How Much Evidence Is Enough?

Two years ago the American intelligence community released a National Intelligence Estimate. In a nearly unprecedented move the NIE was made public with only (relatively) light redactions. The conclusions of the community were optimistic, but plausible.

The two most important facets were that the Iranians had ceased active research and development on atomic weapons in 2003 and, with "moderate confidence" that these efforts had not restarted by mid- to late-2007.

The London Times has called the second conclusion in the controversial NIE into serious question. If the document obtained by the Times is both genuine and accurately dated, the Iranians were beavering away on developing the neutron initiator for an implosion bomb in 2007. The neutron initiator is the very guts of an implosion bomb--or the "pit" to use the terminology employed by the Manhattan Project lads.

The Iranian document admits that the country lacked the in-country capacity necessary to fabricate and effectively test the initiator, but laid out the steps necessary to do so over a four year period. The production of a prototype and its testing are both very complex. A trenchant analysis of the document by the Institute for Science and International Security makes that clear.

However, the Pakistanis mastered the technology and executed a "cold test" of its initiator some twenty-one years ago. Indeed, a schematic of the initiator appears on the dust jacket of A.Q. Khan's book. (Similar schematics have appeared in numerous fora over the past half century or more.)

There is a vast gulf between the theory of initiators and the practice of detonating implosion weapons. The timing of detonation as well as the geometry and chemistry of the explosive lenses surrounding the uranium (or plutonium) is both critical and vital to the success of the project. Along with the compression of the hollow ball of highly enriched uranium, the timing of the neutron pulse from the (in Iran's case) uranium deuteride core must be timed with exquisite precision.

An absolute fundamental which must be acquired from testing is correct measurement of both the magnitude and duration of the neutron pulse from the UD3. Even gaining these data represents a challenge that Iran admitted it could not meet two years ago.

With evident justification the Iranian regime boasts of the country's growing capacity for self-sufficiency in weapons research, development, and production. While not a subject for boasting, the ability of the regime to evade and avoid the many sanctions barring the sale of dual use technology is equally if not even more impressive.

Some observers may take comfort in the apparent failure of the North Koreans to master the detonation technology as indicated by the fizzle yields of its "hot"tests to date, the same does not of necessity apply to Iran. The Iranian intellectual and industrial infrastructures, like those of Pakistan twenty years ago, are immeasurably superior to those available to the Hermit Kingdom of the North. So also are Iran's financial resources.

It deserves mention that while the problems of timing, explosive geometry and chemistry as well as the source of neutron initiation posed mighty problems to the Manhattan Project physicists and engineers, developments in electronic technology over the past few decades have solved the difficulties of timing at the nanosecond level. Similarly, improvements in the chemistry and physics of explosives have solved most if not quite all of the features which stumped the Manhattan Project folks for many, many months while causing the canyons around Los Alamos to echo with both the sounds of explosions and curses when yet another failure was recorded.

The give-peace-a-chance crowd will seek to deprecate the import of the Times article and the supporting documentation by questioning the veracity of the leaked piece of paper and assuming its lack of authenticity to be a very poor basis for policy planning. The Iranian government is already playing to this constituency by branding the report an aggressive move, a part of the "psychological war" being waged against Iran's defense of its "nuclear rights."

So far Israel's response to the new revelations regarding Iran's "peaceful" nuclear program has been restrained. Government figures have limited themselves to calling for "tougher new sanctions." Defense minister Barak opined that there was still time for diplomacy to work but refused to eschew the use of military force.

The Obama administration has not been notably more robust in its treatment of the new information. Secretary of State Clinton allowed as how "our outreach has produced very little in terms of any kind of positive response from the Iranians."

Duh!

More realistically the outstretched hand method of Obama diplomacy has resulted in nothing but kicks in the crotch in return. Tehran correctly sees the American president and his administration as too weak, too loving of peace at any price, to represent a credible threat to either the regime or its activities. The Iranian government has also properly assessed the global weakness of the US currently as well well as how that weakness links to the self-interest of both China and Russia.

In short, there is little, if any, apprehension in Tehran as to further sanctions. Nor is there any appeal in the pursuit of diplomacy beyond that provided by the desirability of buying even more time as the centrifuges spin and the researchers research.

In blunt and unpleasant fact, the US (and such as its allies who might care) has precisely two choices. The first alternative, which appears to be the default, is to accept a nuclear capable Iran and the concomitant realignment of what the Soviets termed "the correlation of forces" in the Mideast, Persian Gulf, and Northwest Asia. The second is to employ whatever level of force is necessary to destroy the Iranian nuclear complex as well as associated weapons systems, command and control sites, and the government itself.

The second option will be nasty, brutish, and far from short. It would bring in its train any number of very bad and quite long lasting consequences. It is an alternative which is only marginally less undesirable than the first--if that.

What gives the second option any attraction whatsoever is the eschatological leanings of so many in both the Iranian clerical elite and the government of Ahmadinejad. This end times orientation calls into serious question the calculus of rationality employed by the ultimate decision makers in Iran. It calls into doubt the efficacy of containment and mutually assured destruction which served the US so well during the long years of the Cold War.

Containment and deterrence through MAD worked for fifty years only because both the US and the Soviet Union shared the ultimate imperative of national and governmental survival. It is not at all certain that the top echelons of the Iranian regime see life in similar terms.

One cannot help but wonder whether or not Mr Obama regrets having left that nice cushy seat in the Senate. At least there he was not responsible for the end of Western Civilization as we have known it or, less dramatically, the decline and fall of the US as a Great Power.