How Close Are We To Nuclear Breakout In Iran? Is Tehran About To Reset The Table?

If you have spent time down range or in the field face to face with our nation’s adversaries, you know “the enemy gets a vote”. You can plan all you want. You can predict all you want. Ultimately, the enemy is under no compulsion to behave the way you want him to, or you think he will. He is perfectly free to change the game at any time and reset the board.

The Japanese were supposed to modify their behavior and come to the negotiating table in 1941. They chose instead to bomb Pearl Harbor.

Al-Qaida was supposed to continue to limit itself to attacks in the Middle East in 2001. It decided instead to take the fight onto our soil and kill almost 3000 Americans while we watched in horror.

The Russians were supposed to line their troops up on the Ukrainian border, rattle some sabers, and then accept the status quo. They opted to launch a lightning attack on Ukraine and gamble they could take Kiev before the West could react.

As we try to dig out from the wreckage of the Biden administration, we would do well to remember these lessons. Our enemies, who are legion, do not have to respond to our alternating overtures and threats by agreeing to see reason and talk. They are perfectly free to decide that it is time to jump.

A case in point is Iran.

The Iranians are a great people. They are heirs to one of the world’s great civilizations. I have worked with many Iranian patriots over the years. They were, to a man and a woman, educated, cultured, and yearning to breathe free again.

The men who control Iran today, the mullahs and the leaders of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), exhibit none of these qualities. They subscribe to a dark, twisted form of Islam, and they yearn for Armageddon. They believe absolutely that we are in the end times and that they will emerge victorious from a final battle. For them, the Madhi, a mythical Islamic superman, is absolutely real. His return is imminent. The final victory is at hand.

“As a Shi’a Islamist force the IRGC’s worldview hinges on Mahdism: the return of the 12th divinely ordained Shi’a imam, Muhammad al-Mahdi (or the Hidden Imam), whom Shi’a Muslims believe was withdrawn into a miraculous state of occultation (hiddenness) by God in 874 CE. The concept of Mahdism is rooted in the belief that Imam Mahdi will one day return to rid the world of evil and injustice. His coming will bring about “one final apocalyptic battle” between two armies, in which Shi’as believe that Mahdi and his forces will prevail over evil.”

Middle East Institute

We want to continue nuclear talks with the Iranians. They just announced that the next round of those talks will not take place. It is unclear if this is just a hiccup or if the negotiations are dead.

Meanwhile video on Iranian state TV recently showed Iran unveiling a new ballistic missile. To add emphasis, Iran’s proxies in Yemen, the Houthis, just hit Israel with a ballistic missile of their own. Iranian Defense Minister Aziz Nasirzadeh is warning that “If war is initiated by the U.S. or Israel, Iran will strike their interests, bases and forces wherever they are and whenever necessary.”

The new missile, called “Qassem Basir,” is solid-fueled and reportedly includes enhancements in maneuverability and guidance systems, allowing it to evade defenses. Iranian outlets claim it has a range of 1,200 kilometers and can strike targets with pinpoint accuracy without using GPS. The fact that it is intended to be used without the aid of GPS is of note, particularly since there has been voluminous reporting for years regarding Iran’s capacity to interfere with GPS navigation and targeting systems in the Middle East.

This is occurring against the backdrop of the uncertainty concerning the exact status of the Iranian nuclear program. It is worth clarifying, I think, exactly where we stand in that regard:

• The Iranians have had a nuclear weapons program for many years. They are not trying to develop nuclear power for peaceful purposes. They want a nuclear arsenal.
• They are at most weeks away from having enough highly enriched uranium (HEU) to build several nuclear weapons. More to the point, our intelligence collection is not good enough to allow us to refine that estimate. In layman’s terms, that means they could very well already have enough HEU for several weapons, and they may well already have taken the steps necessary to put that HEU into the form necessary for use in a weapon.
• We know that years ago, the Iranians were working on the engineering aspects of building a device. They may have completed that work. It would be logical and consistent with what we have seen in other programs for the Iranians to have built the actual bombs concurrent with the refinement of uranium.
• Based on what we know about the Chinese program that resulted in them acquiring nuclear weapons, from the time the HEU is available in its final usable form, assembly of a device probably would take no more than 72 hours.

So, if our entire plan is based on the assumption that the Iranians cannot possibly already have nuclear weapons, it may well turn out to be a bad plan.

We can, of course, add additional layers of bad news to this picture. Once the Iranians have nuclear weapons, they can disperse them to a wide variety of locations. Via their worldwide terror network, they can move them, likely undetected, to locations across the globe, including in this hemisphere. They have, via their unconventional and conventional assets, many different ways to deliver such weapons and dramatically complicate the job of locating them and intercepting them.

Does this mean we have no options or that we are doomed? No, not at all. What it does mean, however, is that if we are assuming that we still have the option of bombing some centrifuges and calling it a day, we may want to revisit our assumptions. We may want to start taking a very hard look at:

• The state of our intelligence collection. Let’s get down to brass tacks. How good are our “assessments”? What do we really know about deliberations inside the top levels of Iranian leadership? And, once we face up to the fact that we don’t know nearly enough, what are we going to do to improve things?
• Our ability to intercept any Iranian efforts to move and hide pieces of their nuclear weapons program. Can we do that? How? If not, how do we fix that in a hurry?
• What exactly is our plan for responding to an Iranian declaration that they have gone nuclear? If they detonate a nuke in the desert tomorrow and announce they have five more dispersed throughout the country and ready to launch, do we have a plan?
• – And, if it comes down to us having to hit Iran and disarm it, how exactly do we plan to do that? What are we bombing? The goal cannot be just to blow things up. It has to be to remove the threat.

The bottom line has to be this. We cannot just assume that all we have to do is bomb some targets in Iran and call it a day. We have to plan for the day when the Iranians dare to act contrary to our expectations. We have to plan for the day, which may be much closer than we think, when they achieve nuclear breakout and reset the board.

Originally published by AND Magazine.

AUTHOR

Sam Faddis

Senior Fellow.

RELATED ARTICLE: Huckabee: Giving Iran a Nuke Is Like Handing a 16-Year-Old a ‘Lamborghini and a Bottle of Whiskey’

EDITORS NOTE: This Center for Security Policy column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.