Nuclear Issues

New sanctions imposed by the United Nations Security Council on September 11 in response to North Korea’s latest nuclear test are “not significant enough,” according to R. Nicholas Burns, an Atlantic Council board member who served as undersecretary of state for political affairs in the George W. Bush administration.

Sanctions must be part of a “patient long-term strategy” that includes deterrence, working closely with allies, and negotiations, said Burns, laying out the United States’ options for dealing with the North Korean crisis.  

A key foreign affairs issue for the Trump administration will be its policy on Iran, as was the case also for the Obama administration. But we have no idea what approach it will take, an uncertainty amplified by the fact that Trump has no experience whatsoever in foreign policy, and no idea whose input he will accept in shaping it. It’s not as if we have no information about his attitude – during the election campaign, Trump made his intention on Iran very clear – but, as with other topics, it is unclear how he will act when once he is forced to translate his intentions into action and realizes that reality is far more complicated than he imagined.

The Iran nuclear deal was officially implemented on Saturday, as Iran successfully fulfilled its initial key nuclear commitments and the international community relieved major sanctions, including unfreezing about $100 billion of Iranian money. Implementation Day was met with applause from deal supporters in the U.S. and Iran, while critics have raised questions about whether Iran will adhere to its requirements and how it will flex its newfound economic power. Also in recent days, the U.S. and Iran agreed to a prisoner swap that led to the freedom of Washington Post reporter Jason Rezaian and others, and negotiated the release of American sailors detained in Iran. What does the arrival of Implementation Day mean for Iran’s nuclear program and nuclear nonproliferation, and how does it bode for the future of U.S.-Iran relations? We asked Belfer Center experts to weigh in on these and related questions.

Henry Rome reviews the latest version of the Iran oversight legislation drafted by Sen. Ben Cardin (D, Maryland). Since publishing a “discussion draft” last month, Cardin removed language related to Iranian production of highly enriched uranium (HEU) but retained sections permitting new terrorism sanctions and increasing defense assistance to Israel.

Aaron Arnold, Associate with the Project on Managing the Atom at the Belfer Center, and Nikos Passas, Professor of Criminal Justice at Northeastern University, argue in The Conversation that Iran's reintegration into the global financial system may in fact make it easier, not more difficult, to monitor Iranian financial activities for illicit transactions. They point to the fact that banks can monitor transactions for entities designated as involved in terrorist or weapons of mass destruction activities by the U.S. Treasury. They also suggest that Iran may adopt stricter money laundering standards in order to increase economic integration. While challenges remain, they suggest that building a public-private partnership between banks and regulators will ensure that Iran will be caught in any illicit financial actions after the nuclear deal.

Henry Rome reviews new legislation drafted by Sen. Ben Cardin (D, Maryland), which aims to expand Congressional oversight of the nuclear deal’s implementation and its power to impose new sanctions.

Olli Heinonen, Senior Fellow at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, and Simon Henderson, Baker Fellow at the Washington Institute for Middle East Policy, write for the Washington Institute for Near East Policy that the final agreement with Iran over its nuclear program needs to take into account the efficiency of Iranian centrifuges when calculating breakout time, and not just the number of centrifuges allowed to enrich. They note that the exact efficiency in Separative Work Units (SWUs) of the Iranian IR-1 centrifuge is not exactly known, and therefore it is very possible that American estimates of Iran's enrichment capacity dangerously underestimates how much Iran is able to enrich, meaning that estimates putting its breakout time at one year are are inaccurate. They argue that it is necessary to understand exactly how efficient the Iranian centrifuges are in order to understand how many Iran needs to maintain a breakout time of about one year, and that this figure cannot only be calculated from the number of centrifuges Iran possess.

Gary Samore, Director of Research at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, writes in Time that the emerging nuclear agreement with Iran, while not perfect, buys needed time for the United States and its allies to continue to manage the potential threat of a nuclear Iran. He notes that the agreement will severely restrict any Iranian attempt to build a nuclear weapon through enriching plutonium, as it mandates modification of the Arak Nuclear facility and bans the construction of a nuclear reprocessing facility, which would be necessary for extracting plutonium from used fuel rods. However, the agreement does leave Iran with a much more robust uranium enrichment program, with restrictions for ten years which are steadily eased between fifteen and twenty-five years after the agreement is signed. He suggests that while it may be possible to get a better deal with tougher negotiating tactics, the United States will not be able to keep international consensus pressuring Iran if it rejects the deal after Iran appears to agree to it. He concludes that while this does not solve the problem of the Iranian nuclear program, it gives the United States time to check Iranian regional designs, encourage political change in Iran, and seek other ways to change the regime's calculus about nuclear weapons.

What could happen if the Iranian nuclear talks fail?

Along with President Obama, four members of the Belfer Center's Iran Working Group--Graham Allison, Nader Habibi, Payam Mohseni, and William Tobey--answer the vital question of what scenarios are possible if the negotiations fail, both sides declare diplomacy finished, and the commitments from the interim Joint Plan of Action are voided. 

Payam Mohseni, just returned from a long trip to Iran, offers his observations on Iranian attitudes toward nuclear negotiations gleaned from meetings with Iranians from across the political spectrum. He finds a distinct disconnect between Iranian and American perceptions of the relationship between the two countries.