Consider this scenario: The Saudis have gone nuclear. So have the Egyptians. Both countries had been signatories to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, but that agreement is now dissolved. Riyadh and Cairo acquired their weapons from Pakistan, a Sunni ally, in response to the nuclear threat from Shia Iran. Meanwhile, Iraq continues to fester, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is far from settled, and Iranian proxies remain firmly entrenched within Lebanon's combustible sectarian mix--a mix that pits Sunni against Shia and just so happens to exist on Israel's northern border. In short, all the key players in the Middle East--Sunni, Shia, Israeli--now have nuclear weapons at a moment when the simmering and, in some cases, quite open conflicts between the region's states, sects, and ethnicities are almost too numerous to count.
If that situation sounds terrifying, it should. And it may well come to pass if Iran is allowed to go nuclear. This past December, Saudi Arabia's foreign minister, Saud Al Faisal, declared that Riyadh, in conjunction with surrounding Gulf states, might seek to develop nuclear power. He insisted the program would be used only for peaceful purposes, but, to many, Faisal's words sounded like a threat: Since Iran is pursuing nuclear weapons, maybe we will, too. If that happens, Egypt probably won't be far behind. Senior Egyptian officials have told me that, if we cannot stop Iran from going nuclear, it will spell the end of the nuclear nonproliferation regime.
Needless to say, a nuclear arms race in the Middle East would greatly increase the chances of war--between Sunnis and Shia or between Israelis and Muslims--through mistake or miscalculation. For this reason alone, we must prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons. The question is: How?
There seem to be two parallel realities today regarding Iran's nuclear program. On the one hand, most of the international community appears to oppose Iran going nuclear, and the Bush administration has helped forge two U.N. Security Council resolutions (despite Russian and Chinese hesitancy) that impose limited sanctions on the Iranian nuclear and missile industries, as well as individuals and entities associated with them. Even though the sanctions were far less stringent than those the administration initially sought, they seem to have created dissonance within the Iranian elite. Criticism of Iran's president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, has become much more open and far more pointed. One newspaper associated with Iranian supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei went so far as to say that Ahmadinejad was using the nuclear issue to divert attention from the failings of his government. As Undersecretary of State Nicholas Burns, the administration's point person on the issue, put it, "We've roiled their government, and I think we've shocked them a bit."
That's the good news. Now the other reality: The Iranians continue to press ahead with their nuclear program. The International Atomic Energy Agency reports that Tehran, some technical difficulties notwithstanding, has already produced at least 1,000 centrifuges for enriching uranium. It is now reasonable to assume that Iran will, before the end of this year, be able to reach its aim of manufacturing 3,000 centrifuges. And, once Tehran has that many centrifuges operating efficiently, it will only need about nine months to generate sufficient fissile material for one nuclear bomb.
In other words, the Iranians may be feeling pressure, but they have yet to change their behavior. The diplomatic track is slowly having an impact on Iran's leadership, but at a pace that continues to be outstripped by the country's nuclear advances. The key, then, is to find a way to alter the calculus--and, therefore, the behavior of Iran's rulers--more quickly.
Some suggest this can be done by dropping our conditions and engaging Iran. I favor this approach--but only if it is guided by an understanding that penalties, more than inducements, are the key to altering the Iranian position. When inducements have been put on the table--such as the British, French, and German offer to provide Iran with light-water nuclear reactors--the Iranians seem to have had little trouble rejecting them, and without hints of dissonance among the country's elite. Yet, when even the threat of U.N. sanctions appeared real, we began to see signs of a much sharper internal Iranian debate. For instance, last October, as discussion of sanctions was unfolding at the United Nations, former Iranian President Ali Akbar Rafsanjani released a secret letter from Ayatollah Khomeini explaining his decision to end the war with Iraq. With Ahmadinejad and his constituency as the intended audience, an Iranian newspaper commented that the letter revealed Khomeini's understanding that one cannot permit ideology to get in the way of a "realistic understanding of the international situation."
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