Logic Of Iran's Quest For Nukes

(CBS)  Tom Fenton covered the major news events in Europe, the Middle East, Russia and Africa during his 34-year career as a CBS News correspondent. He writes about world affairs from his Listening Post in London and other locations around the world.

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The growing crisis provoked by Iran's nuclear research program exposes a fundamental weakness in the existing international system for preventing the spread of nuclear weapons.

The United States and most major western powers believe Iran is working to produce nuclear weapons and is within a few years of reaching its goal. Iran insists it is only producing fuel for a peaceful nuclear energy program. But the debate over whether Iran's current nuclear program is military or civilian is meaningless.

Iran is working on both plutonium and uranium processing – both means of producing the material for a nuclear weapon. The amazing thing is that both programs are legal. The Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty allows a country to produce and possess for peaceful purposes the same materials that can be used in nuclear weapons. It was not Iran's programs to produce separated plutonium and enriched uranium that violated its international treaty obligations. It was Iran's failure to notify the International Atomic Energy Agency of its programs that got it into trouble.

Under the treaty, Iran could legally continue to produce low-enriched uranium, (suitable for a peaceful energy program), then give the required 90 days notice to opt out of the treaty, and simply switch to producing highly enriched uranium suitable for a bomb.

There are many signs that Iran's real intentions are less than peaceful. The recent allegation that rogue officials in Ukraine sold Iran leftover Russian cruise missiles, and another report that Iran has been acquiring material for nuclear detonators, seem to confirm the worst fears.

Moreover, Iran's own national interests would seem to dictate a military program. The Iranians live in a tough neighborhood, ringed with nuclear powers. Their old enemy, the Iraqis, were close to acquiring nuclear weapons before that program was aborted by international action. Now the world's biggest nuclear power is occupying Iraq, India and Pakistan have become nuclear powers, and of course so are Russia and China. Further away but still within striking range is Iran's archenemy, Israel, an undeclared nuclear power.

It would be surprising if Iranian strategic planners did not come to the conclusion that their best defense is a nuclear deterrent. They need only look at North Korea and Israel, both unofficial nuclear powers that believe they owe their continued existence to their nuclear arsenals.

Take Israel. Uri Bar-Joseph, an expert in military and intelligence matters at Haifa University, states that according to "various sources" Israel assembled its first two nuclear devices during the crisis that preceded the 1967 Arab-Israeli War. Since then, it is believed to have developed the full panoply of land, sea and air delivered nuclear weapons, with an estimated 200 warheads. Israel's nuclear deterrent is one program that virtually all Israelis agree on. It is, according to Eitan Haber, who was once a close assistant to the late Prime Minister Yitzak Rabin, the thing that stands "between the life and the demise of Israel."

Israel is of course a special case. As Bar-Joseph points out, it "was able to develop nuclear weapons without a major confrontation with the United States or the Soviet Union." Indeed, it was tacitly allowed to do so. The Arabs constantly point to the Israeli nuclear deterrent as an example of the double standards applied by the United States, and in this respect they are correct. If the Bush administration means what it says, Iran will be given no such opportunity.

By Tom Fenton