deceits. The exemplary behavior of South Africa\u2019s often-mendacious apartheid government when it decided to go non-nuclear \u2014 total transparency about the militarization of its atomic program \u2014 isn\u2019t expected from Iran.<\/p>\n
The clerical regime has already dropped the bar through its \u201cfacts on the ground\u201d intransigence: more than 19,000 centrifuges built and a heavy-water plant nearing completion. Washington doesn\u2019t want to go to war again in the Middle East, and the Iranians know it.<\/p>\n
The administration and Congress are gambling that sanctions will be enough to overcome the regime\u2019s chronic dishonesty. Economic pain will be so intense, the theory holds, that eventually Tehran will play by Western rules.<\/p>\n
In other words, supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the Revolutionary Guards and Rouhani \u2014 who had a not-insignificant role in developing Iran\u2019s nuclear program in the 1990s \u2014 would be willing to admit that \u201cevil incarnate\u201d (Khamenei\u2019s update to the \u201cGreat Satan\u201d), against which the Islamic Republic\u2019s very identity has been built, has defeated their nuclear aspirations.<\/p>\n
Every country has an economic breaking point. But achieving that moment in the Islamic Republic will be extraordinarily difficult because such compromise is tantamount to spiritual suicide.<\/p>\n
U.S. foreign policy elites play down or ignore God\u2019s role in foreign affairs since the divine has no part in the U.S. worldview. In Western media, Rouhani is a \u201cpragmatist,\u201d as was his mentor Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, the former major-domo of the political clergy; and as was Khamenei before he backed the election of populist firebrand Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as president in 2005. All of these men have been critical to Iran\u2019s nuclear-weapons program. All, even Ahmadinejad, have been politically pragmatic. This doesn\u2019t make them less religious, less anti-American or averse to viewing terrorism as both statecraft and soulcraft.<\/p>\n
Iranian leaders probably are entering these negotiations for one reason: to test Barack Obama\u2019s mettle. They want to see whether Tehran can have the bomb and sanctions relief. The strategy for doing so isn\u2019t complicated. The regime could suspend work at the Arak heavy-water facility, the regime\u2019s plutonium path to a bomb, and stop enriching uranium to 20 percent, the big step in processing it to weapons-grade.<\/p>\n
But without a verifiable end to centrifuge production, the regime could continue to manufacture centrifuges, shrinking the time required to convert unprocessed uranium to bomb-grade stock. With enough advanced centrifuges, a 20\u2009percent stockpile becomes operationally much less relevant given the increased speed of processing.
The only real compromise Khamenei would be making here is with the nuclear calendar. More time would be needed to develop a rapid, undetectable \u201cbreakout\u201d capacity, which nuclear expert David Albright has estimated will happen by mid-2014. If the regime could trade heavy-water processing and uranium enriched to 20 percent in return for weakening of the interbank transfer sanctions, regaining the right to trade in gold or loosened restrictions on using euros, then it could easily gain $20\u2009billion \u2014 a big sum for a regime that has only $20 billion in fully accessible hard currency. Tehran still has about $50\u2009billion of locked-up cash that can be used for barter trade in a handful of countries. Given Iran\u2019s currency reserves, even without a lessening of economic pressure, nuclear physics is still outpacing sanctions and diplomacy.<\/p>\n
Obama has been clear that he isn\u2019t going to war to stop low-grade enrichment, so Tehran needs to figure out whether the president has any \u201cred line\u201d on 3.5 percent enrichment. If Khamenei had to export most of Iran\u2019s stockpile enriched to that amount, a nuclear weapon would be significantly delayed \u2014 provided centrifuge production was curtailed and the number of machines spinning reduced.<\/p>\n
Khamenei can\u2019t allow the West to stop centrifuge manufacturing. He cannot allow Washington to know where all of the centrifuges are being built or how the regime has avoided sanctions on \u201cdual-use\u201d imports. Such knowledge could massively delay or even end the weapons program, either through a preemptive strike or better sanctions enforcement.<\/p>\n
Nor can Iran\u2019s supreme leader implement any additional protocol of the Non-Proliferation Treaty that would allow U.N. inspectors to track centrifuge plants, search military bases (where the regime probably hides its most sensitive nuclear-weapons research) or debrief all of Iran\u2019s nuclear scientists.<\/p>\n
The administration and Congress would be wise to hit Tehran with more sanctions immediately. The United States shouldn\u2019t be fooled by false divisions within the regime. Abandoning the long quest for atomic weapons would be an extraordinary humiliation for Iran\u2019s ruling class. That isn\u2019t going to happen unless Iran\u2019s supreme leader and his guards know with certainty that the Islamic order is finished if they don\u2019t abandon the bomb.
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*Reuel Marc Gerecht, a former Iranian-targets officer in the CIA\u2019s Clandestine Service is a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. Mark Dubowitz is the foundation\u2019s executive director and heads its project on Iran sanctions.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
By Reuel Marc Gerecht and Mark Dubowitz* Source: The Washington PostIranian President Hassan Rouhani is lying when he says the Islamic Republic has never had any intention of building an […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[17],"tags":[175],"class_list":{"0":"post-14918","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-nuclear","7":"tag-updated"},"yoast_head":"\n