If provoked, many Americans might well back nuclear attacks on foes like Iran and al Qaeda, according to new collaborative research from CISAC senior fellow Scott Sagan and Dartmouth professor Benjamin Valentino.
You can read more about their latest public opinion polling data, and its implications for the debate surrounding President Obama's upcoming visit to Hiroshima, in a column they co-authored for the Wall Street Journal.
A shadowy terror group smuggles a crude nuclear bomb into the United States, then detonates it right in the heart of Washington D.C., setting off a 15 kiloton explosion.
Eighty thousand Americans are killed instantly, including the president, vice president and most of the members of Congress, and more than a hundred thousand more are seriously wounded.
News outlets are soon broadcasting a message they’ve all received from a group claiming responsibility.
It says there are five more bombs hidden in five different cities across the America, and one bomb will be set off each week for the next five weeks unless all American troops based overseas are ordered to immediately return to the U.S. homeland.
The nation is thrown into chaos, as millions scramble to flee the cities, clogging roads and choking telecommunications systems.
The stock market crashes, before trading is halted altogether.
Martial law is declared, amid widespread looting and violence.
That was just one of the nightmare scenarios for a potential nuclear disaster that former U.S. Secretary of Defense William J. Perry vividly described as he delivered the Center for International Security and Cooperation’s annual Drell Lecture on Wednesday.
“My bottom line is that the likelihood of a nuclear catastrophe today is greater than it was during the Cold War,” Perry said.
Most people were “blissfully unaware” of the danger that simmering conflicts in geopolitical flash points around the globe – including Russia, China, North Korea, Iran and Pakistan – could easily turn nuclear, Perry told the Stanford audience.
A new nuclear arms race with Russia
Perry said he had tried to foster closer cooperation between the U.S. and Russia when he headed the Pentagon during the mid ‘90s and helped oversee the joint dismantling of four thousand nuclear weapons.
“When I left the Pentagon, I believed we were well on the way to ending forever that Cold War enmity, but that was not to be,” he said.
William J. Perry shares a video depicting the threat of nuclear terrorism with a Stanford audience.
Since then, relations between the West and Russia have soured badly, prompting Russia to modernize its nuclear arsenal and assume a more aggressive nuclear posture.
“They’re well advanced in rebuilding their Cold War nuclear arsenal, and it is Putin’s stated first priority,” Perry said.
“And they have dropped their former policy of no first use of nuclear weapons, and replaced it with a policy that says nuclear weapons will be their weapon of choice if they are threatened.”
While Perry said he believed Russian president Vladimir Putin did not want to engage in a military conflict with NATO forces, he said he was concerned about the possibility of Russia making a strategic miscalculation and stumbling into a conflict where they might resort to the use of tactical nuclear weapons.
“If they did that there’s no way of predicting or controlling the escalation that would follow thereafter,” Perry said.
Chinese economic problems increasing tensions
In Asia, a slowing Chinese economy could exacerbate domestic political tensions over issues such as wealth inequality and pollution, and encourage Chinese leaders to divert attention from problems at home by focusing on enemies abroad.
“China has had more than 10 percent growth now for almost three decades, but I think there’s trouble ahead,” Perry said.
“The time-proven safety valve for any government that’s in trouble is ultra-nationalism, which in the case of China translates into anti-Americanism and anti-Japanese.”
China has seen a major growth in military expenditures over the last decade, and it has used that investment to build a blue water navy and develop effective anti-ship missiles designed to drive the U.S. Navy hundreds of miles back from the Chinese coastline.
One potential flash point for a conflict between China and the U.S. are the artificial islands that China has been building in the disputed waters of the South China Sea.
“In a sense, China is regarding the South China Sea as a domestic lake, and we regard it and most other countries regard it as international waters, so their actions have been challenged by the U.S. Navy and will continue to be challenged,” Perry said.
North Korea’s growing nuclear threat
Meanwhile, China’s neighbor North Korea has continued to defy the international community and conducted another nuclear test in January.
“North Korea is today building a nuclear arsenal, and I would say clearly it’s of the highest priority in their government, and they have adopted outrageous rhetoric about how they might use those nuclear weapons,” Perry said.
William J. Perry delivers the Drell Lecture in an address entitled "A National Security Walk Around the World."
North Korea followed up its latest nuclear test with a satellite launch earlier this month – an important step towards developing an intercontinental ballistic missile that could threaten the United States mainland.
“These missiles today have only conventional warheads that are of no significant concern, but they are developing nuclear warheads,” Perry said.
“They already have developed a nuclear bomb, and the latest test, as well as tests to come, will be designed to perfect a bomb small enough and compact enough and durable enough to fit into a warhead. If they succeed in doing that, then the bluster will become a real threat.”
Perry said he hoped China and the United States could combine forces and adopt a “carrot and stick” diplomatic approach to force North Korea to abandon its nuclear weapons program – with the United States offering aid and international recognition, and China threatening to cut off supplies of food and aid.
He said he expected to see “more acting out” from the North Korean regime in the coming months, in the form of further nuclear and rocket tests.
Like it or not, the Iran deal is the only deal we’ll get
The landmark deal reached last year, where Iran agree to curtail its nuclear program in exchange for the lifting of economic sanctions, was a better resolution than Perry had expected to the negotiations, but it has met with significant resistance from groups he described as “strange bedfellows.”
“The opposition in Israel and the United States opposed the deal because they fear it will allow Iran to get a bomb,” Perry said.
“Whereas the opposition in Iran opposed the deal because they fear it will prevent Iran from getting a bomb. Both cannot be right.”
Many Republican presidential hopefuls have publicly stated on the campaign trail that they would withdraw from the deal if they got elected to the White House, but Perry said that would be a strategic mistake.
“The opposition in the United States has a simple formula – we should withdraw from the deal, we should reinstate sanctions, and we should renegotiate a better deal,” Perry said.
“Let me be as blunt as I can, this is a pure fantasy. There is not the remotest possibility that the sanction could be reapplied if the United States withdraws from this deal, because the day we withdraw from the deal, our allies are gone, the sanctions are gone, there will be no renegotiations without sanctions, so this deal, like it or not, is the only deal we will ever get.”
Another “Mumbai” attack could spark regional nuclear war
Nuclear rivals India and Pakistan have more than a hundred nuclear weapons on each side, as well as the missiles to deliver them, and a conventional military conflict between them could quickly escalate into a regional nuclear war, Perry said.
Another large-scale terror attack, like the coordinated assault in Mumbai that killed more than 163 people in 2008, could lead India to retaliate militarily against Pakistan (which India blames for encouraging the terror groups operating in Pakistani territory).
Perry said he was concerned that Pakistan would then use tactical nuclear weapons against invading Indian troops, and that India might then respond with a nuclear attack of its own on Pakistan.
“So this is the nightmare scenario of how a regional nuclear war could start,” Perry said.
“A nightmare that would involve literally tens of millions of deaths, along with the possibility of stimulating a nuclear winter that would cause widespread tragedies all over the planet.”
A ray of hope
Despite all the potential for nuclear disaster in the current geopolitical environment, Perry said he was still hopeful that nuclear catastrophe could be avoided.
"While much of my talk today has a doomsday ring to it, that truly is not who I am,” Perry said.
“I’m basically an optimist. When I see a cloud, I look for a ray to shine through that cloud.”
One important step toward reducing the nuclear threat would be improving relations between the U.S. and Russia, he said.
“My ray of sunshine, my hope, is I believe we can still reverse the slide in U.S. Russia relations, he said.
“We must begin that by restoring civil dialog. We must restore cooperation between the United States and Russia in areas where we have mutual interest…If we succeed in doing that, then we can work to stop and reverse the drift to a greater and greater dependence on nuclear weapons.”
Perry ended his speech by urging the audience to keep striving to rid the world of the threat of nuclear weapons.
“We must pursue our ideals in order to keep alive our hope – hope for a safer world for our children and for our grandchildren,” he said.
Why did Iran agree to send the bulk of its low-enriched uranium out of the country and remove the core of its Arak reactor? Those actions significantly lengthen the time it would take to build up a nuclear weapon program.
Can the U.S. find the right balance between cooperation and containment, so it can realize the long-term benefits of the nuclear deal with Iran? CISAC visiting fellow Nicholas Burns, who helped to negotiate sanctions against Iran for the Bush administration a decade ago, offers his opinion in this piece for The New York Times.
Abstract: Iran under Shah Mohammad-Reza Pahlavi undertook one of the most ambitious nuclear programs of any non-nuclear weapon state in the Non-proliferation Treaty (NPT) in the 1970s. Despite the Shah’s Cold War alliance with the United States, the emerging global nonproliferation order became a zone of contestation in U.S.-Iran relations. This paper is a condensed version of chapter two of this dissertation, covering U.S.-Iran nuclear cooperation agreements under the Nixon and Ford administrations, which explores the Shah's struggle to obtain Western nuclear technology, the ultimately unsuccessful U.S.-Iran nuclear negotiations, and the United States' efforts to use these negotiations to redefine the Nonproliferation Treaty.
About the Speaker: Farzan Sabet is Nuclear Security Predoctoral Fellow at the Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC) and holds a Swiss National Science Foundation Doctoral Mobility Fellowship for the 2015-2016 academic year. He is a doctoral candidate in international history at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva, researching the Iranian nuclear program under Mohammad-Reza Shah Pahlavi and its evolving relationship with the global nonproliferation regime during the 1970s. His dissertation is based on multi-archival research in the United States, United Kingdom, France, and Canada and combines diplomatic history with nonproliferation studies. He is affiliated with the Woodrow Wilson Center’s Nuclear Proliferation International History Project (NPIHP)
Farzan is also a co-founder and managing editor at IranPolitik.com, which focuses on key issues in Iranian foreign policy and domestic politics today. His work on Iranian politics has appeared in The Washington Post's "Monkey Cage" blog, The Atlantic, and War on the Rocks, among other outlets.
Nuclear Security Predoctoral Fellow
CISAC, Stanford University
Abstract: Numerous polls show that U.S. public approval of Truman’s decision to drop atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki has declined significantly since 1945. Scholars and pundits have suggested that this is a sign of the emergence of a “nuclear taboo.” Such polls, however, do not force respondents to contemplate the tradeoff the U.S. government believed it faced in 1945: choosing between the use of nuclear weapons and a ground invasion of Japan to end the Pacific War. This paper reports on survey experiments recreating that kind of a tradeoff in a hypothetical war with Iran. In order to avoid a ground assault on Tehran that was predicted to kill 20,000 American soldiers, 60% of the U.S. public approved of an atomic attack on an Iranian city that would kill 100,000 civilians and 60% approved of an atomic attack that would kill 2,000,000 civilians. Sixty-seven percent preferred a conventional bombing attack that was estimated to kill 100,000 Iranian civilians. Moreover, the prospect of killing more noncombatants appeared to trigger beliefs in retribution and complicity, as a way of justifying the decisions. Our findings suggest that U.S. public support for the principle of noncombatant immunity is shallow.
About the Speaker: Scott D. Sagan is the Caroline S.G. Munro Professor of Political Science, the Mimi and Peter Haas University Fellow in Undergraduate Education, and Senior Fellow at the Center for International Security and Cooperation and the Freeman Spogli Institute at Stanford University. He also serves as Project Chair for the American Academy of Arts and Sciences’ Initiative on New Dilemmas in Ethics, Technology, and War and as Senior Advisor for the American Academy of Arts and Sciences’ Global Nuclear Future Initiative. Before joining the Stanford faculty, Sagan was a lecturer in the Department of Government at Harvard University. From 1984 to 1985, he served as special assistant to the director of the Organization of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in the Pentagon. Sagan has also served as a consultant to the office of the Secretary of Defense and at the Sandia National Laboratory and the Los Alamos National Laboratory.
Sagan is the author of Moving Targets: Nuclear Strategy and National Security (Princeton University Press, 1989); The Limits of Safety: Organizations, Accidents, and Nuclear Weapons (Princeton University Press, 1993); and, with co-author Kenneth N. Waltz, The Spread of Nuclear Weapons: An Enduring Debate (W.W. Norton, 2012). He is the co-editor of Planning the Unthinkable (Cornell University Press, 2000) with Peter R. Lavoy and James L. Wirtz; the editor of Inside Nuclear South Asia (Stanford University Press, 2009); and co-editor of a two-volume special issue of Daedalus, On the Global Nuclear Future (Fall 2009 and Winter 2010), with Steven E. Miller. Sagan’s recent publications include “A Call for Global Nuclear Disarmament” in Nature (July 2012); “Atomic Aversion: Experimental Evidence on Taboos, Traditions, and the Non-Use of Nuclear Weapons” with Daryl G. Press and Benjamin A. Valentino in the American Political Science Review (February 2013); and, with Matthew Bunn, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences occasional paper, “A Worst Practices Guide to Insider Threats: Lessons from Past Mistakes” (2014).
Sagan was the recipient of the National Academy of Sciences William and Katherine Estes Award in 2015 and the International Studies Association's International Security Studies Section Distinguished Scholar Award in 2013. He has also won four teaching awards: Stanford’s 1998-99 Dean’s Award for Distinguished Teaching; Stanford's 1996 Hoagland Prize for Undergraduate Teaching; the International Studies Association’s 2008 Innovative Teaching Award; and the Monterey Institute for International Studies’ Nonproliferation Education Award in 2009.
Scott D. Sagan is Co-Director and Senior Fellow at the Center for International Security and Cooperation, the Caroline S.G. Munro Professor of Political Science, and the Bass University Fellow in Undergraduate Education at Stanford University. He also serves as Co-Chair of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences’ Committee on International Security Studies. Before joining the Stanford faculty, Sagan was a lecturer in the Department of Government at Harvard University and served as special assistant to the director of the Organization of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in the Pentagon.
Sagan is the author of Moving Targets: Nuclear Strategy and National Security (Princeton University Press, 1989); The Limits of Safety: Organizations, Accidents, and Nuclear Weapons (Princeton University Press, 1993); and, with co-author Kenneth N. Waltz, The Spread of Nuclear Weapons: An Enduring Debate (W.W. Norton, 2012). He is the co-editor of Insider Threats (Cornell University Press, 2017) with Matthew Bunn; and co-editor of The Fragile Balance of Terror (Cornell University Press, 2022) with Vipin Narang. Sagan was also the guest editor of a two-volume special issue of Daedalus: Ethics, Technology, and War (Fall 2016) and The Changing Rules of War (Winter 2017).
Recent publications include “Kettles of Hawks: Public Opinion on the Nuclear Taboo and Noncombatant Immunity in the United States, United Kingdom, France, and Israel”, with Janina Dill and Benjamin A. Valentino in Security Studies (February 2022); “The Rule of Law and the Role of Strategy in U.S. Nuclear Doctrine” with Allen S. Weiner in International Security (Spring 2021); “Does the Noncombatant Immunity Norm Have Stopping Power?” with Benjamin A. Valentino in International Security (Fall 2020); and “Just War and Unjust Soldiers: American Public Opinion on the Moral Equality of Combatants” and “On Reciprocity, Revenge, and Replication: A Rejoinder to Walzer, McMahan, and Keohane” with Benjamin A. Valentino in Ethics & International Affairs (Winter 2019).
In 2022, Sagan was awarded Thérèse Delpech Memorial Award from the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace at their International Nuclear Policy Conference. In 2017, he received the International Studies Association’s Susan Strange Award which recognizes the scholar whose “singular intellect, assertiveness, and insight most challenge conventional wisdom and intellectual and organizational complacency" in the international studies community. Sagan was also the recipient of the National Academy of Sciences William and Katherine Estes Award in 2015, for his work addressing the risks of nuclear weapons and the causes of nuclear proliferation. The award, which is granted triennially, recognizes “research in any field of cognitive or behavioral science that advances understanding of issues relating to the risk of nuclear war.” In 2013, Sagan received the International Studies Association's International Security Studies Section Distinguished Scholar Award. He has also won four teaching awards: Stanford’s 1998-99 Dean’s Award for Distinguished Teaching; Stanford's 1996 Hoagland Prize for Undergraduate Teaching; the International Studies Association’s 2008 Innovative Teaching Award; and the Monterey Institute for International Studies’ Nonproliferation Education Award in 2009.
Co-director of the Center for International Security and Cooperation
Abstract: President Obama’s Prague Agenda – moving toward a world without nuclear weapons – has been stalled for several years, due to the downturn in U.S.-Russian relations, Congressional opposition to arms control, and stalemate and division within the multilateral disarmament community. Will the Iran nuclear agreement provide an impetus for reviving elements of the Prague Agenda, such as efforts to advance regional arms control in the Middle East and strengthen the non-proliferation regime, or – as some critics contend - will the Iran deal increase long term pressures for further nuclear proliferation in the Middle East? Dr. Samore will address these and other questions concerning the implications of the Iran nuclear agreement for broader nonproliferation and disarmament efforts.
About the Speaker: As of February 2013, Dr. Gary Samore is the Executive Director for Research at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. He is also a non-resident Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution and member of the advisory board for United Against Nuclear Iran (UANI), a non-profit organization that seeks to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons. He served for four years as President Obama’s White House Coordinator for Arms Control and Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD), including as U.S. Sherpa for the 2010 Nuclear Security Summit in Washington, D.C. and the 2012 Nuclear Security Summit in Seoul, Korea. As WMD Coordinator, he served as the principal advisor to the President on all matters relating to arms control and the prevention of weapons of mass destruction proliferation and WMD terrorism, and coordinated United States government activities, initiatives, and programs to prevent proliferation and WMD terrorism and promote international arms control efforts.
Dr. Samore was a National Science Foundation Fellow at Harvard University, where he received his MA and PhD in government in 1984. While at Harvard, he was a pre-doctoral fellow at what was then the Harvard Center for Science and International Affairs, later to become the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs.
Gary Samore
Executive Director for Research, Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs
Harvard University
The history of nonproliferation failures in Israel, India, Pakistan, and North Korea are reviewed in the light of the nuclear agreement with Iran. The paper shows that the circumstances in each case are special and not comparable to the situation in the Iranian case. Thus, while the Iran agreement has some weaknesses, past nonproliferation failures should not be considered predictive of a future failure in this case. But there are lessons to be learned from such failures that should inform U.S. nonproliferation policy generally.
Today’s landmark deal between six world powers and Iran, which would limit Iran’s nuclear program in exchange for lifting economic sanctions, was an important step toward stopping Iran from building a nuclear bomb.
However, the key challenge for the international community will be making sure Iran keeps its part of the bargain, according to Stanford experts.
“Both sides have made a series of compromises that will help Iran’s economy in exchange for constraining its nuclear capabilities – and that’s a deal worth making, in my view,” said Scott Sagan, the Caroline S.G. Munro professor of political science and senior fellow at the Center for International Security and Cooperation.
“Iran will still have a technical capability to develop nuclear weapons, given the technology and materials that they have, but under this deal it will both take them a much longer period of time and would require them to take actions that would be easily discerned by the International Atomic Energy Agency, so it constrains their break-out capabilities in important ways.”
Sig Hecker, former Los Alamos National Laboratory director and senior fellow at Stanford’s Center for International Security and Cooperation, said the nuclear deal was “hard-won and is better than any other reasonably achievable alternative.”
“Iran agreed to considerably greater restrictions on its program than what I thought was possible before the Joint Plan of Action was signed in November 2013,” said Hecker.
Abbas Milani, director of Iranian studies at Stanford and an affiliate at the Center for Democracy Development and the Rule of Law, called it the “least bad deal” for both Iran and the international community.
“Nobody gets everything they want,” Milani said. “Every side gets some of what they want.”
Under the deal, Iran would be allowed to continue to enrich uranium for peaceful purposes in its energy and health industries.
But it would have to reduce the number of its centrifuges from 19,000 to 6,000, and cut its stockpile of low enriched uranium down from more than 20 thousand pounds to about 660 pounds.
“Reducing that stockpile actually lengthens the breakout time more than any other measure,” said Hecker.
These limits were designed to increase the “breakout time” it would take for Iran to produce enough fissile material to make a nuclear weapon from the current two to three months, to one year over a period of the next 10 years.
The agreement still faces a series of political hurdles before it gets implemented, and will face tough scrutiny from a Republican-controlled U.S. Congress, as well as the parliaments of European countries that were parties to the talks.
“I think it’s going to be hard for the U.S. Congress and [European] parliaments to kill the deal and be perceived as the ones who would rather have a war than give diplomacy a chance,” said Thomas Fingar, distinguished fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies.
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“The key is going to be the effectiveness of the verification procedures and IAEA access,” Fingar said.
“There’s an element of trust, but a far more important part is the rigorous verification protocols.”
As soon as the IAEA confirms that Iran is abiding by the terms of the agreement, economic sanctions can be lifted.
Sagan warned that the international community should not be surprised if Iran pushed the limits of the agreement, and should be ready to reimpose economic sanctions if Iran violated the deal.
“We should anticipate that Iranian opponents to the agreement will try to stretch it and do things that are potential violations and that we have to call them on that, and not treat every problem that we see as unexpected,” said Sagan.
“We should anticipate such problems and be ready, if necessary, to reimpose sanctions. Having the ability to reimpose sanctions is the best way to deter the Iranians from engaging in such violations.”
But Hecker said the international community should focus on incentivizing Iran.
“The best hope is to make the civilian nuclear path so appealing – and then successful – that Tehran will not want to risk the political and economic consequences of that success by pursuing the bomb option,” he said.
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The negotiations were a diplomatic balancing act, with serious consequences for both sides of the negotiations if they failed to reach an agreement.
Iran faced the threat of military action if it continued to press forward with its nuclear program.
While Russia and China had both signaled that they were likely to abandon the sanctions regime if talks fell apart.
One of the key challenges to reaching an agreement was “finding a language that would allow both parties to declare victory”, according to Milani.
“Iran has clearly made some very substantive concessions, but Iran has also been allowed to keep enough of its infrastructure so that it can declare at least partial victory for the domestic political audience."
Now the scramble is on in Tehran to claim credit for the deal.
Reformists, led by current Iranian President Hassan Rouhani and former president Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, hope it will strengthen their hand as they head into the next election.
On the other side of the political spectrum, conservatives believe it could give them the edge in the battle to succeed Ayatollah Ali Khamenei as Iran’s Supreme Leader.
“They understand that whoever gets the credit for this will be in a much better position to determine the future leadership and future direction of Iran’s foreign policy,” said Milani.
It’s too early to tell what impact the agreement might have on Iran’s foreign policy, which is often at odds with U.S. interests in hot spots like Iraq, Syria, Yemen and Afghanistan. But Sagan said today’s deal was an important step in making sure that future conflicts with Iran don’t go nuclear.
“Hopefully those disagreements will be played out without the shadow of nuclear weapons hanging over the future, and that’s a good thing.”
Weeks away from a final international accord on Iran’s nuclear program, Stanford scholars are focusing on the technical, political and practical aspects of the pending deal intended to loosen sanctions while restricting Tehran’s ability to build a nuclear weapon.
“In two to three weeks we will have what some pundits are already calling the most revolutionary positive change in Iranian-American relations and others are saying a disastrous policy of appeasement to the Iranian regime,” said Scott Sagan, a senior fellow at the university’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies. Sagan moderated a discussion at the FSI's Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC) on Tuesday that included FSI’s Siegfried Hecker and Thomas Fingar, as well as Abbas Milani, director of Stanford’s Iranian Studies.
Hecker, a former director of the Los Alamos National Laboratory, said Iran has developed its civilian nuclear capabilities to concurrently have a nuclear weapon option. However, at this point, they do not yet have nuclear weapons, nor have they produced the fissile materials, plutonium or highly enriched uranium, that would fuel such weapons.
“They’ve demonstrated they can enrich uranium to the levels allowed for civilian applications, but that gives them the capability to produce highly enriched uranium for bombs should they choose to do so,” Hecker said. “If they complete the Arak reactor, they will have the potential for plutonium production, although they have not developed a facility to extract the plutonium. If you look in terms of timelines for making fissile materials, they were somewhere between weeks to a month or two away for making enough fissile material for one bomb at the start of the negotiations in November 2013. The nuclear deal would move that timeline, called the ‘breakout’ time to one year, giving the international community more time to respond.”
Hecker said the technical issues are “secondary to whether Iran actually wants to go ahead and decide to build the bomb.”
He met with Iranian negotiators – including Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif – in 2013, and said the officials were anxious to reach a deal.
“Zarif told me that the cost of acquiring strategic capabilities will make Iran less safe rather than more safe,” Hecker said.
Fingar, who chaired the National Intelligence Council while also serving as the U.S. deputy director of national intelligence for analysis between 2005 and 2008, stressed the need for strong verification mechanisms if any deal with Iran is going to work.
“Verification can establish some facts but what it means is fundamentally a contextual and political judgment. What is most important? Catching somebody in a technical violation or preserving the overall purpose for which you are conducting verification. Verification requirements are an integral part of the negotiating process,” Fingar said.
That is especially true for Iran, which has proven that it is not trustworthy, he said.
“It did have a military program, it was seeking the bomb. It continues to lie about it. It lied to the European negotiators, to the UN, to the IAEA,” Fingar said. "This history mandates having a rigorous verification capability."
Monitoring is done in three bins, he said. The first, and most important, is the IAEA on-site inspections. The second is that done by other countries’ intelligence services, including those of the other P5 plus 1 countries and Israel. The third bin is the U.S. intelligence community.
“We will learn far more about what Iran is doing from the IAEA inspections than from any other mechanism,” Fingar said.
Milani focused on the politics of the deal inside Iran. Discussion of this political dimension, he said, cannot be understood unless we take into account two critical issues: Recent concerns with the health of Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and the heated battle on who might succeed him; and secondly the rise of ISIS and the fact that they are near Iran’s borders and have repeatedly threatened the country’s Shiites.
The debate in Iran is heated, he said, with many in favor of the agreement and a few opposed to it.
“Part of what is being fought over is what happens after the deal,” he said. “Who can claim victory for the deal? Who can take blame for it? These are profoundly political issues and they are being fought over.”
Milani said that he has never seen any policy issue, in the entire 35-year history of the Islamic Republic, being discussed with as much detail, and with as much ferocity as the nuclear deal.
There are occasional, detailed debates happening in Tehran University and other places Milani said. One side –typically pro-regime hard-liner – argues that this is the worst deal in Iran’s history. Reformists and scholars supporting President Rouhani’s government defend the agreement.
But he said these conservative opponents of the agreement are in the minority. He estimates that they have no more than 7 to 10 million supporters in a country with a population of 75 million. The vast majority of the population wants a deal, he said. The Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, which wields more power than any other group, is not all in favor of the deal and has made threats against the government in recent weeks.
Still, the ultimate political obstacle is that the deal must contain language that all actors can sell to their respective constituencies as a victory. And finding a language that passes this political hurdle is every bit as hard as the problems discussed by Hecker and Fingar.
William J. Perry shares a video depicting the threat of nuclear terrorism with a Stanford audience.
William J. Perry delivers the Drell Lecture in an address entitled "A National Security Walk Around the World."
