Unthinkable by Kenneth M. Pollack Read Free Book Online Page B

them—sanctions, international isolation, the threat of a military strike, or something else. We would not know which, but we could assume that it was one or some combination of them. Even if Iran had never wanted anything other than the capability to defend itselfagainst attack, there would be no reason to stop with a breakout capability if there were no cost to proceeding to an actual arsenal. Taiwan, South Korea, Argentina, and other countries that have stopped with what amounts to a breakout capability all did so because of the price to be paid by going further. If Iran were not concerned about that price, why stop? This would demonstrate that the Iranian regime actually was sensitive to some degree of external resistance, which should give us confidence that Tehran would only move to full weaponization if they had reason to believe that the externally imposed cost no longer applied, or if the regime had a newly compelling reason to weaponize that suddenly made it willing to absorb that cost in a way that it wasn’t in the past.
    CRISIS MANAGEMENT AND A NONWEAPONIZED IRAN. The problem of crisis management also becomes far, far easier if Iran has only a theoretical breakout capacity rather than a deployed arsenal. In any situation where Iran is not the instigator of the problem and it has not specifically chosen beforehand to use the crisis to transition from a breakout capability to an actual arsenal, its latent nuclear capability becomes irrelevant. As it would take Iran weeks or months to assemble a nuclear weapon, that capability would not be germane to the crisis at hand. Iran would not be able to threaten anyone with its nuclear forces because it won’t have any. It can’t even threaten uncontrollable escalation because it would not be able to escalate to the nuclear level. The dangerous and perplexing problems of nuclear crisis management would not be present. Which also means that both before and after crises, the two sides would not have to go through the expensive and destabilizing rigmarole of preparing for a potential nuclear crisis, with all of its attendant risks, complexities, and dangers. The dangers of nuclear crisis management would not have to drive strategy, force structure, arms purchases, doctrine, operating procedures, or decision-making because the crises wouldn’t be nuclear. That would be an enormously beneficial state of affairs.
    Many of the dangerous scenarios that we all fear if Iran possesses a nuclear arsenal become a lot less hair-raising if Iran has only a potentialcapability to field an arsenal. Imagine if Israel and Hizballah start going at it. Iran cannot step in and raise the specter of escalation to a nuclear exchange to force Israel to back down, because Iran would not have nuclear weapons. At most, Iran could threaten to break out of the NPT and deploy an arsenal at some point in the near future after the crisis had passed. This might be enough to get Israel to back down, but not because Israel would fear uncontrollable escalation. Nor is it reasonable to believe that the Israelis would fear that Iran would assemble a weapon months later and use it against them. There would no longer be a “heat of the moment” problem and cooler heads would have plenty of time to prevail. Ultimately, the only reason that Israel might choose to back down would be if it did not want Iran to weaponize. That kind of pressure might still not be great from Israel’s perspective or our own, but it is vastly better than having actual nuclear crises.
    Even if Iran had come to the decision that it wanted to go ahead and weaponize, and was now willing to endure whatever costs had brought it up short in the past, it would be difficult for Tehran to somehow use it as part of a crisis. The IAEA inspects Iran’s facilities every six to eight weeks, so Iran’s breakout window would have to be under six weeks for it to gain any possibility of surprising a rival with a deployed