This bizarre animated film aired on Tehran TV on February 21, 2007. It shows the completion of nuclear plants in several Iranian cities by the year 2023. In Tehran TV's view of the future, the United States, encouraged by Israel, mobilizes the international community to stop Iran's efforts, but fails. 

ALEX WONG/Getty Images News

The commentariat has, understandably, gone apoplectic about yesterday's news that Iran stopped its nuclear-weapons program in 2003. And several Democratic candidates, hoping to score points against frontrunner Hillary Clinton, are having a field day:

Barack Obama: "[T]he new National Intelligence Estimate makes a compelling case for less saber-rattling and more direct diplomacy."

John Edwards: "The new NIE finds that Iran halted its nuclear weapons program in 2003 and that Iran can be dissuaded from pursuing a nuclear weapon through diplomacy."

The problem is, the NIE doesn't actually go that far. It strongly suggests that the threat of sanctions and military action is actually helpful, but makes no promises about what can be achieved through diplomacy:

Our assessment that Iran halted the program in 2003 primarily in response to international pressure indicates Tehran's decisions are guided by a cost-benefit approach rather than a rush to a weapon irrespective of the political, economic, and military costs. This, in turn, suggests that some combination of threats of intensified international security and pressures, along with opportunities for Iran to achieve its security, prestige, and goals for regional influence in other ways might—if perceived by Iran's leaders as credible—prompt Tehran to extend the current halt to its nuclear weapons program.

The NIE's conclusion here is remarkably similar to National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley's statement, dismissed everywhere as pure spin:

The estimate offers grounds for hope that the problem can be solved diplomatically - without the use of force - as the Administration has been trying to do. And it suggests that the President has the right strategy: intensified international pressure along with a willingness to negotiate a solution that serves Iranian interests while ensuring that the world will never have to face a nuclear armed Iran. The bottom line is this: for that strategy to succeed, the international community has to turn up the pressure on Iran - with diplomatic isolation, United Nations sanctions, and with other financial pressure - and Iran has to decide it wants to negotiate a solution.

Matt Yglesias cries foul and says that the Bush administration has been hyping the threat, and that's certainly true. And it may well be that Vice President Dick Cheney discounts the intelligence community's assessment. But there may also be a defensible reason for the hysteria. If we take Hadley's statement at face value, the past year of bluster coming from the administration makes sense. The fundamental problem is that the Europeans, the Chinese, and especially the Russians are skittish about enacting U.N. sanctions. But the sanctions seem to be working! Yet to get others on board, the United States has had to sound the alarm about the program and threaten that if sanctions fail, it will turn to its Air Force for solutions. In order to be effective, this threat has to be credible: The Iranians have to believe it, and the other members of the Security Council have to believe it. In other words, the Bush administration has to convince the world that the alternative to sanctions is war, rather than a nuclear Iran that might be unpalatable but is ultimately a manageable problem.

Of course, what the administration hasn't done is offer Iran a credible package of inducements that includes security guarantees, economic incentives, and so forth. In the words of the NIE, "opportunities for Iran to achieve its security, prestige, and goals for regional influence in other ways." Hadley's mention of a "willingness to negotiate a solution that serves Iranian interests" hints that such a package might be in the offing. The trouble is, Iran's negotiators are much more irascible now than they were in 2003, so the price will be far higher than it was back then—assuming a deal is still even possible.

The Japanese newspaper Mainichi Shimbun has a  long and at times contentious interview with Morris Jeppson, one of the two surviving members of the crew of the Enola Gay. 

Jeppson isn't a big fan of Barack Obama generally, particularly his views on nuclear disarmament. Interestingly, Jeppson, who was in charge of arming the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima, seems to feel that the time has come for Japan to have nuclear weapons of its own:

So I've always endorsed Japan's position of let's not go for nuclear weapons. But I don't believe that anymore. [...]

The only thing that worked before now is deterrent. So if Obama gets us out of nuclear weapons, and Japan is sitting there with no nuclear weapons, Japan is at the mercy of North Korea and China, we are defenseless against North Korea and China and Iran. We already have a weapon and I trust they'll keep them under control. But Japan is heavily into the nuclear power industry, more than the biggest nuclear power in the whole world. When you generate nuclear power, I'm kind of on the fringe of that. You manufacture plutonium -- that's the Nagasaki-type bomb. So that's why North Korea wants it, Iran wants it, China has it, Pakistan has it. I think Japan with super technology could very, very quickly produce nuclear weapons and be prepared to use them if they had to.

Now that's what I am going to ask you -- that's my point of view for where Japan should go. Now I need to ask you -- how do you think Japan would be over the long range, of being a protectorate of nuclear weaponry? Would it not use it unless there is a good reason to use it? For me, I'd like to be reassured that Japan is a democracy and a world power and will protect what it has -- nuclear power and nuclear weapons if it can get nuclear weapons. Getting nuclear weapons would hold off North Korea for sure -- that would stop North Korea from ever using them -- that would involve Japan. I think it might be a deterrent to hold back China.

The whole three-part interview is fascinating reading, particularly the interaction between Jeppson and the Japanese interviewer over whether Obama should offer an apology when he visits Hiroshima in November.

Photo: Wikipedia

Having spent another refreshing night in the flesh-eating bacteria wing of the Davos Dermatological and Allergy Clinic, I have arrived at the Congress Hall refreshed if a little bit worried about the first signs of a strange rash. (Not really. And I am sure the place has not been a clinic for months.  There are signs all over announcing that it is not only a hotel, but a Grand Hotel. I harbor a bit of a sense that were I to peel the signs away it would say "biohazard" underneath, but why tempt fate?)

Even more frightening, one of the themes that came up several times yesterday was nuclear terrorism. A very senior Wall Street banker with whom I spoke said the session he attended on the subject made him want to run screaming into the night. One panelist on that session was the Prime Minister of Pakistan, Shaukat Aziz, who had early in the day been on the terrorism panel I chaired. In both sessions, he displayed both articulate aplomb and a deft ability to sidestep any question that he felt was uncomfortable.

JOEL SAGET/AFP

"Everything is fine with Pakistan's nuclear facilities, everything is safe," he assured unconvinced observers. One such man, a former foreign minister who now heads a well-respected NGO, noted to me (in the men's room of the Congress Hall, where polite urinal chit-chat inevitably turns to WMD proliferation) that he emphatically disagreed, asserting that "Pakistan is the most dangerous country in the world." It's a refrain I have heard several times in the past few days, as the precariousness of the broader Middle East situation reminds observers that Pakistan's nuclear stockpile is only a coup away from falling into the hands of radical elements who might well be allied with al Qaeda. (more after the jump)

While George Bush and Vladimir Putin squabble about the location of missile defense sites and ramp up the rhetoric about a new cold war, a new poll indicates that the public in both countries broadly support measures to reduce their countries' nuclear arsenals.

According to the poll, conducted by WorldPublicOpinion.org and the Center for International Security Studies at the University of Maryland, healthy majorities in both countries support taking nuclear weapons off of high alert, participating in the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, sharing information on weapons stocks, and using nuclear weapons only if attacked first. Remarkably, 73 percent of Americans and 63 percent of Russians believe that all nuclear weapons should be eliminated, assuming that a proper verification procedure were in place.

The poll results indicate that the public is broadly in favor of the kind of deep arsenal cuts outlined by elder statesmen George Shultz, William Perry, Henry Kissinger, and Sam Nunn in a Wall Street Journal editorial (pdf) earlier this year, which partly inspired the poll. The issue of nuclear disarmament has fallen from the public eye since the end of the Cold War.

World Security Institute Director Bruce Blair, who spoke at the poll's unveiling, believes this is because the public understands neither the scale of the United States' and Russia's nuclear programs nor how short a fuse they are on. According to this and previous polls, most Americans and Russians vastly underestimate the size of their countries' nuclear arsenals and are unaware of how many are on high alert, meaning they can be deployed in a matter of minutes in response to a perceived threat. Former U.S. Defense Secretary Robert McNamara laid out many of the risks in an FP cover story in 2005.

Blair feels that the political moment may soon arrive when leaders will be forced to recognize the public's desire to reduce the nuclear threat. "What this poll shows is that the public's view is poles apart from the actions of their government," he said.

Last week Ploughshares Fund President Joe Cirincione wrote on ForeignPolicy.com that the pending civilian nuclear cooperation deal between the U.S. and United Arab Emirates was "Half-baked and hasty at best, foolhardy and dangerous at worst" and would likely contribute to a nuclear arms race in the Middle East.

The piece has stirred some debate in the nonproliferation community. Here's one thoughtful response from Joe DeThomas, nonproliferation director at the U.S. Civilian Research & Development Foundation. He previously served as Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary of State in the Bureau of Nonproliferation and Ambassador to Estonia. The views expressed here and DeThomas's own and do not represent those of the CRDF:

I may be disqualified from replying to Joe Cirincione's article, since I have actually been to the U.A.E. and discussed its nuclear program with the people actually implementing it.  This will take all the fun out of any comments I make. But the piece does raise a number of questions that I think are worth addressing.

1.  Is there a nuclear arms race in the Gulf and Middle East?  Is interest in nuclear power really driven by the need to counter the Iranian program?

It is probably not coincidental that so many countries in the region, many of them Sunni, have suddenly decided to pursue nuclear power. However, it is probably also not coincidental that these grandiose plans coincided with $150-a-barrel oil and with the fact that booming electricity demand was causing them to consume the lifeblood of their economies at home.  But, are these countries really racing and if so is nuclear power for electricity generation the way they are racing to match the Iranians?  For the most part, I'd say no. 

First there is a lot more talk than action outside the UAE.  (Unless Saudi Arabia were to unleash a crash program, no country in the region outside of the UAE will have an operating nuclear power program before 2025.) Second, if there is any thought of using power reactors as a counter balance to Iran, it is in order to persuade public and elite opinion in the countries in question that they are matching the Iranians without doing any of the real things that would be necessary to create a real arms race. This is not to say that such posturing could not create a mess.  We should be paying attention to ways to keep any such shadow plays from creating real security problems.

2. Is the UAE program a potential proliferation threat?

If ever a program was designed to make it ill-suited for proliferation, it is the UAE program. First, the program did not flow out of a political-military calculation but out of a rather robust energy policy debate.  Second, it specifically rejects acquiring the front or back ends of the fuel cycle. Third, it will be very happy to send away spent fuel and does not wish to pursue a plutonium economy. Fourth, it is in such a hurry to deploy power reactors that it is not going to pursue many of the preliminary steps that other countries do to get ready for nuclear power (e.g., operate research reactors, which we have seen in India and the DPRK are much more useful for small weapons programs than big power reactors are). 

Fifth, because it is resource rich but people poor, the UAE is going to be highly dependent on foreign expertise and foreign firms to build, operate and regulate its program. It has gone out of its way to select outside expertise that will not have any incentive (and faces many disincentives) to assist or tolerate proliferation. Sixth, it has gone out of its way to constrain its future options by signing on to every constraining international agreement and inspection regime it could find. Seventh, it has selected technologies (LWR's with a once-through fuel cycle) for its future program that are the least congenial to pursue proliferation.

Now, there are those who will argue that ANY nuclear technology in the Middle East presents proliferation and security risks. I suppose if we could dictate choices in the region there might be a case to be made to make the Middle East a nuclear technology free zone. But, that is not on the menu either politically or economically. No US strategy will persuade the countries of the region or the suppliers in the industrialized world to create a nuclear boycott on the entire Arab world. If we can't stop the development of nuclear power in the region, we should at least have the sense to be happy if it is put in place in a way that minimizes the risks and maximizes our influence on the way it is used.

If we can show that countries that do things the right way get the benefit of an efficient, safe, secure nuclear power program while countries like Iran end up with clunky hybrid reactors that were obsolete before they ever generated a kilowatt, we might finally get somewhere. 

-Joseph DeThomas

The six-party talks have failed yet again, though the North Koreans have promised to study more generous U.S. proposals. Pyongyang has also promised to "improved its nuclear deterrent."

The deal-breaker was North Korea's demand that U.S. financial restrictions be part of the negotiations on the North's nuclear weapons. That was met by a stiff refusal by Christopher Hill, the chief negotiator for the United States. The Bush administration says the sanctions are tied to North Korea's criminal enterprises, not to its nuclear program.

Our sympathies are with Mr. Hill, sandwiched as he is between the unrealistic demands of the White House and the unstable negotiating tactics of Pyongyang.

First, Hill must deal with Mr. Bush's North Korea policy: bluster and saber-rattling one day and pleading for a return to talks another. Until the North's nuclear test in October, Washington had demanded a complete dismantling of the nuclear program as a pre-condition to talks. Having had to crawl back to the table (a pattern), the Bush administration maintains that the only solution it is willing to accept is complete dismantlement. But out of the nine countries that have ever acquired nuclear weapons, only South Africa has ever given them up—and that happened because apartheid regime collapsed. Every other country has done what the UK just decided a few weeks ago: Maintain and improve their nuclear stockpiles.

A more realistic goal than complete disarmament, says Brookings scholar Ivo H. Daalder, would be for North Korea to freeze and verify its existing program. This means: No more testing, a freeze on plutonium production, the return of international monitors, and the end of North Korea's uranium enrichment program. As Daalder tartly observes, if the U.S. achieves these goals, we'd be back where we were under Clinton 12 years ago.

But the Bush administration's negotiating foibles pale in comparison to the calculated unpredictability of the North Koreans. Mr Hill is the latest of a series of envoys to match wits with Mr. Kim Kye-gwan, who has been North Korea's chief negotiator since the mid-1990s. As Tim Johnson explains, North Korea has honed erratic negotiating behavior to an art:

Make outlandish demands. Appear unyielding. Threaten to bolt at the slightest provocation…escalating a mood of crisis, demanding last-minute concessions and unilaterally reinterpreting past accords…"They basically demand everything but the kitchen sink, and they are not offering much in return so far," Snyder said. "It helps to shape the field of negotiation to their advantage."…"Nobody has ever effectively countered their negotiating style. That's why we're in the mess we're in," said Ralph A. Cossa, head of the Honolulu-based Pacific Forum of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a policy institute.”

Mr. Hill got a taste of this strategy when the North Koreans pulled one of their favorite tactics, arriving a day late. Much of this is for show. The North Koreans are loth to display any sign of weakness in public, but according to U.S. negotiators, in private sessions there is greater willingness to talk and sort things out. Yet, if last week is any indication, they aren't very willing. For now, Mr. Hill faces an uphill battle to resolve East Asia's biggest security challenge.

I must admit, this news surprises me. Assuming David Albright's analysis is on point, did the Syrians really believe they would get away with it?

Independent experts have pinpointed what they believe to be the Euphrates River site in Syria that was bombed by Israel last month, and satellite imagery of the area shows buildings under construction roughly similar in design to a North Korean reactor capable of producing nuclear material for one bomb a year, the experts say.

Photographs of the site taken before the secret Sept. 6 airstrike depict an isolated compound that includes a tall, boxy structure similar to the type of building used to house a gas-graphite reactor. They also show what could have been a pumping station used to supply cooling water for a reactor, say experts David Albright and Paul Brannan of the Institute for Science and International Security (ISIS).

U.S. and international experts and officials familiar with the site, who were shown the photographs yesterday, said there was a strong and credible possibility that they depict the remote compound that was attacked. Israeli officials and the White House declined to comment.

Check out ISIS's report here (pdf). Arms-control expert Jeffrey Lewis of Harvard, who has yet to comment on this specific report, is deeply skeptical of an ABC News story that appears to describe the same photographs. Lewis notes that the North Koreans use gas, not water, to cool Yongbyon. I'll be interested to see his take on this new report, given that Albright is a well-respected analyst.

In a hush-hush deal, the British government just sold its last shares in the country's nuclear weapons plant to a U.S. company. California-based Jacobs Engineering Group paid an undisclosed amount for the government's one-third stake in the only plant in the UK that manufactures nuclear weapons, including Trident warheads. Lockheed Martin owns another third of the plant, and a British business services company the remaining third.

The sale wasn't announced to Parliament, leaving some MPs to speculate that the government sold the plant at below market rates to get some much-needed funds for the Treasury. Critically, it means that all production, design, and decommissioning of nuclear weapons in the UK is privately owned, with U.S. companies having a majority stake.

Photo: Getty Images

Los Alamos Country police, on what they thought was a routine domestic disturbance call at a local trailer park, found a rudimentary crystal-meth lab and three flash drives containing more than 400 pages of classified documents from Los Alamos National Labs. Four hundred pages.

"Potentially the greatest breach of national security" in decades, is how one official described it. That would probably be true if the U.S. government wasn't already publishing documents that explain how to build nuclear weapons on the Internet.

Honestly, given that the current administration is so cagey about security that Attorney General Alberto Gonzales has threatened to prosecute journalists for revealing classified information, top secret nuclear documents are appearing in a lot of strange places. 

Foreign ministers from the major powers met today to iron out their differences on how to deal with Iran's nuclear program. Given the importance of the meeting, I asked George Perkovich, vice president here at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and a top expert on nonproliferation, to weigh in on today's statement, which was issued by the so-called P5+2, the United States, China, France, Germany, Russia, and the United Kingdom (plus the European Union). Here's Perkovich:

ElBaradei and Iran have won this round. In August the IAEA Director General accepted what were essentially Iranian terms for answering the IAEA's outstanding questions about Iran's suspicious nuclear activities. This agreement seemed to surrender the IAEA's rights and responsibilities to conduct follow-up investigations and pursue new leads. The agreement also neglected the U.N. Security Council's legally binding demands that Iran suspend uranium enrichment and reprocessing activities as long as the IAEA is unable to satisfy itself that Iran's nuclear activities have been entirely peaceful. Yet Iran and Mr. ElBaradei hailed it as a breakthrough. ElBaradei and others who are convinced the U.S. plans to go to war against Iran felt the agreement would spare the world another catastrophe.

The P5+2 statement reveals that the Iran/IAEA deal effectively neutralized the U.S., French, U.K. effort to tighten sanctions on Iran in response to Iran's ongoing refusal to accede to U.N. Security Council resolutions. The statement basically says the world should wait and hope that Iran gives the IAEA full answers and that somehow all the outstanding issues are indeed resolved. (If this were so easy, why has Iran waited more than four years to provide such answers and suffered U.N. sanctions for failing to cooperate?) Then, in November the P5+2 will reconvene and, if Iran has not satisfied the IAEA, they will huff and puff some more.

When President Ahmadinejad said last week that the Iran case is closed in the Security Council and the matter is with the IAEA where it belongs, he was absolutely wrong from a legal standpoint. The U.N. Security Council Resolutions remain active and binding. But now some members of the Security Council, following the lead of Director General ElBaradei, are showing that President Ahmadinejad is having his way, at least for now.

I mentioned a few weeks ago that I was getting awfully tired of reading about Russia's strongly worded but vague "warnings" to its neighbors. Polish Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski agrees, and expressed his displeasure yesterday in the politest way imaginable:

"Of course we don't like it when the Russian president or Russian generals threaten us with nuclear annihilation. It is not a friendly thing to do, and we have asked them to do it no more than once a month."

Who could say no to that?

Maybe this is for real this time:

Iran has struck a basic deal to enrich uranium with Russia, Iranian state radio has reported.The details have still to be worked out. Tehran claimed a similar deal in February, when a Russian nuclear chief visited Iran. Iran's ambassador to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), Ali Asghar Soltanieh, told Iranian radio he had struck a basic agreement. Tehran is under pressure from the UN Security Council to freeze enrichment. Mr Soltanieh said the joint enrichment company would operate on Russian soil.

KAREN BLEIER/AFP

Pressure is mounting on the international community to stop Iran’s nuclear program. Iran remains defiant; its president has declared a policy of "no surrender" on his country's nuclear enrichment program. But the United Nations Security Council is putting the final touches on new sanctions that would penalize Tehran for its intransigence.

And there may be more on the way. 

Key U.S. lawmaker Tom Lantos wants to go further than the Bush administration has been willing to go, and present countries—even U.S. allies and powerful states like Russia and China—with a choice: Either you’re with the United States, or you’re with Iran.

He says his new strategy is "the single most effective avenue of compelling Iran to give up its military nuclear ambition." 

Find out why in this week’s Seven Questions.