Iran: Nuclear Hedging or Acquisition?

In the spirit of my last post, I’d like to pose a very simple question to readers: Is Iran attempting to acually acquire nuclear weapons or employing the tried and true strategy of nuclear hedging?

The acquisition of nuclear weapons needs no explanation so let us begin with a definition of “nuclear hedging” taken from Ariel Levite’s article Never Say Never Again: Nuclear Reversal Revisited, namely that [...] “nuclear hedging” is a national strategy lying between nuclear pursuit and rollback. It is an appealing and surprisingly common strategy whose “greatest appeal is the ‘latent’ or ‘virtual’ deterrence posture it generates towards nuclear weapons aspirants or potential aggressors, and the leverage it provides in reinforcing a state’s coercive diplomacy strategy, particularly against the United States.” What exactly does this entail? Simply put, it involves advancing a state’s nuclear programs to an advanced stage short of weaponization, leaving the state in a position in which it could easily and quickly build nuclear weapons in a short period of time should the need arise. Some examples of countries who maintain this posture include Japan, Germany, Switzerland, South Korea and Taiwan. Levite’s article goes into explicit detail of Japan.

Japan provides the most salient example of nuclear hedging to date. The Japan case illustrates how a state signatory to the NPT and a champion of nonproliferation and disarmament can legitimately maintain a nuclear fuel–cycle capability and possess huge quantities of weapons-grade fissile material. Moreover, according to an official British government report, Japan “has key bomb-making components, including plutonium and electronic triggers, and has the expertise to go nuclear very quickly.”

With that in mind, let us briefly consider the reasons why states decide to go nuclear. They include a desire to intimidate and coerce rivals, the search for enhanced security against regional or international rivals, status and prestige, domestic politics, and bureaucratic self-aggrandizement. In the book The Nuclear Tipping Point, the authors list several reasons which leads states to rethink earlier decisions to forgo nuclear weapons. They are:

– Change in direction of US foreign & security policy
– breakdown of global NPT
– erosion of regional or global security
– domestic imperatives
– increasing availability of the necessary technology (both know how and physical components)

With those in mind, we must now ask another key and often overlooked question. When considering Iran’s goals, are we focusing too much on Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as an individual? Should we not spend more time on the individual organizations within Iran’s government? Could their be either some or even significant disagreement with the government as to whether to pursue nuclear weapons, or nuclear technology at all?

I ask these questions not with answers already in mind but merely because I feel a dangerous consensus in the blogosphere and MSM that Iran’s strategy is definitely one of nuclear acquisition and not nuclear hedging and that President Ahmadinejad and the radical religious views ascribed to him, is likely to employ these weapons. Both of these assumptions are subject to doubt though again, this post does not claim to be sure about Iran’s nuclear policy. However, should the U.S. decide Iran is pursuing a strategy of nuclear hedging, our options and goals become very different.

Readers, I invite your thoughts, firstly on what you believe Iran’s nuclear policy to be, and secondly, how that changes or confirms existing US policy and goals.