By Patrick Disney

Israel has long maintained a policy of strategic ambiguity about its nuclear arsenal, neither confirming nor denying its existence.  The policy, called amimut in Hebrew, has been expedient given Israel’s regional situation and its relationship with great Western powers.  And because it is not a signatory to the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT), Israel’s development of a secret nuclear arsenal has technically not violated its international legal obligations.

According to a recent report by the Jerusalem Post, however, some officials within the Israeli defense establishment are worried that the four decade old policy might have created an unwelcome precedent for others to follow – namely Israel’s arch-rival, Iran.

“Iran very well could continue on its current course for a while, during which it continues to enrich uranium like it is today but without going to the breakout stage and publicly making a nuclear weapon,” the senior official said.

If that were to happen, the concern in Israel is that Iran would not immediately declare that it has developed a nuclear device – assuming that it did so without expelling international inspectors from Natanz – to avoid providing the world with the justification to either increase sanctions or to use military action to stop it.

 

Certainly Iran would want to avoid provoking the ire of the international community by suddenly announcing its hostile nuclear intent; to make such an announcement out of the blue would be uncharacteristic for Iran’s clerical leaders.  But the fears of Israeli security officials presented here go beyond the idea that Iran might develop a latent weapons capability and instead suggest that the Islamic Republic might actually make nuclear weapons without telling anyone.

This is a serious misreading of Iranian nuclear strategy.

Since the first days of the Islamic Republic’s existence, Iran’s clerical leaders have consistently denounced the use or development of nuclear weapons as contrary to Islamic principles. Iran’s current Supreme Leader and the ultimate authority on the nuclear program, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, issued an oral fatwa in 2003 forbidding the production and use of weapons of mass destruction (WMD).  Furthermore, Iran has been a party to the NPT since its ratification in 1970, and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) maintains a very active presence with inspectors and monitoring stations throughout the country.  Although Iran has yet to formally adopt the Additional Protocol, which would allow anytime, anywhere inspections and would increase confidence in the absence of a secret weapons program, few experts believe Iran intends to develop a nuclear device in secret.  By most accounts, Iran wants to push the envelope of its nuclear progress under the auspices of its legitimate right to peaceful nuclear energy, all the while approaching a capability to produce weapons if desired.  That is to say, Iran is believed to be pursuing a weapons option in secret, but most likely is not working on an actual device as of today.

Here is where the similarity to Israel’s amimut policy ends.  Right now, Iran benefits from a degree of ambiguity about just how close the country is to being able to develop nuclear bombs. But Iran possesses this benefit without actually possessing the weapons themselves. Iran’s nuclear development has occurred gradually, pushing the international community’s willingness to accommodate Iran ever so slightly.  The tactic, known as “salami slicing,” is why the world can look back on the past ten years and wonder how and when Iran got so close to a weapons capability without paying a much greater price.

Israel’s program went through no such evolution. In fact, the Israel of the 1960s could not have relied for its security purposes on a latent nuclear weapons capability the same way Iran is able to today.  Nuclear weapons were, for Israel at the time, the last line of defense against annihilation at the hands of regional adversaries, and the only guarantor that the Holocaust would never be repeated.  In order to derive a deterrent benefit from nuclear technology, though, Israel had to first possess the weapons in reality.  Only then did Tel Aviv judge that the costs of openly declaring its arsenal outweighed the downsides of maintaining strategic ambiguity.

Should Iran choose to go nuclear, there is little reason to believe Tehran would keep it a secret for long.  A secret arsenal gains little or no additional benefit beyond those that Iran already enjoys with its virtual weapons capability.  And it carries a major risk of discovery – not an unlikely prospect given the extreme interest of foreign intelligence agencies, IAEA inspectors, and opposition groups in uncovering Iran’s nuclear secrets.

If Iran wanted to launch a crash program for building up a nuclear arsenal – actually building the devices as quickly as possible – Tehran would be unlikely to do so in secret.  Instead, the most advantageous scenario for weaponization would involve Iran seizing on some provocation from Western powers and blaming Iran’s enemies for triggering the decision.  An Israeli airstrike on nuclear facilities, certainly, more assassinations of Iranian scientists, or another Stuxnet– any of these could be sufficient to justify crossing the nuclear threshold in the minds of Iran’s leaders. And past declarations or religious decrees could easily be overturned based on the new circumstances; the Persian principle of maslahat-e nizam, or “expediency of the system” was inserted into Iran’s constitution for precisely such a contingency.  Ayatollah Khomeini, the Islamic Republic’s founder, declared shortly before his death that the needs of the state must supersede even core principles of Islamic law.

Unfortunately, such a scenario, in which Tehran seizes on some provocation to justify a hardline stance on the nuclear program, would likely leave Iran totally unconstrained.  That could mean Iran might withdraw from the NPT, kick out nuclear inspectors, and rally many of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) countries to support its cause.  Such a full-throated challenge to the existing world order would be perfectly in line with Iran’s strategic aspirations.  It would also be likely to do irreparable harm to the global nonproliferation regime.

Israel is right to be concerned about an Iranian bomb.  But it must be careful not to allow its judgment about Iranian intentions to be clouded by Israel’s own fears and past experiences.

About the Author

Patrick Disney is a second-year international relations student at Yale, focusing on Iran and nuclear nonproliferation. He is a contributor to The Atlantic, and blogs at TalkingWarheads.com.