The Biden administration has reportedly given up on returning Iran to the core constraint of the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action.
Whereas the Obama administration believed that its nuclear deal would preserve a 12-month breakout period, Biden’s team no longer believes it is possible to put Iran’s uranium enrichment back in such a box. The U.S. intelligence community now appears to believe that Iran could produce enough weapons-grade uranium for a bomb in a matter of weeks.
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The figures are scary, and they inevitably unleash a partisan blame game. They shouldn’t.
The problem, after all, is not Washington but Tehran. Certainly, every administration likes to blame its predecessor for failure to stop Iran’s nuclear ambitions. But the reality is that Iran’s nuclear program has grown with every administration. Ironically, Iran’s greatest nuclear advancements occur during the administrations of so-called moderates or pragmatists — Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani (1989-1997), Mohammad Khatami (1997-2005), and Hassan Rouhani (2013-2021) — largely because Western hope for increased engagement leads diplomats prematurely to erode sanctions.
While the Biden administration often excuses Iran’s rush to enrich as the fault of President Donald Trump’s withdrawal from the nuclear agreement, it forgets that Iran still has no legal right to push ahead as it does today. JCPOA or no JCPOA, the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty governs Iran’s program. In reality, however, Tehran cares little for such commitments, hence the International Atomic Energy Agency’s 2005 reference of Iran’s nuclear file to the United Nations Security Council.
A broader problem with the current focus on breakout time as a metric of whether or not Tehran could weaponize its nuclear program is the assumption that Iran strives for perfection. The intelligence community may be correct to estimate that 20 kilograms or so of 90% enriched uranium would enable Iran to build a Hiroshima-equivalent bomb (albeit a significantly miniaturized version), but they are wrong to assume that is the threshold that would make any Iranian nuclear program dangerous. If the most ideological elements of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps who control the nuclear program want to wreak havoc, they need not aim for a fission reaction. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps has advanced its ballistic missile program steadily alongside Iran’s nuclear program, expanding both range and precision. Add some uranium or other nuclear material into an otherwise conventional warhead, and the result would be a nuclear contamination spread far by the initial explosion.
The same might hold true with Iran’s drone program. Both Iran and its proxies in Yemen and Iraq have used drones to strike deep into Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates to target critical infrastructure. Delivering a dirty bomb by drone is well within Iran’s capabilities today but would knock out refineries or airports for months, if not years.
There is a tendency in Washington to hold our adversaries to a high standard and then seek comfort in failed tests and the fact that they did not achieve specific technical capabilities. Certainly, that was the case with the North Koreans up until they succeeded in testing a nuclear weapon. But rogue regimes are creative. They do not abide by the rules of diplomacy, and they likewise do not abide by the rules of conventional warfare.
Michael Rubin (@mrubin1971) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential. He is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.
