OLIVIER DEBOUZY: How to Stop Iran – WSJ.com
OPINION EUROPE DECEMBER 16, 2009, 5:15 P.M. ET
How to Stop Iran
The West has reached a defining moment in its bid to prevent the rogue state from going nuclear.
By OLIVIER DEBOUZY
The lack of progress in negotiations with Iran, together with the latest report from the International Atomic Energy Agency and Iran’s announcement that it would develop new enrichment facilities, all point toward an inconvenient truth: Iran is not only not serious about negotiating in good faith. It is also very likely that it has, for more than a decade now, concealed a significant part of what appears to be a major nuclear military effort. This week’s revelations about Iran’s recent work on warhead design underscore the point. No country has ever gone so far along the road toward the acquisition of a nuclear military capability without actually developing one.
Iran could well stop at the threshold of such capability, letting it be known to all specialists that it has a military capability without openly deploying it. This would still leave it uncertain, in the eyes of the public, whether it really has an effective nuclear arsenal. But this would not change much in practical terms. Western decision makers are now at a defining moment.
Politically, no Israeli prime minister could survive the fact that Iran became a nuclear-armed state, officially or unofficially, on his watch. The pressure on the Israeli government to do something to counter Iran’s acquisition of nuclear weapons would be so strong that it could well be tempted to play a desperate gamble, regardless of any security guaranties that the U.S. might offer.
Similarly, no U.S. president (especially one endowed with a Nobel Prize) could escape blame for having let Iran become a nuclear-weapon state by consistently underestimating its ability to conceal its preparations. The intelligence community’s credibility would be devastated, and the indecision by successive administrations (Clinton, Bush and now Obama) to quash a program that has been suspected for 15 years and openly known for seven would be seen as a failure of major proportions.
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