The Best Way to Avoid a Nuclear-Armed Iran

By Steve Sheffey

A nuclear-armed Iran would be disastrous for the United States and for Israel. It would wreak havoc in the region. The debate about how best to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons is about which policy is most likely to succeed, not whether the threat is serious. A return to the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) is the best alternative, and we may know within a few weeks if Iran is willing to reenter the deal on terms acceptable to the United States and its allies.

Joe Cirincione and Geoff Wilson wrote that the Iran Deal was “one of the strongest non-proliferation agreements ever negotiated.” Before Iran received sanctions relief under the JCPOA, Iran removed two-thirds of its centrifuges, including the disconnection of every single nuclear enrichment centrifuge at the Fordow facility. Iran reduced its vast stockpile of up to five percent enriched uranium from over 12,000 kilograms, enough for numerous nuclear bombs, down to under 300 kilograms, far less than the amount needed for even one nuclear bomb — a reduction of 98 percent. Iran removed the core of the Arak reactor and filled it with cement and was forced to redesign that facility to ensure it could not be used to produce weapons-grade plutonium.

All of Iran’s pathways to nuclear weapons were blocked, and to ensure that remained the case, we had 24/7 access to all known sites, including the right to inspect any site within 24 days under the most intrusive inspections regime any country has ever agreed to. Many important restrictions imposed on Iran by the Iran Deal lasted beyond 15 years, including a ban on nuclear weapons, which was permanent. Iran’s breakout time was pushed back to about a year.

In return, we gave Iran access to its own money. It was not a payment from the U.S., and the amount of sanctions relief came to about $50 billion (the $1.7 billion additional payment we sometimes hear about was to settle unrelated litigation with Iran, and that payment saved U.S. taxpayers money).

The purpose of the Iran Deal was not to stop all of Iran’s deleterious activities, but to remove the potentially existential threat of a nuclear-armed Iran, thus making Iran’s other activities easier to counter. Nadiv Tamir explains that arguments against the deal based on its sunset provisions were false, and arguments based on the deal’s alleged failure to limit Iran’s long-range missile development and its regional subversion were unfounded. Jewish members of Congress supported the Iran deal by more than a 2–1 margin.

Even though the Iran Deal achieved its goal of taking the threat of a nuclear-armed Iran off the table, Trump walked away in 2018 while Iran was still in compliance. The former head of the Iran branch in Israel’s Military Intelligence’s Research and Analysis Division said in a lengthy interview that is worth your time, ‘’We can say a lot of bad things about Iran, but they kept their part of the agreement. Everything started going haywire when Trump left the agreement.”

Trump’s “maximum pressure” strategy failed, his efforts at the UN to continue the arms embargo against Iran failed, and his efforts at the UN to snap back sanctions against Iran failed. Iran is now only a few weeks from breakout because after remaining in compliance for about a year after Trump reneged on the deal, Iran resumed activities prohibited under the deal after Trump reimposed sanctions that were prohibited under the deal.

Neri Zilber wrote that “a growing chorus of former Israeli officials have decried Netanyahu’s (and Trump’s) strategy as nothing short of calamitous: jettisoning a nonproliferation agreement that, however flawed, was working, in favor of a coercive strategy against Iran that on every parameter has failed to achieve the results confidently predicted by those who cheered on Trump.”

Major General Isaac Ben Israel said that “Netanyahu’s efforts to persuade the Trump administration to quit the nuclear agreement have turned out to be the worst strategic mistake in Israel’s history.” Former Prime Minister Ehud Barak, the most decorated soldier in Israel’s history, said that Trump’s decision to recklessly pull out of the original Iran deal “was a delusional decision that allowed the Iranians to move forward quickly in the direction of becoming a nuclear threshold state.” Former IDF chief Gadi Eisenkot called Trump’s withdrawal a “strategic mistake.”

In January, the head of Israeli military intelligence said during a Security Cabinet meeting that Israel will be better off if the Iran nuclear talks lead to a deal rather than collapsing without one.

Sanctions alone cannot stop Iran’s progress toward nuclear weapons. On February 9, Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT) noted that to the extent there was any silver lining of Trump’s decision to withdraw from the JCPOA, “it’s that it allowed us for four years to test the theory of.. the critics, because President Trump implemented the strategy that the critics of the JCPOA wanted President Obama to employ. Donald Trump imposed greater sanctions.” The result, as Murphy documents, is that increased sanctions proved ineffective against Iran’s nuclear activities and its other nefarious activities. “The strategy pushed by the deal’s critics was a spectacular failure.”

Military action can delay Iran’s progress, but unless the United States is willing to invade and occupy Iran indefinitely (we aren’t), military action will reinforce for Iran the belief that it needs nuclear weapons to ensure its security. A return to a deal that worked before is the best alternative.

Unfortunately, even if we return to exactly the same deal, the benefits will not be the same because thanks to Trump’s withdrawal, Iran has gained knowledge and experience it could not have gained had both Iran and the U.S. remained in compliance with the deal. Consequently, instead of pushing back Iran’s breakout time from a few weeks to a year, the same deal will push it back from a few weeks to roughly six months. It’s less than the 12 months we had before Trump broke the deal, but the choice is not between six months and 12 months, but between six months with a deal and less than one month — approaching zero as time goes on — without a deal.

Arms control expert Robert Einhorn said on February 3 that “a six-month breakout period would be enough time to respond — militarily if necessary — to an overt Iranian nuclear breakout. The sweeping monitoring and inspection powers included in the 2015 deal, which in some cases extend for another two decades, will also help restrain Iran’s ability to make a covert dash for a nuclear weapon, long considered by U.S. officials to be a more likely scenario.”

“Breakout” does not mean Iran acquires nuclear weapons. Even if Iran acquires enough fissile material for one nuclear bomb (that’s what it means to “breakout”), it would take years for Iran to develop a usable nuclear weapon. Paul Pillar explains that “although it has been a convenient way to represent the size and enrichment levels of a stockpile of fissionable material, [breakout] does not represent the time before a country has a nuclear weapon. Building such a weapon would require many more technically demanding steps.” All of this is academic if we and Iran return to compliance with the JCPOA, which will verifiably deny Iran the capability to produce a significant quantity of bomb-grade nuclear material.

If Biden negotiates a return to the JCPOA, look for Israel’s government to express concerns. But don’t expect anything like Netanyahu’s unprecedented address to Congress. Israel’s politicians cannot appear to accept anything but the most drastic action against Iran for internal political reasons, but they know that a return to the deal is in Israel’s best interests–and many in Israel’s security and military establishment will more openly support a return to the deal. Unfortunately, some American groups and politicians will play Rip Van Winkle and trot out the same debunked arguments they used in 2015, as if they’ve been asleep since then, and they’ll play on our legitimate fears and concerns, as if any strategy could guarantee success.

We saw some of this on February 4, when the administration restored a sanctions waiver that was mischaracterized by opponents of the Iran Deal. State Department spokesperson Ned Price explained on February 7 that issuance of the waiver “in no way enriches Iran.” Rather, the waiver enables “third-party participation in nuclear non-proliferation and safety projects in Iran…in particular with respect to the increasing stockpiles of enriched uranium in Iran, the stockpiles that have grown following the last administration’s decision to abandon the JCPOA. Absent this waiver, the sort of detailed technical discussions with third parties regarding the disposition of stockpiles and other activities of non-proliferation value couldn’t take place.”

But those facts did not stop opponents of diplomacy from mischaracterizing the waiver as a concession.

The question is not whether a return to the deal will allow us to never have to think about Iran again or whether an actual deal is worse than some hypothetical deal that Biden could get if he had the negotiating skill of your right-wing uncle. The question is whether a return to the deal is better than any realistic alternative. It is. The more concerned you are about preventing nuclear proliferation, the more concerned you are about Israel’s safety and security, and the more concerned you are about regional stability–the more you should support the Biden administration’s efforts to return to the JCPOA and listen to reason, not those who have previously gotten it wrong about Iran.

Steve Sheffey has a weekly newsletter called the Chicagoland ProIsrael Update. You can sign-up here.

The views represented here are those of the author, and not necessarily those of JDCA.