Partial success or eventual failure?

Noah Pollak of the Emergency Committee for Israel tweeted today:

Obama policy = preventing Iran from getting nuke. Israel policy = preventing capability to build nuke. There’s the rub.

That is indeed the rub, but there is vast ambiguity hiding behind both equations.  What does “getting” a nuke really mean?  What does “preventing capability” really mean?

In short, building a nuclear weapons requires two of three things:

• Enrichment technology, or
• Plutonium production capability, and
• Specific design and ignition capabilities for nuclear weapons

Enrichment and plutonium production are “dual use,” that is they can be used for both peaceful and weapons purposes.  Iran already has enrichment technology enabling it to enrich to 20%.  That program is more advanced than its plutonium efforts.  Moving beyond 20% enrichment is not a big technological step.  What would it mean to take away this capability?

I suppose there is someone who thinks it means killing whichever Iranian nuclear scientists provide this capability.  But realistically speaking that won’t be possible.  The centrifuge enrichment technology that Iran has acquired is not a big mystery.  There must be dozens if not hundreds of Iranians now capable of carrying the effort forward. To my knowledge, no state that has acquired enrichment technology has every surrendered it, though Libya may have come close.  But Libya is not Iran, and what happened to Qaddafi would not encourage Supreme Leader Khamenei to go down the same road.

The only realistic approach to denying Iran nuclear weapons capability is to put its entire nuclear program under strict safeguards, with verifiable guarantees that it won’t enrich beyond current levels.  Iran would also have to give up working on specific design and ignition capabilities.  That is the direction President Obama is pointing when he says there is still a diplomatic solution.

The real question is whether Israel and its supporters in the United States could accept such a diplomatic solution as denying Iran nuclear capability.  There was no sign of that at the AIPAC meeting today, where the President was applauded only when he talked about the military option and not when he mentioned diplomacy.

The problem with the military option is that it only delays and does not resolve.  Iran would unquestionably redouble its efforts if its nuclear facilities are attacked.  That is the correct lesson of the Israeli attack on Iraq’s Osiraq reactor in 1981, as Colin Kahl points out. Any attack would have to be repeated at shorter and shorter intervals, without any guarantee that they would prevent Iran from eventually getting nuclear weapons.

So which do you prefer?  Diplomacy that leaves some capability in Iranian hands, and has to be constantly monitored to ensure compliance, or the military option, which is doomed to eventual failure in preventing Iran from “getting” nuclear weapons?