Will the U.S. Bomb Iran Over a Nuclear Weapons Program That Doesn’t Exist?
Iran’s nuclear weapons program is like Schrödinger’s cat: It both does and doesn’t exist at the same time.
Last week, National Security Adviser Mike Waltz told ABC that “Iran cannot have a nuclear weapon. All options are on the table to ensure it does not have one. And that’s all aspects of Iran’s program. That’s the missiles, the weaponization, the enrichment.” But this week, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard told the Senate that “Iran is not building a nuclear weapon and Supreme Leader [Ali] Khamenei has not authorized the nuclear weapons program that he suspended in 2003.”
The seeming contradiction in the Trump administration’s line is actually a fine-toothed distinction. Iran is currently enriching uranium up to 60 percent, according to a leaked report by United Nations nuclear inspectors. It’s far above the 2 to 5 percent enrichment level used to fuel power plants, yet below the 90 percent necessary to build a bomb. As Gabbard said at the Tuesday hearing, “Iran’s enriched uranium stockpile…is unprecedented for a state without nuclear weapons.”
Still, buying a lot of flour isn’t the same thing as baking a cake. Iranian elites are openly debating whether they should build a bomb, with some arguing that Iranian nuclear policy should change if the country comes under more serious threat. Should Khamenei give a green light to weaponization, bringing the uranium from 60 percent to 90 percent enrichment would take a little under a week, and assembling a working bomb would take additional weeks to months.
Despite the high stakes of nuclear proliferation, the issue isn’t well understood by the public. Leave aside complex technical details like different levels of uranium enrichment. Even basic facts are garbled in the public understanding. U.S. policy since the Bush administration has been to go to war to stop Iran from building a nuclear weapon bomb, but a majority of Americans believe that Iran already has nuclear weapons, according to a poll from 2021.
The confusion has so far benefited hawks. Although President Donald Trump has said that the “only thing” he’s concerned about with Iran “is that they can’t have a nuclear weapon,” Waltz has been pushing a wide definition of “nuclear program,” as he alluded to in his ABC interview. Last month, Trump signed a National Security Presidential Memorandum defining all nuclear fuel processing and “nuclear-capable” missiles (read: almost all long-range missiles) as part of “Iran’s nuclear program.”
The same memo also includes a laundry list of complaints unrelated to nuclear weapons, including that Iran supports the Houthi movement in Yemen, launched (non-nuclear) missile attacks on Israel last year, and “bears responsibility for the horr
Article from Reason.com
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