Obama has killed the nonproliferation standard putting the world at greater risk.

A Nuclear Turning Point 

The longstanding, bipartisan nonproliferation standard is dead. 

Matthew Kroenig

April 20, 2015, Vol. 20, No. 30

If there is one thing on which Democrats and Republicans can agree, it is that it is undesirable for countries other than the United States to possess nuclear weapons. For this reason, America’s nonproliferation policy has traditionally been characterized by strong bipartisanship. It is notable, therefore, that support for the recently negotiated Iran deal splits along party lines. But on closer inspection, what is truly puzzling is that anyone supports the agreement at all. In striking this deal, the Obama administration abandoned a decades-old mainstay of U.S. nonproliferation policy, and opponents are right to reject it. The United States has always opposed the spread of sensitive nuclear technologies—uranium enrichment and plutonium reprocessing—to all states, including its own allies, and it is a mistake to make an exception for Iran.

From the beginning of the atomic era, American scientists understood that these sensitive nuclear technologies could be used to make fuel for nuclear energy or for nuclear weapons, and the United States immediately began working to close off this pathway to the bomb. The McMahon Act of 1946 made it illegal for the United States to share nuclear technologies with any country. Even countries like Britain and Canada that had helped America invent the bomb during the Manhattan Project were cut off. 

Later, under President Eisenhower’s Atoms for Peace program, the United States loosened restrictions on nuclear cooperation somewhat, but it always drew a bright line at uranium enrichment and plutonium reprocessing because the risk of proliferation was simply too great.

When other advanced industrial countries succeeded in developing sensitive nuclear technologies and, in some cases, the bomb without American help, Washington came to understand that international coordination was needed. The Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) was opened for signature in 1968, and when India conducted a nuclear test using plutonium reprocessed from a Canadian-supplied nuclear reactor in 1974, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger convened other nuclear powers to establish the Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG), a cartel designed to restrict the international transfer of sensitive nuclear technologies.

These controls have mostly proved effective, but when they were insufficient, the United States went on the offensive to stop the spread of sensitive nuclear technologies on a case-by-case basis. It even played hardball with friends, forcing Taiwan and South Korea to shut down reprocessing programs in the 1970s and convincing France to cancel the sale of a reprocessing plant to Pakistan in 1978. As one Taiwanese scientist remarked at the time, “After the Americans got through with us, we wouldn’t have been able to teach physics here on Taiwan.”

To be sure, Washington has been willing to barter with outlaw states over illegal nuclear programs in the past, but its terms remained clear and uncompromising: Sensitive nuclear technologies are not allowed. The 1994 Agreed Framework with North Korea permitted light-water nuclear reactors, but not plutonium reprocessing. When it became clear that Pyongyang had been cheating on the deal from day one by secretly enriching uranium, Washington sought to shut that program down, demanding nothing less than “complete, verifiable, and irreversible disarmament.”

In an agreement with Libya in 2003, a textbook example of successful nuclear diplomacy, U.S. military aircraft transferred over 55,000 pounds of nuclear equipment out of the country, including its stockpile of centrifuges and centrifuge parts, within weeks of concluding the deal.

Washington’s unbending position on sensitive technologies always sat in uneasy tension with the “inalienable right” to peaceful nuclear technology granted in Article IV of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, but when a superpower is willing to enforce its interpretation of international law, it can, and in this instance did, have a profound effect.

This history helps explain why, when the existence of Iran’s covert nuclear program came to light in 2003, the United States immediately and reflexively declared that Iran would not be permitted to enrich uranium. It was not an unreasonable or unexpected demand; it was simply a restatement of U.S. nonproliferation policy over the past half-century. 

The international community understood America’s position and slowly climbed on board, demanding that Iran suspend enrichment in six separate U.N. Security Council resolutions.

The P5+1 resolutely held this line for nearly a decade as the pressure began to mount on Iran, but then, suddenly, the Obama administration abandoned this cornerstone of American foreign policy. 

In the interim agreement struck in November 2013, Washington granted Iran the right to enrich, and over the past 18 months it has engaged in the unprecedented act of bargaining over the scale—not the existence—of an aspiring proliferator’s enrichment program.

This decision will prove disastrous. A deal that allows enrichment in Iran will not solve the problem it is intended to solve. It was with good reason that Washington prohibited sensitive nuclear technologies in the past; permitting the possession of a large nuclear program, complete with sensitive fuel-making capabilities, will make it much harder to prevent Iran from building nuclear weapons if and when it decides to do so. Moreover, verifying compliance with such a deal will be challenging. When enrichment or reprocessing is prohibited altogether, detecting a violation is relatively easy. Enforcing an agreement that permits 6,104 centrifuges but not 6,105 (as this deal does) is a fool’s errand.  

Perhaps more important, the Iran deal sets a dangerous precedent. The United States is making this exception to its nonproliferation policy not for just any country, but for Iran, a longstanding U.S. enemy, a leading state-sponsor of terrorism, a country that has violated its nonproliferation commitments in the past, and a country that at present stonewalls the International Atomic Energy Agency’s questions about the military dimensions of its nuclear program. 

In the wake of the Iran deal, it will be difficult for Washington to explain that it trusts Tehran with sensitive nuclear technologies, but not other countries, including its allies and partners. Other countries will inevitably demand a similar right to enrich, further weakening the global nonproliferation standard and inviting a possible cascade of nuclear weapons proliferation. 

This is not a theoretical concern. Officials in Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates have already demanded the exact same nuclear rights and capabilities granted to Iran in a final deal, and South Korea is expressing an interest in reprocessing for peaceful purposes. This is only the beginning. Expect additional bids for enrichment and reprocessing programs as countries follow Iran’s example and assemble the components of a nuclear weapons capability under the guise of “peaceful” nuclear power.

The Obama administration claimed a zero-enrichment deal with Iran was impossible. Perhaps it was; there is not always a deal to be had. It would have been much better, however, for Iran to enrich in the face of strong international condemnation than for its dangerous enrichment program to receive the solemn blessing of the international community.

More important, the Obama administration never properly tested whether a zero-enrichment deal could be achieved. In an attempt to improve their bargaining position, Iran’s leaders said it was impossible, and the Obama administration naïvely accepted their claims at face value. It was not easy to get zero-enrichment or reprocessing deals with Libya and Taiwan, but we did not compromise on our principles, and we eventually succeeded. The United States should have held equally firm with Iran. 

Defenders of the accord have argued that there was no viable alternative short of war. But this is not true. If the United States had given Iran a choice between, on the one hand, continued international isolation, increased economic sanctions, and, all else failing, military strikes on its nuclear facilities and, on the other hand, a zero-enrichment deal that lifted sanctions and provided other face-saving goodies, including nonsensitive nuclear technologies, Iran would have eventually chosen the latter.

Instead, we gave up the game. Iran out-negotiated us. We abandoned a clear international standard we had established in order to meet Iran halfway in its unreasonable demands. What we have to show for it is not a historic deal, but the death of a 70-year-old bipartisan pillar of American foreign policy. 

Matthew Kroenig is associate professor in the department of government at Georgetown University and a senior fellow in the Brent Scowcroft Center on International Security at the Atlantic Council.