Dangerous words from Murphy on Iran nuclear weapons
Last week, Sen. Chris Murphy claimed on his Facebook page that “Iran is restarting its nuclear weapons program.” Using the word “weapons” was no social media slip; he made the same claim on his Twitter account a week prior and in a speech on the floor of the House of Representatives in early May.
Sen. Murphy is flat wrong: Iran has not restarted its nuclear weapons program. As a member of the Committee on Foreign Relations, the senator should know that claims of atomic bombs can start wars and that his own voice matters. With the Trump Administration continuing to clumsily confront Iran, every Connecticut resident should understand the facts about nuclear weapons and expect his or her leaders to do the same.
The fundamental challenge of nuclear energy is that the same science that enables carbon-free electricity generation, PET scans for cancer treatment and better crop yields can be misused to build weapons. Einstein’s famous equation is equally valid around the planet and does not care about how it is applied. Worse still, many of the industrial production facilities used to refine uranium and plutonium could be readily re-appropriated for weapons production, perhaps on the night shift.
Since the Manhattan Project, the global community has recognized the dual-use nature of atomic technology and protected against its dark side through a cadre of United Nations nuclear inspectors who keep tabs on nuclear material. Their visits, through the International Atomic Energy Agency, ensure that countries who say they are using nuclear technology for good actually do so. Today, IAEA inspectors have wide legal powers and sophisticated technologies to verify that no country produces nuclear weapons at their known nuclear facilities or builds secret facilities for clandestine production.
Which brings us back to Iran. The IAEA has said that prior to being outed in 2003, Iran undertook a structured program to develop a nuclear weapon. These included activities like uranium enrichment, which could have civilian and military purposes, and computer modeling of a nuclear weapon, which has no civilian excuse. Over the next decade, as Iran jousted with the U.S. and European Union on the outlines of a potential deal, the Islamic Republic continued with provocative, weaponsrelated steps like experimenting with high uranium enrichment levels and building a small facility deep inside a mountain to withstand air raids.
Iran’s nuclear program is different now. Thanks to President Barack Obama’s Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, agreed in 2015 but from which President Donald Trump withdrew in 2018, there is less nuclear material in Iran than before the deal. The core of Iran’s riskiest nuclear reactor has been filled with concrete. IAEA inspectors track Iran’s enrichment activities in real time and have significant powers to visit any site they might find suspicious. As a second line of defense, intelligence agencies worldwide likely continue to monitor Iran’s activity with the greatest of interest. If Iran attempts a sprint for the bomb, alarm bells would go off immediately.
Last month, Iran’s president Hassan Rouhani said that Iran would stop complying with parts of the 2015 nuclear deal, beginning by increasing its nuclear material inventories. These activities are unwelcome, but this is not, as Sen. Murphy has declared, the restart of a nuclear weapons program. They are among the mildest technical actions Iran could have taken to ratchet up the negotiating pressure on the United States, and they are taking place under the watch of IAEA inspectors. In fact, as recently as this February, Sen. Murphy himself tweeted that [National Security Advisor John] “Bolton says Iran is seeking nuclear weapons. This simply isn’t true. The intelligence says the opposite and he knows it.”
To be clear: Iran’s actions across the Middle East, including support to terrorists and repression of human rights, are deplorable. But this is precisely the reason to rely on verification rather than trust. You don’t have to like the Iranians to have confidence, based on objective data, that there is no nuclear weapons program in Iran today. And indeed, just last month, the IAEA reported that Iran was still in compliance with its legal obligations.
In 2003, the United States invaded Iraq to remove weapons of mass destruction that did not exist. The calls for war in the Middle East are growing again, and the unfounded pretext of another nuclear weapons program must not be the basis. Sen. Murphy can improve the debate about Iran by pushing President Trump and his national security leaders for facts and sound U.S. policies rather than embracing their fearmongering.
You don’t have to like the Iranians to have confidence, based on objective data, that there is no nuclear weapons program in Iran today.