(Analyst's note: Absolutely must read - I've highlighted to make a long read easier for you. To better understand one of our enemies who is on a global, Islamic jihad, it is instructive to examine the history of nuclear arms control over the past 30 years. It is also critical to remember that when Iran gets the bomb, they have plans to do so, and will use it. The other critical point to keep in mind is that this enemy is driven by a religious ideology and does NOT think like we do. We can NOT safely apply our logic to what they will do. They will also murder their own people to accomplish their jihad. This article reenforces these thoughts by example: "The reappearance of the 12th Imam will usher in a war between Israel and the Shia", a decisive war which will decide "the fate of humanity." Ahmadinejad repeatedly declares, "We don't shy away from declaring that Islam is ready to rule the world. We must prepare ourselves to rule the world" along with "I will bring the death that the Shi'ite are experiencing in Iraq to the streets of America with the martyr brigades that are ready to act." [....] Ahmadinejad's chief strategist, Hassan Abbassi, who heads the Center for Security Doctrines Research of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (RGC) explains: "We have a strategy drawn up for the destruction of Anglo-Saxon civilization...we must make use of everything we have at hand to strike at this front by means of our suicide operations or by means of our missiles. There are 29 sensitive sites in the U.S. and in the West. We have already spied on these sites and we know how we are going to attack them")
If the United States and Russia reduce their nuclear weapons by 650 deployed warheads, out of stockpiles of some 5,000 warheads for the United States and some 14,000 for the Russians, does this qualify them for the winning ticket in the disarmament sweepstakes? Do countries that previously would not help in keeping Iran and North Korea from acquiring nuclear weapons now help us? In addition, would these same countries now actively help to secure nuclear material – both weapons grade and commercially available for nuclear reactors – that they would not do in the past? In short, would the "international community" think enough of the U.S. and Russian new START agreement to help fulfill the promises of the NPT or the Nuclear Non-Proliferation treaty and significantly move humankind toward: (1) a world without nuclear weapons; and (2) a world in which nuclear dangers, especially nuclear terrorism, were significantly reduced?
This is indeed the hope of the leaders of the two nuclear powers as they conclude a new arms control agreement. The two Presidents will sign it in Prague, the Czech Republic the first week of April 2010. Numerous analysts have concluded that while modest in scope, the new agreement establishes a new measure of "trust" between the two countries, and will allow them to establish their "arms control" credentials prior to a follow-up meeting dealing with securing nuclear materials and the upcoming review conference on the NPT. This in turn, it is hoped, will "unlock" a series of non-proliferation doors, through which we and other nations can walk toward a nuclear weapons free future.
It might indeed be instructive to examine the history of nuclear arms control over the past 30 years. Is there a relationship between U.S. and Russian agreements to cut nuclear weapons and the emergence of rogue state nuclear programs or the acquisition of nuclear weapons by states other than the five permanent members of the UN Security Council, the United States, England, France, Russia and China?
Nuclear weapons reductions first occurred with the agreement in the INF Treaty to eliminate an entire class of deployed medium range missiles in Europe and Asia by the then Soviet Union. These SS-20 missiles carried close to 2000 nuclear weapons deployed in the Warsaw Pact and in the far eastern Soviet Union as a means of intimidating NATO and the Pacific allies of the United States.
The Reagan administration, in the face of intense opposition from disarmament groups in the U.S. and Europe and a campaign against our deployment by the Soviet Union, deployed nuclear-armed Pershing and Ground Launched Cruise Missiles in Europe as a counter. Congress approved such funds by relatively small margins. The resulting INF Treaty – proposed initially by President Reagan early in his first term – took many years to negotiate. But the leverage garnered by the United States after the successful deployment of our missiles, with the extraordinary support from British Prime Minister Thatcher, German Chancellor Kohl, and the Vatican's Pope John Paul II, won the day.
This 1987 treaty not only eliminated thousands of deployed nuclear weapons but also showed that the Soviets could not bully the US and NATO. Gorbachev incorrectly believed he could push President Reagan around after their first meeting. Subsequent meetings left little doubt that the Soviet leader could did not match Reagan's mastery of nuclear diplomacy.
Nevertheless, during this period, particularly toward the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the former Soviet Union, North Korea, which had proposed joining the NPT treaty in 1985, was apparently diverting plutonium from its nuclear reactor. By 1993-4, against the judgment of its Director-General, the International Atomic Energy Administration had concluded there were discrepancies in the reported North Korean nuclear material. During this same time period in the early 1990s, the United States and Russia concluded two additional nuclear weapons treaties, START I and START II, the former completed and ratified by 1991 and the latter signed by Presidents Bush and Yeltsin and placed on incoming President Clinton's desk.
Under both these treaties, nuclear weapons were to fall from roughly 12,000 deployed weapons on bombers, submarines and land-based missiles to 3500 weapons, a significant reduction of some 75% from the height of the cold war, a not insignificant accomplishment. However, even with the end of the Cold War, nuclear proliferation occurred elsewhere. The Khan network in Pakistan, for example, continued its "Nukes 'R Us" activity, selling nuclear weapons technology to Iran and Libya and North Korea, while offering Saddam Hussein in Iraq a full up nuclear starter kit including warheads.
With the end of the 1991 Gulf War, lead UN Inspectors Ekeus and Butler both confirmed that Saddam's Iraq was within 6 months to a year of having a nuclear weapon at the time of Desert Storm, a fact completely missed by the US intelligence community. During the rest of the 1990s, despite the Clinton administration securing a deal with North Korea – the Agreed Framework that froze the further diversion of plutonium from the nuclear reactor at Yongbyon – nuclear proliferation advanced.
Both India and Pakistan exploded a series of nuclear weapons, again catching our intelligence community by surprise. The Taliban, created and financed by the Pakistani intelligence services and the Saudi government, took over Afghanistan. There, al Qaeda's leadership took root among dozens of other terror groups. Having fled from the Sudan, they sought alliances and sanctuaries from which to plan attacks on American interests, culminating initially in the 1998 attack on our embassies in Kenya and Tanzania.
Earlier in the decade, in 1991 Libya and Iran teamed up to blow up a Pan Am flight over Lockerbie Scotland. In the United States, the World Trade Center was attacked, (1993) the Murrah Building in Oklahoma City destroyed (1995) and TWA 800 blown up (1996). Nevertheless, the assumption by the U.S. government was that loose bands of terrorists, homegrown "militias" or foreign "jihadist radicals" had attacked us. In the case of the TWA flight, the conventional wisdom is that a center fuel tank exploded by accident.
In fact, Ramzi Yousef directed the World Trade Center attack in 1993 with assistance from Khalid Sheik Mohammed, with strong Iraqi connections that Laurie Mylroie admirably details in her "Study of Revenge". It is noteworthy that the 1993 World Trade Center attack occurred precisely on the anniversary of Saddam's retreat from Kuwait in Gulf War ‘91! In addition, the explosion of TWA 800 (I believe caused by a missile) occurred on the anniversary of National Liberation Day in Saddam’s Iraq.
The idea that state governments and their intelligence services would team together and use terrorism to attack the United States and its allies was a generally accepted tenet of national security policy at the end of the Cold War. However, despite numerous terrorist attacks against the United States and other countries throughout the decade of the 1990s, there was little interest in the United States or elsewhere in shutting down such state enterprises. State sponsorship of terrorism seemed to have been forgotten. Apparently, as long as fingers pointed at "unknown jihadis" or "militias in old military fatigues", officials charged with protecting America were off the hook. Where were the militias and the jihadis? Well, everywhere and nowhere. In a cave in Pakistan or Afghanistan, in the woods of Northern Michigan, (as one national weekly claimed). Who knew?
In fact, terrorism and state sponsorship began together. The dirty hands of the Soviet KGB were stained with the blood of the thousands of victims of the PLO, the FARC, the FMLN, the Red Brigades, Black September, the Viet Cong and the Khmer Minh. But for some reason, especially after the 1993 World Trade Center attacks, the U.S. government came to view terrorism as the result of loose bands of fanatics unhappy with American foreign policy – whether our liberation of Iraq or our support for Israel. It was back to the old refrain of "blame America first!"
Ironically, when Osama Bin laden actually issued a statement declaring war on the United States in 1998, four of his stated reasons for doing so were (1) the U.S. liberation of Kuwait; (2) the UN imposition of sanctions against Iraq; (3) the claimed deaths of millions of children in Iraq denied health care because of the sanctions; and (4) the presence of the American military no-fly zones over Iraq. This, of course, from the terrorist leader we were repeatedly told had no interest in Saddam but was in fact more than happy to see the Iraqi dictator hobbled.
By the end of the century, while the Cold War was over and the Soviet Union had collapsed, nuclear dangers were actually rising, despite the implementation of START I, the first treaty between the U.S. and Russia that reduced deployed strategic nuclear weapons. The Khan network was actively at work helping North Korea with an enrichment program, the Chinese were busy assisting both Pakistan and North Korea, Libya was getting into the nuclear business and Iran had decided to seek a nuclear weapons program as well.
With the dawn of the next century and the attacks of 9/11, much attention turned to terrorism rather than the nuclear deterrent relationship between the United States and Russia. However, the period from 2001-2008 actually saw an acceleration of previous US efforts to corral the genie of nuclear weapons and loose nuclear material.
In 2002, the Moscow Treaty was signed and a further reduction of 3800 deployed warheads, down from the 6000 deployed warhead START I level agreed to in 1991, was to take place, a fully 62 percent cut. In addition, the interdiction of the BBC China, a freighter with some 13000 centrifuges for making enrichment fuel for nuclear bombs on its way to Libya from Malaysia, exposed the guts of the Khan network and with it the international express of nuclear arms suppliers and builders. Eventually, Libya's leader Qaddafii came clean, calling for the U.S. and Britain to clean out his nuclear weapons and long range missile programs.
The extent of the Libyan nuclear program astounded the U.S. and British officials, who quietly removed freighters full of material missed by previous IAEA inspectors. One senior U.S. official had to walk across huge sand tunes in the middle of the desert in stocking feet to meet the Libyan leader in his tent to conclude the agreement. Finally, late in 2007 the Israelis took out the nascent Syrian nuclear program, apparently built with Iranian money and North Korean technology.
During the first decade of the new millennium, the United States and Russia reduced collectively their deployed weapons by nearly 8,000, and reduced their reserve stockpiles as well, with the US eliminating thousands of additional reserve weapons. Programs in Libya and Syria ended as well. In addition, a new program often referred to as Megatons to Megawatts took nuclear weapons grade fuel from Russia and burned it in US. .nuclear reactors. This program started during this period and successfully destroyed nearly 40 tons of dangerous nuclear junk, the equivalent of 12,000 Russian warheads according to senior Senate staff experts.
Thus, in the past decade, we eliminated or will soon do so, some 20,000 actual or potential deployed warheads. We destroyed the Khan nuclear weapons cartel and ended the Libyan nuclear weapons program. The Proliferation Security Initiative was created, now with more than 100 member nations that have cooperated in seizing and interdicting nuclear weapons and missile technology on route to North Korea and Iran. In addition, in cooperation with Russia, the US founded a multilateral and international alliance of states to combat nuclear terrorism.
Why this record of achievement does not qualify the United States as a committed adherent to the non-proliferation goals of the NPT is one of the unfortunate results of a concerted effort by the disarmament lobby and their media friends to paint the Bush administration as "anti-arms control," or unconcerned with proliferation. The record shows just the opposite. However, the template of those committed to zero nuclear weapons was that no matter what the Bush administration did, no credit would be given for the administration having actually done anything to achieve "arms control." That could never be admitted because the global zero campaign had constructed an "evil straw man" out of the Bush administration. The fact that they had reduced nuclear weapons by tens of thousands of weapons was ignored, hidden from public view, all the while describing the Moscow treaty as "not real arms control."
This public stance even got comical at times. A recent Reuters and AP news report claimed the forthcoming START treaty was the first such treaty in 20 years. In fact, the Moscow Treaty was signed in 2002. It reduced deployed nuclear weapons by 3,800 compared to the new treaty's reduction of 650. It further claimed that Russia had pulled out of the START II in 2002 because President Bush voided the ABM Treaty (that evil George Bush again!) The facts? The START II treaty was turned down by the Russians during the Clinton administration, while the Moscow Treaty was accepted and signed at the same time as the US withdrew from the ABM Treaty.
So too with the successful elimination of the Libyan nuclear programs. Critics claimed it was no big deal. The nuclear "problem" would be resolved during the then ongoing negotiations over the Libyan role in the destruction of the Pan Am flight over Lockerbie. The interdiction of the BBC China, the creation of the PSI and the US and British negotiations on nuclear matters with Libya were all deemed irrelevant..
However, the facts are well known. Senior Bush administration officials who negotiated with Libya's officials including President Qadaffi himself explained to me the Libya dictator denied even having a nuclear weapons program even after the capture of the BB China and the clear evidence that the centrifuges on board were destined for Tripoli. How could Libya be offering to end a program in parallel negotiations it claimed it did not even have?
What clinched the deal was the US capture of Saddam Hussein. Qadaffi immediately phoned British Prime Minister Tony Blair and said he did not want to end up like "Saddam" and the US and Britain should come immediately and he would "give it all up” – nuclear weapons, ballistic missiles and terrorism. Subsequently he did, demanding at the same time that only the British and U.S. governments do the job and the UN and IAEA remain completely out of the picture!
However, this good news unfortunately was undermined by the bad news with respect to North Korea and Iran, and Russia and China. As we have pointed out in earlier parts of this report, the nuclear programs of Iran and North Korea owe much to the technological and scientific assistance from both Moscow and Peking. This assistance has not been by accident. It has been deliberate. It is also a violation of the responsibilities of both countries under the NPT and certainly requires that they, not the United States, be the ones to "reset" their behavior.
Thus, ironically, despite the progress in reducing nuclear weapons from 2001-8, we face a serious security threat with Iran and North Korea. The question being discussed with the announcement of the forthcoming new nuclear arms treaty is whether a treaty to reduce deployed nuclear weapons some 650 on each side will hopefully transform the US and Russian relationship and secure from Moscow their assistance not in helping Iran build nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles, but in doing the opposite –shutting down the program.
Many argue that the nature of the Iranian program remains sufficiently unclear as to warrant a "go slow, diplomacy will do the trick" approach. However, such an approach requires confidence in the current NPT inspection regime. Unfortunately, the lead international UN nuclear watchdog – ElBareidi of Egypt, the past Director-General of the IAEA in Austria, whose tab we as taxpayers underwrite-- spent much of the past decade face-down in his bowl of Viennese Alpo, sound asleep as Iran, Libya, Syria and North Korea – aided by the Khan network, Russia and China and a host of unscrupulous banks, high tech firms and shipping companies – sprinted toward Armageddon.
The Iranian Nuclear Program
What we know about Iran's nuclear program comes largely from other sources than the UN inspection regime. For example, confidential intelligence documents obtained by the London Times and described in a December 14, 2009 news story showed Iran working on testing a key final component of a nuclear bomb. "The notes, from Iran’s most sensitive military nuclear project, describe a four-year plan to test a neutron initiator, the component of a nuclear bomb that triggers an explosion. Foreign intelligence agencies date them to early 2007, four years after Iran was thought to have suspended its weapons program."
The next day, the December 15, 2009 Washington Post reported Iran is seeking an indigenous capability to manufacture nuclear components. The paper noted "that Iran also has sufficient information to be able to produce a nuclear device, and had a four-year plan at least as of 2007 to develop a neutron initiator."
According to David Albright, author of the newly released Peddling Peril: How the Secret Nuclear Trade Arms America’s Enemies, despite the arrest of Pakistani scientist A.G. Khan and the clamp-down on his global smuggling network of nuclear secrets, "the market for such illicit information continues to thrive and elude even the savviest of government watchdogs.” He also notes that Iran is "eliminating bottlenecks in the process of creating a reliable nuclear warhead", perhaps an explanation of why Russian scientists with expertise in detonators have visited Iran to provide training and instruction on building triggering devices for nuclear bombs.
Hassan Rowhani in an internal briefing in Tehran explained how during the entire period he negotiated with Europe about Iran's nuclear program Tehran managed to complete the second stage of uranium enrichment production – the uranium conversion plant in Isfahan. Larijani, the former Iranian Deputy Foreign Minister and brother to Rowhani's successor said: "Diplomacy must be used to lessen the pressure on Iran for its nuclear program."
To a large extent then, Iran has engaged in a massive rope-a dope negotiating strategy even as the United States and its allies keep thinking in terms of some lawyerly crafted "deal." As explained by Lord Peter Archer (Solicitor General of the UK) and Bruce McColl (President of IDS, Institute for Democratic Strategies and Executive Director of Freedom House), "To achieve the goal of nuclear weapons, the Ayatollah uses negotiations to buy more time...further concessions will be seen as weakness and also empower Iran's rulers. It would enable them to fund their terrorist activities, speed up their nuclear program, and consolidate power."
Moreover, in a welcome though worrisome development, the new leadership at IAEA finally faced reality. Iran is working on a nuclear warhead they conclude, and either never stopped working on such a technology or resumed work previously halted. While Iran said the new IAEA report "verified the peaceful nature" of Iran's nuclear energy program, in reality the IAEA report, using US, Israeli and other IAEA member's intelligence, described Iran's move toward a nuclear weapons program as "compelling."
Current intelligence efforts apparently are concentrating on (1) whether the Iranian Supreme Leader has or will give the order for full-scale production of nuclear weapons, and (2) at what point will the Iranians be able to comply with such an order given the state of their nuclear weapons work. A year ago, the U.S. Director of National Intelligence said Iran had "not decided to press forward with work to put a nuclear warhead on a ballistic missile" although internal IAEA documents from the fall of 2009 said Iran had the know-how for nuclear weaponization.
Earlier this month, the Secretary of Defense echoed this view, noting Iran is "not close to a weapon at this point" while according to General Petraeus, the US Commander of US Central Command, "The nuclear program has slipped a little to the right" (March 16, 2010), although earlier Admiral Mullen, the Chairman of the JCS, said Iran has enough fissile material to make a nuclear bomb (CNN, March 1st).
Just last year, in "Preventing a Cascade of Instability", the Washington Institute said Iran had the means to develop a nuclear weapon in a year and fissile material on hand to build 50 warheads, while the new IAEA report of February 18th, 2010 was described as concluding "the development of an Iranian nuclear payload was specifically linked to delivery systems such as ballistic missiles". According to the ArmsControlWonk, the IAEA also concluded "These alleged activities consist of a number of projects and sub-projects covering nuclear and missile related projects, run by military related organizations".
To better understand the nature of the Iranian nuclear program, I am reprinting extensive portions of an excellent article by William Broad of the New York Times from January 6, 2010:
In 2002, the National Council of Resistance of Iran, an opposition group, revealed that Iran was building a secret underground nuclear plant at Natanz that turned out to be for enriching uranium. Enrichment plants can make fuel for reactors or, with a little more effort, atom bombs.
Satellite photos showed the Iranians burying two cavernous halls roughly half the size of the Pentagon. Estimates put the thickness of overhead rock, dirt and concrete at 30 feet — enough to frustrate bombs but not to guarantee the plant’s survival. The disclosure of Natanz set off the West’s confrontation with Iran. Two years later, the International Atomic Energy Agency found to its surprise that Iran was tunneling in the mountains by the Isfahan site, where uranium is readied for enrichment. “Iran failed to report to the agency in a timely manner,” an I.A.E.A. paper said in diplomatic understatement.
Then, in late 2005, the Iranian opposition group held news conferences in Paris and London to announce that its spies had learned that Iran was digging tunnels for missile and atomic work at 14 sites, including an underground complex near Qum. The government, one council official said, was building the tunnels to conceal “its pursuit of nuclear weapons.” The council further charged that Mr. Ahmadinejad and the tunneling association were providing civilian cover for military work and acquisitions.
The council’s assertions got little notice. Some Western experts saw them as overstated. Some questioned the council’s objectivity because it sought the government’s overthrow. Perhaps the biggest impediment was a suspicion of defectors at a time when the American invasion of Iraq was proving to be based in part on Iraqi dissidents’ false claims about Saddam Hussein’s unconventional weapons.
United Nations
atomic inspectors did check out a few of the tunnels at Isfahan, but not at Qum because the plant was on a military base and thus off limits for inspection without strong evidence of suspicious activity.
“We followed whatever they came up with,” Mohamed ElBaradei, the recently departed head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, said of the council in an interview. “And a lot of it was bogus.”
Frank Pabian, a senior adviser on nuclear nonproliferation at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, strongly disagreed. “They’re right 90 percent of the time,” he said of the council’s disclosures about Iran’s clandestine sites. “That doesn’t mean they’re perfect, but 90 percent is a pretty good record.”
In 2007, the council announced that Iran was tunneling in the mountains near Natanz, the sprawling enrichment site. Satellite photos confirmed that.
Moreover, Qum became a vindication, though belatedly, in late September, when President Obama, flanked by the leaders of France and Britain, identified “a covert uranium enrichment facility” being constructed there.
As Dore Gold, the former Israel ambassador to the United States warned us in the August 6, 2009 Los Angeles Times, "An Iran with hegemonial aspirations will not be talked out of acquiring nuclear weapons through a western incentives package...only the most severe economic measures aimed at Iran's dependence upon imported gasoline, backed by Western military power, might pull the Iranians back.
Nature of the Iranian Nuclear Jihad
What then is the threat we face from Iranian? The Heritage Foundation's Jim Carafano, one of the nation's foremost authorities on homeland security, writes: "Iran could detonate one nuclear weapon over New York in a low altitude burst and kill half a million people and cripple Manhattan forever and then fire a second over the mid-Atlantic states creating an electromagnetic pulse(EMP) that would take down a large portion of the national grid and plunge Washington, D.C. into darkness. Both could be done with a missile launched from a freighter off the coast of the US; America would then be crippled in a flash with no obvious enemy at which to shoot back."
Take the EMP threat: the first Iranian test launch of a missile fired in an EMP mode was from a barge in the Caspian in 1998. So dramatic was the test that it led the Rumsfeld Commission on Ballistic Missile Threats to the United States to unanimously alter its conclusions and to include the threat of "sea-launched" ballistic missiles in the unclassified portion of the report. In addition, a senior member of the Defense Science Board told me the US tested a missile in such a mode in the 1960s, so why should we think Iran could not do this today?
Unfortunately, these and other nuclear threats – such as Iran providing a nuclear device to a terrorist cell created solely for the purpose of detonating a nuclear device in a U.S. city – are not taken seriously by all members of America's foreign policy and security community. For example, in the fall 2009 Claremont Review of Books, Michael Anton's "Worse Case Scenario" reviews Graham Allison's Nuclear Terrorism, Michael Levi's On Nuclear Terrorism, and Thomas Reed's and Danny Stillman's The Nuclear Express. The first two reflect much of current American strategy that centers on defensive strategies such the Nunn-Lugar program and the Defense Threat Reduction Act, which combined seek to lock-up and/or destroy Russian nuclear weapons and weapons useable material.
Graham Allison's Nuclear Terrorism and Michael Levi's On Nuclear Terrorism both lay out the case for enhancing both programs and enhance significantly the security at the US nuclear labs where drills have revealed serious security lapses. Their proposals are in line with the current administration's proposal to lock-up and secure all fissionable material worldwide within four years, in short making our current efforts universal, a formidable but highly worthy challenge.
The assumption behind such proposals, however, contains two fallacies. The first is that while anyone can lock up material, the converse is also true: anyone with a key can be bribed to unlock such material as well. I would much rather see such material as much as possible destroyed or burned in a US nuclear power plant as we do now.
Allison's and Levi's proposals also rest on the willingness of "other parties to go along in good faith," including the Pakistanis, North Koreans and Chinese, to "secure their nuclear materials according to an international 'gold standard." This was echoed in recent Congressional testimony on The Global Threat Reduction Initiative by Stephen Black: "It is all cooperative work", (Washington Post, March 16, 2010).
And this is tough work. After billions in expenditures and 20 years the Russians, for example, have not come close to "achieving American standards of security". Even though, Allison blithely says Iran can be bought off "with a grand bargain" and China with soothing talk, and Pakistan "made to see the importance" of security. I am afraid not.
However, both Allison and Levi largely leave out questions of how to enforce such international standards, although Allison would threaten the use of force to secure North Korean compliance with an expanded Nunn-Lugar or DTRA program. For example, in a stunning interview with Iran’s chief nuclear negotiator, Hassan Rowhani, with the state-run daily Kayhan (published 23 July 2005), flat-out admitted that the Tehran regime has been playing “cheat and retreat” with the IAEA and the EU-3: “It may seem on the surface that we have accepted the suspension. But in reality, we have used the time to alleviate many of our shortcomings. We continued building centrifuges until the Paris Accord [November 2004]. After June [2004], we doubled our efforts to make up for the suspension. We have not suspended work in Isfahan, even for a second. Arak has not been suspended at any time,” Rowhani said.
Stillman and Reed, however, are much more realistic and accurate in their assessment of the dimensions of nuclear terrorism. They point to the critical origin of much of today's nuclear proliferation: "China apparently decided to actively promote nuclear proliferation within the third world...trained scientists, transferred technology and built infrastructure in furtherance of the policy".
They continue: "The Libyan confession was the smoking gun...it confirmed the participation of vendors...of Russia, Germany, Malaysia, the United Arab Emirates (Dubai), Switzerland, South Africa, Turkey and Holland as suppliers to nuclear proliferators. It also verified the willingness of machine-tool suppliers in Italy and Spain to supply legal but dual-use technology with no questions asked. It exposed the role of Turkish nationals in supplying magnets, motors, and electronic parts to the nuclear network...the revelations from the BBC China confirmed the role of North Korea in the world's new triangle trade, shuttling gas cylinders made in Pakistan, filled with uranium hexafluoride in North Korea, and then delivered to Libya."
They conclude, "The denouement in Libya also opened wide a window into nuclear Iran. The IAEA and Western press came to understand the massive scope of the underground centrifuge farm planned for Natantz, the close links the Iranian envoys with uranium sources in Namibia...and the potential role of high tech mercenary refugees... in the Iranian crisis still to come..Amidst all of these exposures, the Chinese authorities were totally unhelpful, to the point of stonewalling any investigation into Libya's nuclear supply network...as the nuclear express now rumbles on through other Muslim Republics and the kingdoms of the Middle East." (The Nuclear Express, pp.276-7)
Reed and Stillman highlight my conviction that stopping nuclear jihad will require eliminating the Iranian regime and not simply seeking a "deal" with rogue regimes intent upon killing millions of Americans, Israelis and others they deem apostate. The President of Iran regularly speaks about the need to bring Armageddon about in a mighty clash between Iran and America. The former Vice President of the country, Rafsanjani, noted that just one or two nuclear bombs dropped on Israel would take care of the "Jewish" problem while even 15 nuclear bombs dropped on Iran in retaliation would allow Iran to survive and Islam to "win."
Ahmadinejad's senior adviser says the resolution of the "Holocaust issue will end in the destruction of Israel" in the fulfillment of an historical war between Islam and the West. Mohammed Rahimian, an associate of the Iranian Supreme Leader put it this way: "The reappearance of the 12th Imam will usher in a war between Israel and the Shia", a decisive war which will decide "the fate of humanity." Ahmadinejad repeatedly declares, "We don't shy away from declaring that Islam is ready to rule the world. We must prepare ourselves to rule the world" along with "I will bring the death that the Shi'ite are experiencing in Iraq to the streets of America with the martyr brigades that are ready to act."
And if we still have not got the message, Ahmadinejad's chief strategist, Hassan Abbassi, who heads the Center for Security Doctrines Research of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (RGC) explains: "We have a strategy drawn up for the destruction of Anglo-Saxon civilization...we must make use of everything we have at hand to strike at this front by means of our suicide operations or by means of our missiles. There are 29 sensitive sites in the U.S. and in the West. We have already spied on these sites and we know how we are going to attack them.”
This then is the Iranian threat of Islamic Jihad. Is arms control one step down the road toward ending this threat, or is it a path chosen that in the end might very well turn out to be not only irrelevant, but a distraction? Stay tuned as we follow the story of the Iranian quest for nuclear weapons.
"He handed me a copy of the [nuclear] jihad missile target list. I hadn't seen anything like that before. Tel Aviv, all those American air military bases and Tehran. Tehran! So Jake Grafton was right. Ahmandinejad was going to murder his own people..." Stephen Coonts in The Disciple, (2009 St. Martin's Press.
FamilySecurityMatters.org Contributing Editor Peter Huessy is President of GeoStrategic Analysis, a defense consulting company in Potomac, Maryland
