Iran's Nuclear Program

http://www.forbes.com/forbes/2006/0109/023_print.html

Fact and Comment
Steve Forbes, 01.09.06, 12:00 AM ET

Mushrooming Crisis
Iran's soon-to-be successful push for atomic weapons, not the Iraq war, will be the global hot potato of 2006. All diplomatic efforts to dissuade Tehran from going nuclear have predictably failed. Russia is not going to pull this radioactive chestnut out of the fire, either, even though members of the Bush Administration still pretend it will.

The prospect of Iran's having a nuclear capability is especially frightening because its new president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, is lethally delusional. He is obsessed with the Mahdi (who is to return just before Judgment Day) and believes he must prepare the way for his reappearance. Ahmadinejad has repeatedly declared that the Holocaust never took place and that Europe and the U.S. should provide some of their own land for a Jewish state. Israel itself should be wiped off the map.

Last month Iran cut a deal with Russia to buy an advanced weapons system that can destroy incoming missiles and laser-guided bombs. Russia also helped Iran launch a satellite that could give early warning of an air attack against Iranian nuclear facilities.

For Iran's black-robed fascists to develop nuclear weapons would be an immense setback in the war against Islamic fanaticism. It would embolden terrorists. Tehran would see itself in a position to encourage the overthrow of the Saudi monarchy--or, at the least, bend it to its will. Is military action the only alternative? Yes, unless somehow internal Iranian pressures (the mullahs are despised by most Iranians), as well as international pressures, force either a fundamental change in this fascist theocracy or its actual overthrow. Iraq's impressive progress since mid-2004 in building an economy in which new businesses are proliferating, property prices are rapidly rising, new schools and hospitals are opening, and a new democratic political order is under way can only undermine the mullahs, who preside over a sick economy kept alive solely by the oil windfall. But time is running short.

Could the Bush Administration summon the internal fortitude to undertake the necessary air strikes and possible ground action to set back Iran's nuclear ambitions for five to ten years? Alternatively, could one imagine the White House giving Israel the green light to launch air strikes?

Alas, the White House has done next to nothing to prepare and persuade the U.S. public of the possible need for stern measures here. Thankfully President Ahmadinejad's consistent public statements on the "myth" of the Holocaust will make clear to not only us but also the European masses and elites that this regime poses an increasingly mortal threat to our safety, that European-style diplomacy (a mechanism for doing nothing) is no longer viable.

http://www.forbes.com/forbes/2006/0109/029_print.html

Nuclear Attack--the Worst Threat
Ernesto Zedillo, 01.09.06, 12:00 AM ET

Even if you agree with what's being done in the war on terror, you still could be upset about what's not happening: doing the utmost to prevent a terrorist nuclear attack. We all should have a pretty clear idea of what would follow a nuclear weapon's detonation in any of the world's major cities. Depending on the potency of the device the loss of life could be in the hundreds of thousands (if not millions), the destruction of property in the trillions of dollars, the escalation in conflicts and violence uncontrollable, the erosion of authority and government unstoppable and the disruption of global trade and finance unprecedented. In short, we could practically count on the beginning of another dark age.

Who would like to cause such devastation? Incredibly fanatical terrorist organizations obsessed with inflicting massive pain and damage on Western targets. Is the probability of nuclear terror high? We simply don't know. There is enormous uncertainty over whether these organizations have the means to obtain the necessary nuclear materials for such a catastrophe. However, there are some 30,000 nuclear weapons in the arsenals of the nuclear states and hundreds of tons of fissile material (either enriched uranium or plutonium, the ingredients needed for such bombs) dispersed throughout more than 40 countries around the world. And according to the experts, security for many nuclear stockpiles is horrifyingly loose. These weapons and materials are vulnerable; it's not too much of a stretch to imagine a terrorist group acquiring them through theft or purchase.

Security Gaps Everywhere

Not even the Western nuclear countries, including the U.S., are exempt from security concerns. As for other latitudes, consider Pakistan's security flaws, best represented by the illicit trafficking in nuclear knowhow and equipment by the father of that country's atomic program, the infamous Abdul Qadeer Khan. Fears about North Korea's and Iran's nuclear programs are now frequently reported in the press. But the bulk of the most vulnerable nuclear material is in Russia and some of the other countries that constituted the Soviet Union. Their nuclear security systems, put in place when their societies and institutions were utterly closed, became obsolete after the collapse of the old regime. For this reason the U.S. in the early 1990s embarked on a program of financial and technical support to aid Russia and other former Soviet republics in accounting for and securing their nuclear weapons and materials. But much remains to be done. At the present pace it will take more than a decade before all of Russia's huge nuclear stockpiles are adequately secured.

Nuclear terrorism is not a far-fetched notion but a very real possibility, yet we are not confronting this crisis with the urgency it warrants. This is a big mistake. There will be no valid excuses if a nuclear atrocity occurs. It is the responsibility of all countries to address this risk. However, by virtue of its being the most powerful nation on earth--as well as the terrorists' most desirable target--the U.S. must play a bigger role than any other nation. Frankly, what the U.S. is doing now is not the best prevention American money (and diplomacy) can buy.

Preventable Tragedy

For its own and everyone else's sake the U.S. must change its priorities in the war on terror. It must clarify its objectives and devote much more of its resources to preventing nuclear attacks. It must provide decisive leadership so that others will follow. There is no scarcity of good proposals on how the U.S. in partnership with the other nuclear states and the international community could effectively tackle the risk of nuclear terrorism. One sound example is provided by the Nuclear Threat Initiative (www.nti.org), an organization founded in 2001 by Ted Turner and former Senator Sam Nunn. The NTI calls for every nuclear weapon and every kilogram of nuclear material worldwide to be secured and accounted for as soon as possible. For this to happen the U.S. would have to build an effective global nuclear security partnership, including an accelerated alliance-based approach with Russia, as well as develop a stringent global nuclear security standard and provide assistance to any state willing to meet this standard but lacking the means to do so. It would have to lead the effort to combat nuclear smuggling, and it would have to agree to and implement a program to blend-down highly enriched uranium, rendering it useless for bombmaking.

A plan like the NTI's should be only the first major step in dissipating the risk of a nuclear holocaust. Practically from the first atomic explosion, wise statesmen and thinkers have asserted that the abolition of the nuclear bomb is mankind's only way to ensure the prevention of the ultimate calamity. Last month when Mohamed ElBaradei, director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, received the 2005 Nobel Peace Prize, he affirmed that position: "I have no doubt that, if we hope to escape self-destruction, then nuclear weapons should have no place in our collective conscience, and no role in our security. … Imagine if the only nuclear weapons remaining were the relics in our museums."