Washington Wednesday: A nuclear Iran

MARY REICHARD, HOST: It’s September 14th, 2022 and we’re glad to have you along for today’s edition of The World and Everything in It. Good morning, I’m Mary Reichard.

NICK EICHER, HOST: And I’m Nick Eicher. It’s Washington Wednesday.

At the White House, reviving the Iran nuclear deal remains a top priority.

But Republicans as well as the prime minister of Israel continue to warn against it.

President Biden and European partners in the original 2015 deal say it was a mistake for President Trump to withdraw from that agreement.

REICHARD: Yet European leaders have also begun to doubt that Iran is negotiating in good faith.

Leaders in Tehran are now demanding that the UN drop its probe into several nuclear sites.

And both Secretary of State Tony Blinken and the foreign policy chief of the European Union say they’re now less confident that efforts to revive the deal will succeed.

EICHER: Joining us now is Andrea Stricker. She is a Research Fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. She’s also co-author of multiple books on nuclear weapons programs.

REICHARD: Andrea, good morning!

ANDREA STRICKLER, GUEST: Good morning. Thanks so much for having me.

REICHARD: Glad to have you. First of all, how close is Iran to being able to build a nuclear weapon?

STRICKER: Well, according to the International Atomic Energy Agency, the IAEA, that's the UN nuclear watchdog, they just issued a report that says Iran has enough enriched uranium to make weapons grade uranium for at least three nuclear weapons within one month and five total within four months. And we assess that they could use that weapons grade uranium to explode a crude nuclear device within six months or so in a demonstration test, and probably one to two years to put it on a missile.

REICHARD: From what we know publicly, what is Iran demanding in these nuclear talks?

STRICKER: Well, Iran is demanding guarantees that the United States will not back out of the nuclear deal again, and if it does, that they would get certain concessions, guarantees of revenue ties with businesses in order to gain the benefits of the nuclear deal if they were promised. And then they're also circling back to a repeated demand that the IAEA close its investigation into undeclared Iranian nuclear work. And they've been investigating Iran's activities since 2018. And they want this closed, likely because they have more to hide. There was evidence in an archive that Israel stole from Tehran in 2018 that's the basis of the IA’s investigation that the regime is likely continuing covert atomic weaponization work. And so the IA pulling on these threads, that would potentially lead to other questions that Iran doesn't want to answer. So those are just some of the issues that they're focused on.

REICHARD: And what’s the Biden administration and European partners willing to offer in return?

STRICKER: They’ve tried to make various guarantees to Iran such as that there would be some sort of year and a half or even longer wind down period for businesses, if a future U.S. administration will leave the deal. They also gave technical guarantees that Iran could reconstitute its nuclear program more quickly so it would be able to keep certain equipment in-country but in storage, and that would give it a leg-up if Washington left the deal again. They've also offered to lift many Trump administration terrorism sanctions against Iran. So they've put a very sweet deal on the table. I think we have to question why the regime is not accepting it. I think perhaps the supreme leader may want to just go it alone. He may want to continue laying additional nuclear facts on the ground, and not have to make a deal with the West. But time will tell.

REICHARD: Some European leaders are now openly questioning Iran’s motives in these talks, voicing doubt that Tehran is negotiating in good faith. Do you think more nations might sign on to a maximum pressure approach if they’re convinced that Iran is just gaming the system?

STRICKER: I think we’ll see a very slow pivot back to pressure. We've heard that the U.S. and the E3 countries are potentially at the end of their rope over Iran's latest demands. But maybe they're just pretending to be. There are also reports out today that Iran may be waiting to reach a deal until after the U.S. midterm elections in November because Congress would have to review the deal. And they want to see who's going to be in Congress at the time, a few months to review the deal. So they kind of want to see how many concessions they can get. It depends on whether the West will make it clear that they're ready to walk away and I think Iran knows that if they just keep stringing out the process that it delays the return to this type of pressure campaign.

REICHARD: Do you seen any possibility of military action—by the United States or Israel—to stop Iran from developing nuclear weapons?

STRICKER: I believe that would be a far off prospect. I think Tehran knows that if they tried to sprint for nuclear weapons, such as by creating a crisis of access to one of their uranium enrichment facilities, withdrawing from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, that they could probably bog Washington and Europe down and a long process aimed at delaying any kind of penalty or military strikes. They may see U.S. inaction in Afghanistan and our timid reaction to the Ukraine debacle as a sign that they should go forward at this time.

REICHARD: Critics of the 2015 nuclear deal said it would not prevent Iran from developing a nuclear weapon. But critics of the maximum pressure campaign that Trump favored say that also hasn’t worked. What’s the right approach in your view?

STRICKER: In my view, the maximum pressure campaign didn’t have enough time to have success. Likely if Trump had remained in office—whether or not you would agree with that, or any listeners would agree with that—the pressure campaign may have led to success with Iran agreeing to a stronger deal or at least reining in its nuclear advances. What we saw, unfortunately, under the Biden administration from President Biden's willingness to go back to this failing nuclear accord, is that they took advantage and they carried out their most egregious nuclear advances while in the talks. So, I think now the best action we could do is quickly pivot back to a pressure campaign and it's going to be more difficult this time. Russia and China are not going to enforce UN sanctions if those were brought back into place. So we would have to counter their efforts to circumvent the sanctions and then Iran's nuclear advances. So, it's a tough task ahead. No doubt about that. But the current path, the talks are only succeeding in having Iran advance further to the nuclear threshold.

REICHARD: We’ve been talking to Andrea Stricker is a Research Fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. Andrea, thank you so much.

STRICKER: Thank you so much.

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