Iranian nuclear weapons: dubious reporting, dubious red lines

In an interesting if thinly sourced piece on how Iran is withdrawing IRGC special forces from Syria, The Sunday Times threw in this nugget at the end, as if it were no big deal:

Western intelligence officials see the next few months as a race between Iran’s programme to build a nuclear bomb and sanctions intended to ruin its economy.

This is a remarkable and, if untrue, irresponsible claim.

Both the United States and Israel continue to believe that Iran has not yet decided to build a nuclear bomb (which is distinct from conducting activities relevant to the fabrication of a bomb). This is a clear and widely-sourced claim. See Jeffrey Lewis here, Micah Zenko here, the chief of staff of the IDF here, Haaretz reporting here, and DNI James Clapper, here (“we don’t believe they have actually made the decision to go ahead with a nuclear weapon”).

There is a debate over when Iran would acquire enough uranium enriched to 20% required for one bomb, and whether and how quickly Iran could securely and/or secretly further enrich that to weapons-grade. But these debates are are all hypotheticals. In fact, Iran’s conversion of 20% enriched uranium to fuel plates actually makes it harder and slower to produce a bomb (for some strange reason, the media has only picked up this story a few days ago despite it being obvious from the IAEA’s August report).

The Sunday Times is saying is that Iran is racing for a bomb, which directly contradicts this very large and diverse mass of reporting and analysis.

My guess is that they did not mean to make this claim. But it is staggeringly poor journalism, and a very dangerous claim in the current environment. American newspapers were chastened by their experience of interpreting and reporting on WMD intelligence prior to the Iraq War, and have responded impressively and maturely. British newspapers – with a few honourable exceptions – have shown poor judgment, repeatedly made alarmist claims, and failed to convey the nuances of this technically complex subject.

Moreover, if Iran were racing for a bomb, which it is very obviously not, then the constraint would not be sanctions. Sanctions, however severe, are not going to bring down the regime in the space of the (at most) eight month period in which Iran could, if it wanted, have more than adequate 20% enriched uranium for one or more bombs. The constraint is instead  the risk of detection and vulnerability during breakout. A dash for a bomb can easily outrun sanctions, which operate only over a longer period. Saddam hung on for 12 years, even as sanctions inflicted a devastating toll on civilians (“near apocalyptic” as early as 1991). But it would still run into the other obstacles.

***

Red lines:

On a related note: as it’s a day of the week ending in “y”, Israel has thrown out a new red line for Iran’s nuclear programme. Netanyahu’s UNGA speech appeared to place his desired red line at the point at which Iran obtains enough 20% enriched uranium for one bomb, a point he estimated would arrive during the spring or summer of 2013 (this seems reasonable, but it ignores the possibility that Iran will keep converting some to fuel). This Netanyahu line differs from the presumptive American red line(s) insofar as Iran would cross this one even before making any decision to enrich beyond 20%.

Now,  according to Special Envoy for the Israeli Prime Minister Zalman Shoval, “the red line for Israel is when the Iranians have produced enough fissionable material from which they can produce at least a dirty bomb within a short time”.

This is an even more incoherent red line than many of those suggested earlier, for the simple reason that enriched uranium is not used in dirty bombs:  “these materials, perhaps counterintuitively, are not radioactive enough. Their radioactive emissions don’t travel far and are blocked by simple barriers, including skin and clothing. A dirty bomb would use small amounts of highly radioactive materials such as cesium or cobalt, not uranium”. If Iran did use uranium in a dirty bomb, it wold need “some 1,400 tons of uranium – when all Iran has now is 6 tons total”.

British nuclear weapons and non-deployment: misunderstanding the “Japan option”

The Guardian’s top story is on the future of British nuclear weapons, based on comments by former Lib Dem minister, Sir Nick Harvey. It indicates a less-than-stellar understanding of the subject by the paper:

Harvey said past policy on Trident had been dictated by the 1980s view that the only deterrent to a nuclear attack from the then Soviet Union was the belief that the UK could “flatten Moscow” in retaliation. This led to the UK building Trident and having at least one armed submarine at sea every hour of every day since.

This phrasing misses the point about “Continuous at Sea Deterrence” (CASD). The point of CASD was not that it was necessary to inflict a certain amount of damage, but that “a surprise attack on Western Europe by the Soviet Union was a central driver for UK force planning” (Chalmers, p2).

Nick Harvey’s suggestion that “the Russia of the 21st century […]  might find all sorts of damage to be unacceptable short of flattening Moscow” is both reasonable and slightly besides the point : CASD is not about what Britain needs to inflict on Russia, but what assumptions are made about what Russia can and might do to Britain.

As Malcolm Chalmers points out (see piece cited above), the assumption is indeed changing in favour of the view that “the UK homeland does not face a significant threat of attack by other states. Nor, it is assumed, could one emerge without an extended period of strategic warning”. The point, in other words, is not that Russia is more deterrable today, but that the prospect of a Russian first strike has receded.

The second problem with the article is its discussion about the prospect of a non-deployed arsenal:

Instead of replacing Trident with a like-for-like 24-hour nuclear armed submarine presence at sea after the current system is due to be taken out of service in 2028, cheaper alternatives are being considered. These range from stepping down the patrols, to designing missiles to be launched from aircraft, surface navy ships or land, to a delayed launch system on the model employed by other countries, including Japan.

Er, what? “Delayed launch system”? There are all sorts of strategic, technical and financial reasons why alternatives to Trident might be problematic. But, regardless of where one stands in that debate, the comparison to Japan is just bizarre. The paper explains Harvey’s suggestion like this: “the UK would store the warheads in a secure military location, from where they could be removed, put on the tip of a missile and put to sea within weeks or months”.

This is nothing like Japan. In fact, this passage demonstrates a serious confusion between (1) nuclear latency, (2) a rapid breakout capability, and (3) a non-deployed arsenal.

(1) Japan is latent because it has “made large investments in a civilian nuclear power industry, without developing the sort of expertise that would allow the quick assembly of a nuclear device, or the production of delivery vehicles”. Its access to plutonium, technological sophistication, and satellite launch experience mean that it could hypothetically build a deliverable nuclear bomb – but we’re talking years. Clearly, this isn’t what Harvey means.

(2) Rapid breakout refers to the possibility of quick assembly, but minimal attention to delivery systems and the suchlike. An example would be India in the late 1980s and 1990s. From ~1986 onwards, it is presumed that India could easily and quickly put together a bomb. But it couldn’t properly drop this from a plane, or put it on the tip of a missile. India only carried out its first “fully instrumented aircraft drop test” of a bomb in 1994, roughly eight years after preparing a bomb. I don’t think Harvey is suggesting that Britain just wings it like this.

(3) A non-deployed arsenal is similar, but it requires a higher degree of integration and preparation e.g. the fissile core might be stored separately to the warhead, as Pakistan claims of its arsenal, but the warhead would otherwise have to be ready to go (“for a rainy day”, as Harvey quaintly puts it). This is what Harvey means by “put on the tip of a missile”. He envisions the possession of bombs that are basically together, and fully functioning delivery systems – including options like cruise missiles.

Depending on the delivery system, this requires a far higher degree of weapons development [1] and operational planning for alerting procedures than is suggested by the comparison with Japan. The analogy is fundamentally misleading.

Notes:

[1] E.g. “Any programme to develop and manufacture a new cruise missile would cost far more than retaining the Trident D5 missile. In capability terms, cruise missiles are much less effective than a ballistic missile […] Therefore it was clear that, in terms of both cost and capability, retaining the Trident D5 missile is by far the best approach” – Defence White Paper: The Future of the United Kingdom’s Nuclear Deterrent, December 2006, p25

India and “No First Use”

Earlier this year, the Institute of Peace and Conflict Studies (IPCS) in Delhi released a document, India’s Nuclear Doctrine: An Alternative Blueprint, intended as a “constructive critique” of India’s existing doctrine.

India’s first draft nuclear doctrine in 1999 was a rush job, designed to alleviate international pressure after the previous year’s nuclear tests. In 2003, a more formal document was issued, one which basically accepted India’s “No First Use” pledge and promised “non-use of nuclear weapons against non-nuclear states” i.e. negative security assurances. (Scott Sagan has a nice overview).

In the decade since, most of the debate has been on whether India’s promise of massive retaliation should change to something more credible, such as “assured retaliation” or “flexible response”. There has been comparably little debate over whether India should retain NFU. Last year, former foreign and defense minister Jaswant Singh called for the policy to be reconsidered. See also Reshmi Kazi here and Ali Ahmed here.

The IPCS doctrine, which has an impressively diverse range of authors (many of the other Delhi think-tanks are represented), has an interesting take on this.

It states that:

In adherence to a policy of no first use, India will not initiate a nuclear strike.

The ambiguous use of “strike” is unhelpful. The term has a specific meaning in orthodox deterrence theory, usually referring to a specific type of nuclear first use – preemptive counterforce (see Quinlan, p6, para. 5).

But even more curious is its clarification of what “initiate” means: “‘Initiation’ covers the process leading up to the actual use of a nuclear weapon by an adversary. This would include mating component systems and deploying warheads with the intet [sic] This will enable the Prime Minister to gain the flexibility to decide upon an appropriate response”.

The unfinished sentence aside, this is a fairly … bold definition. It means that if Pakistan mates its warheads to missiles as part of nuclear alerting during a crisis, it can be understood to have “initiated” a nuclear strike. That denudes NFU of all meaning.

The IPCS doctrine also alters negative security assurances a bit: “India will not resort to the use or threat of use of nuclear weapons against states that do not possess nuclear weapons, but such states shall be deemed nuclear weapons states if they ally with or assist nuclear armedstates against India, and/or assist them during hostilities”.

If India had a strict NFU pledge, then these assurances are irrelevant – how would a non-nuclear state initiate a nuclear strike on India in the first place? But, with this definition, you can just about craft a scenario whereby nuclear preparations by a nuclear-armed state count as “initiation”, which then doctrinally permits Indian nuclear use against any non-nuclear ally or co-belligerent of that first state. This is pretty fanciful stuff, but then the nature of nuclear doctrines is that they are supposed to cater to a wide range of scenarios.

There are some other interesting aspects to the document. “This document also does not speculate on the complicity of states in the motives and actions of sub and non-state actors” i.e. we have absolutely no idea what to do if Lashkar-e-Taiba gets a dirty bomb. The authors also, understandably, take a pop at the non-credibility of massive retaliation:

Ethically, the punishing of a whole population for the decisions of its leadership is unsustainable. Moreover, executing massive retaliation would expose India to risking international isolation. There is also the operational consideration, that territories captured or in dispute will be destroyed and rendered uninhabitable for a long time. The suggested alternate wording provides flexibility, while a doctrine based on reflex massive response curtails India’s options.

This – flexibility – certainly seems the direction in which India’s nuclear posture is, slowly, headed.

Pakistan’s nuclear weapons (and A.Q. Khan’s perpetual motion machine)

Bruno Tertrais has published a new paper, Pakistan’s nuclear and WMD Programmes: Status, evolution and risks (PDF), at the EU Non-Proliferation Consortium. Its mostly a synthesis of existing information, but sums things up nicely.

On the evolving nature of Pakistan’s requirements for nuclear sufficiency:

Guaranteed unacceptable damage implies survivability even after a first strike by the adversary. Pakistan is likely to use an Indian pre-emptive strike as a planning assumption (coupled, in the future, with the deployment of missile defence by India) … a former SPD officer wrote that for a set of 10 possible targets, a country might need 68–70 warheads (without taking into account the risk of a pre-emptive strike).

On Pakistan’s need for creativity in counter-value targeting:

A diversification of targets could make Pakistani deterrence more credible, given that a strike on Indian cities would produce massive casualties among its Muslim population—something that might be hard to consider for a country whose very creation was justified by the need to provide a sanctuary and a natural homeland for South Asian Muslims. [1]

For the reverse (and slightly weird) idea, that India would “spare Karachi because Indian Muslims’ relatives live in the city”, see here.

On Pakistan’s nuclear readiness:

It is widely assumed that Pakistan’s nuclear systems are kept on low alert. In peacetime, missiles may not be mated with warheads, and in 2003 President Musharraf referred to a ‘geographical separation’ between them. It is also possible that warheads are kept in a disassembled form. However, the SPD insists that it has never confirmed such arrangements; Kidwai states that forces are not on ‘hair trigger alert’ but that ‘separation is more linked to time rather than space’. A former SPD official has also denied that the warheads were kept in disassembled form. The time required to convert weapons into a state of launch readiness is uncertain. Some accounts suggest that assembly would only take minutes, while other refer to hours. Kidwai said in 2002 that it could happen ‘very quickly’.

On Pakistan’s weapons potential:

Pakistan began producing HEU in the mid-1980s …  It may be producing 120–180 kg per year, enough for 10–15 warheads … Pakistan has [also] begun developing an important plutonium production capability … Khushab-1 can produce 5.7–11.5 kg of plutonium per year depending on its duration of operation, enough for 1–3 warheads … The [total] potential production of warheads today is 7–18 per year.

In late 2010 Pakistan had enough fissile material for at least 160 warheads, and perhaps as many as 240. The coming online of the third and fourth Khushab reactors could bring the total Pakistani buildup capacity to 19–27 weapons per year.

If you assume Pakistan has a 100 warheads today, and take the lower bound for the potential production rate (19 weapons per year), it would take Pakistan under seven years to surpass the UK’s total stockpile (225 weapons), just over seven years to reach China’s level (240) and just over a decade to reach that of France (290) – with these latter figures taken from the Federation of American Scientists. For a useful chart that displays these comparisons, see here. See also the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists’ useful review, Pakistan’s nuclear forces, 2011.

Anyway, back to Tertrais. On Pakistan’s command and control

The foreign minister is deputy chairman of the Employment Control Committee (ECC), which defines nuclear strategy and would decide on nuclear use. It includes the main ministers and the military chiefs … The planned deliberative process for nuclear use is compared by the SPD to that of a ‘board of directors’. The principle of unanimity was affirmed by the NCA in 2003. A decision to use nuclear weapons would need ‘consensus within the NCA, with the chairman casting the final vote’. If consensus were impossible, however, a majority vote would  suffice. Given that the ECC comprises five civilians and four military ex officio members (not including the SPD head), it is not unreasonable to conclude that the military would be the de facto decision maker. However, it would probably ensure that the civilians shared the responsibility of the decision to use nuclear weapons.

On nuclear safety:

As stated above, weapons are probably kept in a disassembled form, but there is considerable uncertainty about the location of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons. Some suggest that even the director of the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) does not know where the weapons are.  It would make sense for most of them to be located in the northern and central parts of Pakistan, in the safest and most secure area of Punjab. After the terrorist attacks on the USA of 11 September 2001, Pakistan ordered a redeployment of its arsenal (to at least six new secret locations according to one account), for fear of an Indian attack. A similar redeployment occurred after the Abbottabad raid by the USA in May 2011, this time for fear of a US raid. Pakistan plays some kind of shell game with its nuclear weapons and dummy locations reportedly exist. If the country has about 100 warheads, it would be surprising if more than 10 sites host weapons at any given time. Some of these sites are subterranean and Pakistan has certainly gone to great lengths to physically protect them.

See also Christopher Clary’s useful 2010 paper for IDSA, Thinking about Pakistan’s Nuclear Security in Peacetime, Crisis and War.

On the nuclear codes:

The last line of defence is coding. Coding is now carried out during the manufacturing process: the launch officer receives the code a few moments before use and inserts it via a computer. For aircraft, pilots receive the code during flight. It has been surmised that 12-digit alphanumerical codes, generated by the Military Intelligence agency, are used. Codes are physically present on bases, split between two officers according to a two-man rule. There are both enabling and authenticating codes. These arrangements are supplemented by ‘a tightly controlled ID system’ and there is no involvement of intelligence services in the chain of command. Atsome points in the chain of command, a three-man rule operates ‘for technical reasons’, according to the SPD One informed source claims that the arming code is divided between three persons.

Gauging the possibility of unauthorized use depends on the exact nature of the codes used by Pakistan. Are the arming mechanisms buried deep in the warhead design, or can coding be bypassed? Do they include disabling features? Is there a code for each warhead or set of warheads, or just a general nuclear release enabling mechanism? Does physically arming a warhead depend on a code transmitted down the chain of command at the last minute, or would the code(s) already present at the base be enough?

Finally, on the EU’s concerns:

 EU members might have military facilities within reach of Pakistani longer-range missiles (e.g. France and the United Kingdom in the Gulf) or temporary bases and personnel (during an operation in the region). In the case of a deterioration in Pakistan’s relations with the West, this could be a subject of concern.

***

On a sort of related note, I was amused by A.Q. Khan’s recent interventions in the case of Pakistan’s magical car-that-runs-on-water. The father of Pakistan’s nuclear bomb appears to be quite taken with the invention:

Former science minister Dr Atta ur Rahman has bravely tried to stem the tide of nonsense by pointing out that the laws of thermodynamics rule out perpetual motion machines, but Dr Qadeer Khan (father of the Islamic bomb and national hero) steps forward to defend the inventor … he says that Readers Digest wrote many years ago that apparently ridiculous inventions may turn out to be true and one can easily see that there is no gas tank in this great man’s car, so the proof is already here … I am NOT kidding.

Video (Urdu):

“The brink is a curved slope”: Thomas Schelling on strategy

I’ve been re-reading some Thomas Schelling, and reminded of how much insight there is on nearly every paragraph of every page (as has been said: “whole careers in international relations have been built out of codifying a few sentences in Schelling”).

Some excerpts, below.

First, The Strategy of Conflict (1960):

On the (then) paucity of strategic studies:

“[M]ilitary services, in contrast to almost any other sizable and respectable profession, have no identifiable academic counterpart … Within the universities, military strategy in this country has been the preoccupation of a small number of historians and political scientists, supported on a scale that suggests that deterring the Russians from a conquest of Europe is about as important as enforcing the antitrust laws”. (p8)

On trying to persuade someone you’ll carry out an irrational threat:

“And one can suspend or destroy his own “rationality”, at least to a limited extent; one can do this because the attributes that go to make up rationality are not inalienable, deeply personal, integral attributes of the human soul, but include such things as one’s hearing aid, the reliability of the mail, the legal system, and the rationality of one’s agents and partners”. (p18)

The famous part on trip-wires:

“We are led in this way to a new interpretation of the ‘trip-wire’ [of US troops in Europe]. The analogy for our limited war forces in Europe is not, according to this argument, a trip wire that certainly detonates all-out war if it is in working order and fails altogether if it is not.

What we have a graduated series of trip wires, each attached to a chance mechanism, with the daily probability of detonation increasing as the enemy moves from wire to wire. The critical feature of the analogy, it should be emphasized, is that whether or not the trip wire detonates general war is – at least to some extent – outside our control, and the Russians know it”. (p192)

On brinksmanship and the brink:

 The brink is not, in this view, the sharp edge of a cliff where one can stand firmly, look down, and decide whether or not to plunge. The brink is a curved slope that one can stand on with some risk of slipping, the slope gets steeper and the risk of slipping greater as one moves toward the chasm. But the slope and the risk of slipping are rather irregular …

Brinksmanship is thus the deliberate creation of a recognizable risk of war, a risk that one does not completely control. It is the tactic of deliberately letting the situation get somewhat out of hand, just because its being out of hand may be intolerable to the other party and force his accommodation”. (p200)

On the social construction of nuclear red-lines:

“The inhibition on the penetration of a border, or on the introduction of a new nationality into the conflict, is like that on the introduction of a nuclear weapon; it is the risk of enemy response . And an important determinant of enemy response is his appreciation of what he has tacitly acquiesced in if he fails to respond, or makes only an incremental response, to our symbolically discontinuous act.

What we are dealing with in the anaysis of limited war is tradition. We are dealing with precedent, convention, and the force of suggestion. We are dealing with the theory of unwritten law … What makes atomic weapons different is a powerful tradition that they are different …

Certain characteristics of limits, particularly their simplicity, uniqueness, discreteness, susceptibility of qualitative definition, and so forth, can be given an objective meaning, one that is at least pertinent to the process of tacit negotiation”. (pp258-263)

***

And excerpts from Arms and Influence (1966). You can get one of the best chapters, The Art of Commitment, here [PDF].

On strategy as punishment:

“Military stategy can no longer be thought of, as it could for some countries in some eras, as the science of military victory. It is now equally, if not more, the art of coercion, of intimidation and deterrence. The instruments of war are more punitive than acquisitive. Military strategy, whether we like it or not, has become the diplomacy of violence”. (p34)

On limits to the madman theory:

“A government that is obliged to appear responsible in its foreign policy can hardly cultivate forever the appearance of impetuosity on the most important decisions in its care …

Deterrent threats are a matter of resolve, impetuosity, plain obstinacy, or, as the anarchist put it, sheer character. It is not easy to change our character; and becoming fanatic or impetuous would be a high price to pay for making our threats convincing” (pp40, 42)

On why clear signaling requires that red-lines separate things clearly:

This, I suppose, is the ultimate reason why we have to defend California-aside from whether or not Easterners want to. There is no way to let California go to the Soviets and make them believe nevertheless that Oregon and Washington, Florida and Maine, and eventually Chevy Chase and Cambridge cannot be had under the same principle …

Once they cross a line into a new class of aggression, into a set of areas or assets that we always claimed we would protect, we may even deceive them if we do not react vigorously. Suppose we let the Soviets have California, and when they reach for Texas we attack them in full force. They could sue for breach of promise. We virtually told them they could have Texas when we let them into California; the fault is ours, for communicating badly, for not recognizing what we were conceding. California is a bit of fantasy here; but it helps to remind us that the effectiveness of deterrence often depends on attaching to particular areas some of the status of California.

The principle is at work all over the world; and the principle is not wholly under our own control. I doubt whether we can identify ourselves with Pakistan in quite the way we can identify ourselves with Great Britain, no matter how many treaties we sign during the next ten years. (p56)

On how this principle differs for the two superpowers:

There is an interesting geographical difference in the Soviet and American homelands Our oceans may not protect us from big wars but they protect us from little ones. A local war could not impinge on California, involving it peripherally or incidentally through geographical continuity, the way the Korean War could impinge on Manchuria and Siberia, or the way Soviet territory could be impinged on by war in Iran, Yugoslavia, or Central Europe  …

This gives the American homeland a more distinctive character – a more unambiguous “homeland” separateness – than the Soviet homeland can have … Like virginity, the homeland wants an absolute definition. This character the Soviet bloc has been losing and may lose even more if it acquires a graduated structure like the old British Empire. (pp57, 62)

More on the need for simple threats:

“There is a simplicity, a kind of virginity, about all-or-none distinctions that differences of degree do not have. It takes more initiative, more soul-searching, more argument, more willingness to break tradition and upset expectations, to do an unprecedented thing once”. (p132)

And how the credibility of an adversary’s red-lines can be inadvertently bolstered (lessons here for India and Pakistan):

If we always treat China as though it is a Soviet California, we tend to make it so. If we imply to the Soviets that we consider Communist China or Czechoslovakia the virtual equivalent of Siberia, then in the event of any military action in or against those areas we have informed the Soviets that we are going to interpret their response as though we had landed troops in Vladivostok or Archangel or launched them across the Soviet-Polish border. We thus oblige them to react in China, or in North Vietnam or wherever it may be, and in effect give them precisely the commitment that is worth so much to them in deterring the West …

We credited the Soviets with effective deterrence and in doing so genuinely gave them some. We came at last to treat the Sino-Soviet split as a real one; but it would have been wiser not to have acknowledged their fusion in the first place. (pp60, 62)

On what can – and cannot – be credibly threatened as part of coercive diplomacy or nuclear strategy (and, by implication, why a strategy of flexible response may be more credible [PDF] than massive retaliation):

When the Russians put missiles in Cuba, why cannot the President quarantine Vladivostok, stopping Soviet ships outside, say, a twelve-mile limit, or perhaps denying them access to the Suez or Panama Canal? And if the Russians had wanted to counter the President’s quarantine of Cuba, why could they not blockade?

A hasty answer may be that it just is not done, or is not “justified,” as though connectedness implied justice, or as though justice were required for effectiveness. Surely that is part of the answer; there is a legalistic or diplomatic, perhaps a casuistic, propensity to keep things connected, to keep the threat and the demand in the same currency, to do what seems reasonable. (p87)

There is an idiom in this interaction, a tendency to keep things in the same currency, to respond in the same language, to make the punishment fit the character of the crime, to impose a coherent pattern on relations” (p147)

The rest of the book looks at the manipulation of risk, how to fight and end a nuclear war, and the dynamic of arms racing and arms control.

Iran on the brink (of what?)

Note: post amended with a correction at the bottom

Dan Senor, a foreign policy adviser to Mitt Romney, has declared that “”Iran is on the brink of getting a nuclear weapon”.

This is hardly unprecedented language. A few months ago, The Times (of London, that is) splashed “Iran close to Bomb after nuclear breakthrough” on its front page. That headline was changed for the online edition – but it still pronounced Iran “one step away from the Bomb”. The Telegraph was just as injudicious: “Iran on brink of nuclear weapon, warns watchdog”. Ditto The Daily Beast, which also put Iran “on the brink of nuclear weapons”.

This language might not surprise many people. After all, the proverbial “brink” is becoming a bit of a foreign policy joke. Yemen and Pakistan both seem to approach it asymptotically. But it does convey the requisite urgency and alarm.

Danielle Pletka, vice-president at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), argued that though Senor’s claim may be wrong, Iran was “on the brink of a weapon’s capability”. She explained as follows:

Iran has 73+ kg of 20% LEU, needs 85[kg] for a bomb. [M]aking the bomb’s easy. I call that “brink”.

These figures don’t appear to be correct.

This seems like a good time to quote three chunks of an Arms Control Wonk post from two months ago:

All too often, pundits make serious mistakes when converting a real measurement like kilograms into the more evocative “bombs worth.” Few pundits make clear their assumptions on how much nuclear material is needed for a weapon in which context. Invariably, the result is to exaggerate either the danger faced or averted. The problem is especially bad when the topic is an amount of highly enriched uranium.

The concept of “significant quantity” of uranium is important in this regard:

IAEA safeguards standards define a significant quantity as “the approximate amount of nuclear material for which the possibility of manufacturing a nuclear explosive device cannot be excluded. Significant quantities take into account unavoidable losses due to conversion and manufacturing processes and should not be confused with critical masses.” And the current IAEA glossary defines that threshold amount for HEU as 25kg of U-235 in HEU.    (U235 is the stuff that goes boom.)

So the claim that Iran needs 85kg of 20% LEU is clearly untenable. [1]  In fact, even

[o]ne hundred kilograms of 20 percent HEU contains 20 kg of U-235 — less than one significant quantity.

How much does Iran actually have, and how much does it need? On the basis of the February IAEA report, Daryl Kimball estimates that

[a]lthough Iran has now produced about 110 kilograms of 20% enriched uranium, it has dedicated 8 kilograms to make fuel assemblies for the TRR. That material would no longer be part of a ready stockpile of 20% enriched uranium that can be rapidly converted to weapons-grade. Iran would need at least 120 kilograms of 20% material in order to make enough weapons grade uranium for a single weapon. It would want sufficient material for more than just one weapon if it were to decide to produce them. [emphasis added]

Some estimates are more conservative. Iran Watch, part of the Wisconsin Project on Nuclear Arms Control, estimates the quantity “to produce a bomb’s worth of weapon-grade uranium metal” to be higher, at 140 kilograms.

Others are more generous. The ScienceWonk blog at the Federation of American Scientists (FAS) judges that:

A hundred kilograms of uranium enriched to 20% U-235 [just under what Iran is estimated to possess at the moment] will have about 20kg of U-235. But a fissionable mass of 94% pure U-235 weighs about 16kg so Iran might have enough uranium with further enrichment to the weapons-grade level to make a single nuclear weapon – maybe two. [emphasis added]

The AEI’s own blog says the following:

If Iran required 25 kg of weapons-grade uranium to fuel one bomb, it would take 4.7 months after September when it is projected to have 141 kg uranium enriched to 20%. [emphasis added]

***

In fact, there are three distinct questions about timelines.

The first is how much time it would take Iran to enrich a “significant quantity” of uranium to 20% (not long).

The second is how long it would take Iran to enrich that stockpile further to weapons-grade (obviously, longer). The answers to both of these questions depend on a complex set of assumptions about how and where they conducted the enrichment.

The third question is how long it would then take to fabricate a nuclear device, if they chose to do so (and, it bears repeating, that they are not thought to have made any such decision). There is a range of views here:

Greg Jones claims it’s easy:

the viewpoint that it will take Iran years to develop the non-nuclear components required for a nuclear weapon is hard to square with the actual historical experience of the nuclear weapon states. It is well-known that for past nuclear weapon programs, the key impediment was the need to acquire the fissile material (HEU or plutonium) for the weapon.

Jacques Hymans, writing in Foreign Affairs, says it’s hard:

The Iranians had to work for 25 years just to start accumulating uranium enriched to 20 percent, which is not even weapons grade. The slow pace of Iranian nuclear progress to date strongly suggests that Iran could still need a very long time to actually build a bomb — or could even ultimately fail to do so. Indeed, global trends in proliferation suggest that either of those outcomes might be more likely than Iranian success in the near future.

This is because of “Iran’s long-standing authoritarian management culture”:

In a study of Iranian human-resource practices, the management analysts Pari Namazie and Monir Tayeb concluded that the Iranian regime has historically shown a marked preference for political loyalty over professional qualifications. “The belief,” they wrote, “is that a loyal person can learn new skills, but it is much more difficult to teach loyalty to a skilled person.” This is the classic attitude of authoritarian managers. And according to the Iranian political scientist Hossein Bashiriyeh, in recent years, Iran’s “irregular and erratic economic policies and practices, political nepotism and general mismanagement” have greatly accelerated. It is hard to imagine that the politically charged Iranian nuclear program is sheltered from these tendencies.

Further reading: a presentation (PDF) by Maseh Zarif for AEI, some questions by ISIS about the intelligence on the Iranian program, former ambassador Thomas Pickering writing on negotiations, a wrap-up of Senate testimony on Iran, and a useful NYT timeline of US-Iran interaction on nuclear issues.

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[1] Note, however: “Tehran claims it has enriched to only 19.75%, thereby avoiding the 20% level, which is notionally the divide between low-enriched uranium and HEU” [Op-Ed, Olli Heinonen and Simon Henderson]

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Update/correction: Maseh Zarif correctly notes that I confused solid and gas figures for enriched uranium, and that I omitted to note that a lower-bound for one bombs-worth of enriched uranium was as little as 15kg (much lower than the IAEA’s 25kg “significant quantity).

Agni-V, Indian nuclear weapons, and arms racing: a wrap-up

Three pieces of my writing on India’s new 5,000km-range ballistic missile, along with a few by others. Writing for RUSI with Frank O’Donnell (of the Department of War Studies at King’s College London),  I looked at the general implications:

An Agni-V deployed in modest numbers, and accompanied by political signals that the system’s development represents the maturity of India’s nuclear forces, would most closely accord with the initial spirit of credible minimum deterrence. By contrast, if the Agni-V is seen as a ‘bridge’ to a much more diverse and sizeable Indian arsenal, and its production and deployment eventually takes place in large numbers, this could herald a strengthening of the more assertive strand in Indian nuclear thinking. This is not about India adopting a nuclear posture of counterforce and embracing nuclear war-fighting. Rather, this is about a longstanding debate, pioneered in the United States, between the view that ‘deterrence can be achieved only through difficult choices, sustained with intelligent effort, and will depend very much on the technical details’ and the opposing view ‘that, beyond a certain point, all of this is crazy talk, and the technical details don’t matter very much at all’. India’s approach to nuclear weapons is, and is likely to remain, closer to the second of these – but that is not to say that the ‘technical details’ of nuclear deterrence will not assume greater prominence in India’s security policy.

At the Times of India, we suggest that the missile test reflects a shift in the US-India relationship:

In 1994, the United States pressured India to suspend testing of the Agni series after just three test flights. India formally suspended the programme at the end of 1996, although it resumed testing in 1997. The muted American response to the test of the Agni V, despite Washington’s concern over the missile programmes of Iran and North Korea, is indicative of the rapid improvement in the US-India bilateral relationship over the past 15 years. Some Indians sneer at the efforts made by successive Indian governments to improve ties with Washington. These sceptics should consider the diplomatic nightmare that India would have faced had it conducted this test 15 years ago.

We also look at two risks:

The first is that bureaucrats and scientists, rather than elected politicians and a well-informed public, make these choices [about India’s nuclear future]. Last year, MIT professor Vipin Narang … warned that “DRDO’s press releases and post-test comments unnecessarily – and dangerously – confuse India’s nuclear posture”. Perhaps India should build on the Agni V test to make longer-range missiles, as DRDO director V K Saraswat promised to do last week, but this has big financial, diplomatic and strategic implications – and is therefore a matter for political leaders. A national security strategy and nuclear posture review – like those we see in other nuclear weapons states – would be a good start. The second danger is that we begin to see all technological advances as desirable. To be sure, anything that makes India’s missiles more survivable – for example, increasing their mobility on the ground – is unambiguously a good thing. But other improvements mentioned by Saraswat, like MIRV technology that puts multiple warheads on a single missile, presents trade-offs: the missiles will pack a greater punch, but could generate fears that India is abandoning credible minimum deterrence.

Then, at the New York Times‘ India Ink, responding in part to the newspaper’s own reporting of the Agni-V test, I questioned the prevalent thinking that an “arms race” is now underway:

Of the Agni 5, the Hindustan Times’ foreign editor, Pramit Pal Chaudhuri, estimates that India will add, “at best, two such missiles to its arsenal every year.” This will have virtually zero impact on China’s retaliatory capacity. There is, therefore, no reason to suppose that Beijing will scramble to respond in the way that Washington and Moscow would have done in response to one another. Under these conditions, having more survivable and robust means of retaliation, like the Agni 5, can be stabilizing. Such missiles can be moved around by road or rail, which makes them less vulnerable than those in fixed silos. This enables India to shift away from less reliable and more trigger-happy delivery systems like aircraft. The more confident India feels in its ability to respond, the calmer it can be in handling crises.

The BBC asked this same question last week, and quoted Jeffrey Lewis along the same lines (emphasis added):

“Beijing tends to focus much more on the United States, rather than India. Indian officials talk about China much more than their Chinese counterparts talk about them. I doubt very much that China and India will engage in an arms race, scaled-down or otherwise. Both countries tend to pursue the same specific capabilities, but neither produces large numbers of nuclear weapons or nuclear-capable missiles.” He suggests that both China and India seem to be pursuing what he calls a “possession” oriented approach to nuclear modernisation: “They are developing in turn small numbers of ever more advanced capabilities held by other power. Neither country, however, has produced anywhere near the number of nuclear weapons or nuclear-capable missiles that each is capable of producing“.

The article by Vipin Narang (the one that we cited in the Times of India) was published with the Institute for Defense Studies and Analyses (IDSA) last year. It’s available here, and is well worth reading in light of last week’s flurry of post-test commentary:

Certainly, the engineers at DRDO who have developed these capabilities should be proud of their contribution to India’s strategic capabilities, but their post-test commentary risks adjusting or crafting Indian nuclear doctrine on the fly and in ad hoc ways—carrying the danger of dragging the cat by its own tail. Leaving aside the larger direction and drivers of DRDO’s strategic missile developments, these seemingly public relations details can have tremendous implications for future crisis stability on the Subcontinent. The DRDO commentary presumes that political and strategic decisions about future missile role-assignment have been made. But, if the NCA and SFC decide, for example, that the naval variant of the Shourya will have a nuclear role but the land-based cousin will not, those subtleties may be lost on adversaries because of these DRDO statements, possibly generating misperceptions and miscalculations about India’s movements during a crisis.

Last year, Michael Krepon also reflected on the broader question of an arms race (or “arms crawl”), and comes to more mixed conclusions with which I wouldn’t agree:

Ashley [Tellis] was right about New Delhi’s limited enthusiasm for nuclear weapons [when he wrote in 2000-1], but he was off the mark in assuming that Pakistan’s nuclear requirements would be influenced by India’s restraint and deep ambivalence about the Bomb. Instead, Pakistan’s military leadership appears intent to outpace India’s nuclear capabilities. China is also moving forward with strategic modernization programs. Situated between two more serious regional nuclear competitors, New Delhi has done “the needful.” India, like Pakistan, has reportedly doubled the size of its nuclear arsenal over the past decade, while still lagging behind its neighbors … Pakistan and India are entering a less stable phase of offsetting, growing, and more diversified nuclear capabilities, one that is complicated by China’s strategic modernization programs. This is par for the course after rivals with serious security concerns move from covert to overt nuclear weapon capabilities and, then later, when they build out their force structure. If one of the competitors in southern Asia seeks advantage, or worries about being disadvantaged, the result will look more like a nuclear arms competition than an arms crawl.

At his blog, Rohan Joshi warned against triumphalism:

However, it is important to exercise caution and not get unduly carried away with yesterday’s successful test.  Unfortunately, India’s mainstream media has displayed misguided, almost vulgar bellicosity in its reporting of the success of Agni-V.  The same mainstream media that claimed that India wasn’t even prepared for war against Pakistan just two weeks ago, was all set to launch a punitive nuclear attack against China yesterday.  Some TV news channels also featured animated videos of Agni-V hitting targets in China!  This shrillness, rhetoric and lack of credible analysis does a tremendous disservice to the profession of journalism and to the people of India.

Nitin Pai, writing for DNA, was also cautious:

It is fashionable to argue that India’s fractious democratic system does not allow it to pursue long term inter-generational projects. This is only partly true. India’s nuclear strategy contradicts this argument — the minimum credible deterrent has been pursued for at least the last three decades. Will Agni-V change the balance of power in the broader Asian region? Not quite. For that India will need to regain the economic growth trajectory that it fell out of over the last decade. What remains to be seen is whether the security the missile provides will make us even more complacent about implementing the second-generation reforms necessary to accumulate power.

 Also in DNA, Radhakrisha Rao demanded an ICBM. Why? Well …

an ICBM capability is vital for India to be recognised as a military power of global standing. India should look beyond the Chinese threat to build a sturdy ICBM muscle to showcase Indian technological prowess that cannot be browbeaten by the technology denial regime.

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Tagged Agni-V, Arms race, Asia, DRDO, ICBM, India, India-China, MIRVs, Missiles, New York Times, Nuclear weapons, RUSI, Times of India