Iran dodges another bullet

While the mainstream media reports on the supposed concessions Iran has promised to make following talks with international powers Thursday, and President Barack Obama described the meeting as a “constructive beginning,” Tehran continues to play its game.

Henry Sokolski, the executive director of the Nonproliferation Policy Education Center in Washington, D.C., gives the simple truth of the matter:

Iran emerged as the clear winner at yesterday’s nuclear summit with Russia, China, France, the UK, the U.S. and Germany. Heading into the Geneva talks, the U.S. and the UN Security Council (unsc) were demanding that Iran suspend all nuclear-fuel-making activities or face sanctions. After 7½ hours of negotiations, though, the unsc and Germany blinked, dropped any hint of penalizing Tehran, and let it continue to make nuclear fuel at Natanz.How did Iran finagle this? First, it agreed to allow a visit to a suspect site in Qom that’s almost certain to be empty when inspectors arrive. Second, it pledged to send roughly one bomb’s worth of low-enriched uranium to Russia and France to be refashioned into more highly enriched fuel for use in one of Iran’s small research reactors.This last offer is tricky: Assuming Iran continues to make nuclear fuel, Tehran could have enough low-enriched uranium by next fall to make a bomb even if it followed through on its promised transfer. Also, the fuel that France and Russia will send back to Iran will be far more weapons-usable—it will be enriched with 19.75-percent nuclear-weapons-grade uranium—than the 3.5-percent-enriched brew Iran currently has on hand. If Iran were to seize this more enriched fuel, it could make a bomb much more quickly than it could now.This is a far cry from getting Iran to stop all of its nuclear-fuel-making activities, much less flooding it with hundreds of nuclear inspectors. It’s almost the opposite. Certainly, if we want to keep Iran from getting a bomb, we will have to do better.

Take away the spin, and nothing really has changed in Iran’s march toward nuclear-weapons capability. As we have pointed out before, Iran is playing the same game it has been playing for years: stalling, dividing, deceiving, challenging—and steadily moving forward with its nuclear program.

Read Stephen Flurry’s article in our current print edition, “Surrendering to Iran,” for more on Iran’s history of deceit and how it is exposing the weakness of the United States.