Response To: Iran Is Still Botching the Bomb It is Time for Israel and the United States To Stop Overreacting Jacques E. C. Hymans
Najm,
I've delayed my response to you so I could research his full text and and any challenges to his numerous operational assumptions concerning both Iran and Israel by any of the foreign policy reviewers who should have checked out his assertions.
In short form I can guarantee that in nearly every one of his assumptions he is close to 100% wrong.
You have first-hand exposure to the Iranian engineering and scientific communities. Just considering those that we have trained at USC it is sure that Iran has the technical and scientific management capabilities for this project. Again, just reviewing the backgrounds of the high level Iranian technical people dedicated to this project and the backgrounds of the several hundred participants that have been identified does not give a keystone cop image of their efforts and their organization.
In my own experience , we were surprised at the rapid achievement by the Soviets of atomic bomb capability. We were surprised by the rapid achievement of the Soviets of hydrogen bomb capability. We were surprised by both the Pakistani and the Indian nuclear successes. We were surprised by the North Korean success. In 1991 we were surprised at the rapid progress Saddam Hussein had made and believed that he was within one year or less of achieving a nuclear weapon. When Libya opened up and surrendered their nuclear materials and divulged their program we were dismayed at the progress they had made. Unfortunately , so much of what we know about Iran came about through clandestine sources not part of US intelligence and actually dumped information on us which surprised us and which we at 1st rejected until we had other sources to verify that this was correct. This is not a shining example of our capabilities.
One example of this school of thought demonstrated by Prof.Hymans is that" even if Iran gets nuclear capability it does not have the delivery capability". I remind such people that this problem was solved by the United States in 1945. Some time ago, Hezbollah successfully flew a drone over much of Israel. Then, all freighters are capable of carrying these weapons as part of their cargo that can detonate these weapons in international waters near Israel. Etc., etc., etc.
If anything intelligence has been underestimating the Iranian program. The national intelligence estimate of 2007 which said that Iran had ceased its program in 2003 was issued in spite of our on the ground observation that every graduate nuclear engineering student in Iran was fully employed and had multiple employment opportunities.
As you know from your own experience and education and from your direct contacts, the pattern has been for the US intelligence to underestimate and then for clandestine groups to reveal previously unreported Iranian nuclear developments.
In short form I suggest that you rely on your own knowledge, experience, and contacts when assessing Iranian technical capabilities. Iranian intentions are another matter and I would regard your opinions as being of great interest.
Howard
tOn Feb 22, 2013, at 12:40 PM, Najmedin Meshkati wrote:
From: Najmedin Meshkati <meshkati@usc.edu>Date: February 22, 2013 12:39:27 PM PSTTo: meshkati@usc.eduSubject: Foreign Affairs - Feb 18th - It is Time for Israel and the United States To Stop Overreacting by Prof Jacques Hymans -
From my USC colleague, Prof Jacques Hymans...
Hi guys,
I enjoyed yesterday afternoon. My Foreign Affairs blog post just went up online, and so I would like to share it with you.
http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/139013/jacques-e-c-hymans/iran-is-still-botching-the-bomb
Cheers,
Jacques
--------------
Foreign Affairs
February 18, 2013
Iran Is Still Botching the Bomb
It is Time for Israel and the United States To Stop Overreacting
Jacques E. C. Hymans
JACQUES E. C. HYMANS is Associate Professor of International Relations at the University of Southern California. He is the author, most recently, of Achieving Nuclear Ambitions: Scientists, Politicians, and Proliferation. This postscript is an update to his Foreign Affairs article “Botching the Bomb,” which appeared in the May/June 2012 issue.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the United Nations General Assembly, September 2012. (Lucas Jackson / Courtesy Reuters)
At the end of January, Israeli intelligence officials quietly indicated that they have downgraded their assessments of Iran's ability to build a nuclear bomb. This is surprising because less than six months ago, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu warned from the tribune of the United Nations that the Iranian nuclear D-Day might come as early as 2013. Now, Israel believes that Iran will not have its first nuclear device before 2015 or 2016 [1].
The news comes as a great relief. But it also raises questions. This was a serious intelligence failure, one that has led some of Israel's own officials to wonder aloud, "Did we cry wolf too early?"
Indeed, Israel has consistently overestimated Iran's nuclear program for decades. In 1992, then Foreign Minister Shimon Peres announced that Iran was on pace to have the bomb by 1999. Israel's many subsequent estimates have become increasingly frenzied but have been consistently wrong. U.S. intelligence agencies have been only slightly less alarmist, and they, too, have had to extend their timelines repeatedly.
Overestimating Iran's nuclear potential might not seem like a big problem. However, similar, unfounded fears were the basis for President George W. Bush's preemptive attack against Iraq and its nonexistent weapons of mass destruction. Israel and the United States need to make sure that this kind of human and foreign policy disaster does not happen again.
What explains Israel's most recent intelligence failure? Israeli officials have suggested that Iran decided to downshift its nuclear program in response to international sanctions and Israel's hawkish posture. But that theory falls apart when judged against Tehran's own recent aggressiveness. In the past few months, Iran has blocked the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) from gaining access to suspect facilities, stalled on diplomatic meetings, and announced a "successful" space shot and the intention to build higher-quality centrifuges. These are not the actions of a state that is purposely slowing down its nuclear program. Even more to the point, if Tehran were really intent on curbing its nuclear work, an explicit announcement of the new policy could be highly beneficial for the country: many states would praise it, sanctions might be lifted, and an Israeli or U.S. military attack would become much less likely. But Iran has not advertised the downshift, and its onl
y modest concession of late has been to convert some of its 20 percent enriched uranium to reactor fuel. It is doubtful that the Iranians would decide to slow down their nuclear program without asking for anything in return.
A second hypothesis is that Israeli intelligence estimates have been manipulated for political purposes. This possibility is hard to verify, but it cannot be dismissed out of hand. Preventing the emergence of a nuclear-armed Iran is Netanyahu's signature foreign policy stance, and he had an acute interest in keeping the anti-Iran pot boiling in the run-up to last month's parliamentary elections, which he nearly lost. Now, with the elections over, perhaps Israeli intelligence officials feel freer to convey a more honest assessment of Iran's status. This theory of pre-election spin is not very satisfying, however, because it fails to explain why Israeli governments of all political orientations have been making exaggerated claims about Iran for 20 years -- to say nothing of the United States' own overly dire predictions.
The most plausible reason for the consistent pattern of overstatement is that Israeli and U.S. models of Iranian proliferation are flawed. Sure enough, Israeli officials have acknowledged that they did not anticipate the high number of technical problems Iranian scientists have run into recently. Some of those mishaps may have been the product of Israeli or U.S. efforts at sabotage. For instance, the 2010 Stuxnet computer virus attack on Iran's nuclear facilities reportedly went well. But the long-term impact of such operations is usually small -- or nonexistent: the IAEA and other reputable sources have dismissed the highly publicized claims of a major recent explosion at Iran's Fordow uranium-enrichment plant, for instance.
Rather than being hampered by James Bond exploits, Iran's nuclear program has probably suffered much more from Keystone Kops-like blunders: mistaken technical choices and poor implementation by the Iranian nuclear establishment. There is ample reason to believe that such slipups have been the main cause of Iran's extremely slow pace of nuclear progress all along. The country is rife with other botched projects [2], especially in the chaotic public sector. It is unlikely that the Iranian nuclear program is immune to these problems. This is not a knock against the quality of Iranian scientists and engineers, but rather against the organizational structures in which they are trapped. In such an environment, where top-down mismanagement and political agendas are abundant, even easy technical steps often lead to dead ends and pitfalls.
Iran is not the only state with a dysfunctional nuclear weapons program. As I argued in a 2012 Foreign Affairs article [3], since the 1970s, most states seeking entry into the nuclear weapons club have run their weapons programs poorly, leading to a marked slowdown in global proliferation. The cause of this mismanagement is the poor quality of the would-be proliferator's state institutions. Libya and North Korea are two classic examples. Libya essentially made no progress, even after 30 years of trying. North Korea has gotten somewhere -- but only after 50 years, and with many high-profile embarrassments along the way. Iran, whose nuclear weapons drive began in the mid-1980s, seems to be following a similar trajectory. Considering Iran in the broader context of the proliferation slowdown, it becomes clear that the technical problems it has encountered are more than unpredictable accidents -- they are structurally determined.
Since U.S. and Israeli intelligence services have failed to appreciate the weakness of Iran's nuclear weapons program, they have not adjusted their analytical models accordingly. Thus, there is reason to be skeptical about Israel's updated estimate of an Iranian bomb in the next two or three years. The new date is probably just the product of another ad hoc readjustment, but what is needed is a fundamental rethinking.
As the little shepherd boy learned, crying wolf too early and too often destroys one's credibility and leaves one vulnerable and alone. In order to rebuild public trust in their analysis, Jerusalem and Washington need to explain the assumptions on which their scary estimates are based, provide alternative estimates that are also consistent with the data they have gathered, and give a clear indication of the chance that their estimates are wrong and will have to be revised again. The Iranian nuclear effort is highly provocative. The potential for war is real. That is why Israel and the United States need to avoid peddling unrealistic, worse-than-worst-case scenarios.
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Published on Foreign Affairs (http://www.foreignaffairs.com)
Links:
[1] http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2013/01/28/181276/israel-iran-slowing-nuclear-program.html
[2] http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/05/31/AR2006053101464.html
[3] http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/137403/jacques-e-c-hymans/botching-the-bomb)
*******************************
Najmedin Meshkati
Professor
Department of Civil/Environmental Engineering
Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering
Kaprielian Hall (KAP), Rm 238B
University of Southern California
Los Angeles, California 90089-2531
U.S.A.
Tel: (213) 740-8765
Fax: (213) 744-1426
Email: meshkati@usc.edu
http://www-bcf.usc.edu/~meshkati/
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