Nuclear Threat Initiative IV - How It Went During Obama's Administration: Part Four
Since February 2021, I have been posting on Substack weekly entries on nuclear weapon matters—history, technology, and “secrets,” not current events—in You Might Want to Know. To see the titles of other entries, check out the Archive.
On July 14, 2015, in Obama’s second term, his administration joined in something that seemed to me momentous. It was for sure very complicated.
Some background would be helpful, I imagine.
Iran had been enriching uranium for years. In 1953, President Eisenhower’s CIA had joined the British in subverting Iran’s democratically elected president, Mohammad Mossadegh, and installed a Shah, a kind of king. Afterwards, as part of Eisenhower’s Atoms for Peace program, we’d helped the Shah build and fuel power reactors.
In 1979, an Islamic revolution overthrew the Shah. It was clear that what the Eisenhower administration and the UK had done in 1953 had not been forgotten. The new Islamic regime inherited the Shah’s reactors. They took over the enrichment of uranium which they were doing, they said, only for power reactors.
Under the Shah, Iran had been one of the original signers of the Non-proliferation Treaty in 1970. As you know, the NPT obligates its signatories not to develop nuclear weapons and to allow the IAEA to inspect their facilities to make sure they weren’t.
In the 1990’s, though, it began to look like Iran was enriching uranium to levels higher than required for power reactors and trying to hide these activities from the IAEA’s inspectors. It looked like they might be trying, secretly, to produce weapons-grade fissile fuel after all, just as North Korea had recently done.
Because of these activities, the United Nations, under the authority of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, had passed resolutions that imposed “sanctions” on Iran. Some countries, like the United States, imposed sanctions of their own. The sanctions were designed to interfere with Iran’s sales of oil, their financial transactions, shipping, and other activities. People who violated the sanctions could be charged with crimes by whoever’s sanctions they were. Sounds simple, but it was an amazing tangle. Clearly, though, not a good thing for Iran and its people.
For what it was worth, in the mid-1990’s, Iran’s Supreme Leader, the Ayatollah Ali Khamenei had issued a fatwa declaring the use of nuclear weapons and other weapons of mass destruction to be contrary to Islamic law. A fatwa is a clarification of a point of Islamic law.
The agreement signed on July 14, 2015, after years of negotiation, was called the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, the JCPOA. It was signed by the U.S. and the other Permanent Members of the United Nations Security Council (The United States, Russia, the UK, France, and China, referred to as the “P5,” all Nuclear Weapon States), plus Germany and the European Union. And of course Iran had to sign too.
In the JCPOA, Iran agreed to eliminate its stockpile of medium-enriched uranium, cut its stockpile of low-enriched uranium by 98%, and cut by about 2/3 the number of its operating gas centrifuges. Gas centrifuges are the best technology now for enriching uranium. Iran, we now knew, had installed a bunch them underground. In the JCPOA, Iran agreed to let the International Atomic Energy Agency conduct inspections to verify their adherence the agreement. In return, Iran would get relief from many of the sanctions that had been imposed on them.
In January 2016, the beginning of Obama’s last year in office, after inspections, most UN and US sanctions were lifted.
Some in Iran didn’t like the deal, of course, saying that it violated its sovereign rights. There were two big objections to the JCPOA by countries other than Iran. One was that Iran agreed to observe its terms for only fifteen years, not forever. The other was it didn’t require Iran to stop supporting militant groups in the area, like Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in the Palestinian territories. Nor did Iran agree to stop developing its missile program which seemed to be making significant strides.
Among those objecting to the agreement, Israel was one of the most vehement but Saudi Arabia also objected. Iranian leaders had said in the past that they wanted to wipe Israel off the map, so the reason Israel objected was pretty obvious. But why did Saudi Arabia object? Saudi Arabia was, like Iran, also an Islamic country, right? Thing is it was Sunni Islam in Saudi Arabia and Shia Islam in Iran. Those two branches of Islam were at odds. Sort of like Catholic and Protestant Christians in the past, I suppose, who also had their problems with each other and wars even.
But wasn’t it a miracle to get from Iran as much as the JCPOA got? Eliminate their whole stockpile of uranium enriched beyond the level necessary for power reactors? And why would you think that after fifteen years, if the parties worked at it, Iran would necessarily go back to its bad old ways? Maybe in that time, they and we would find new ways of going about things that would put us on a better path. That’s what President Obama hoped would happen, I’m sure.
The fourth and last of President Obama’s Nuclear Security Summits was held in Washington, D.C. again some months after the signing of the JCPOA, at the end of March 2016, in Obama’s last year in office. This one was attended, as the 2014 Summit had been, by a large number of national leaders, including prime ministers. Russia, North Korea, Iran and Belarus did not attend but just about every other country did.
As you know, these summits had been held every two years during Obama’s administration, with the goal of finding ways to cooperate in securing all the nuclear weapons and fissile fuel that was in the world now. Progress had been made in these summits but clearly we hadn’t yet gotten all the way there.
In November 2016, we had an election to choose our next President. The candidates were Donald Trump, a real-estate investor and television personality, and Hilary Clinton, who had been President Obama’s Secretary of State. Hilary Clinton won the popular vote, but Trump got more votes in the Electoral College. That meant Trump would be our next president. That’s the way it is in our system. You can lose the popular vote and still become president. It had happened before.
Would President-elect Trump maintain the commitments and continue with the kinds of efforts Obama had made toward eliminating nuclear weapons? We didn’t know yet. I doubted it. If there was no support coming from the President, how would things go for NTI and for the cause of eliminating the weapons?
On January 11, 2017, just before President-elect Trump was to be inaugurated, Vice-President Biden gave a speech at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. The Carnegie Endowment was an important financial supporter of NTI, among other activities. Biden used the occasion to recall some of the achievements of the Obama-Biden administration when it came to nuclear weapons.
The achievements were significant, as you know if you’ve read this far. But Biden announced some numbers we hadn’t heard before. He announced that since 2009, Obama’s first year in office, the United States had dismantled 2,226 nuclear warheads. We had also unilaterally—that is, all on our own without any trade-offs involved—cut the number of nuclear weapons in our stockpile to 4,018 warheads, a reduction of 553 warheads since September 2015, less than two years before. During its eight years in office, the Obama administration had reduced the U.S. nuclear weapons stockpile by 1,255 weapons. Hans Kristensen, writing for the Federation of American Scientists, pointed out that that 4,018 was a number greater than the estimated number of warheads in the arsenals of Britain, China, France, India, Israel, North Korea, and Pakistan. Combined. Our current substantially reduced stockpile of 4018 warheads meant that we were still hanging on to more than three times the total of what all those countries had. Still a good way from elimination.
Biden referred back to how Obama had in the beginning of his administration said that the only purpose we would recognize for nuclear weapons was to deter their use by others. That would mean, wouldn’t it, that we’d never use them in a first strike. We’d never made no-first-use an official policy, however. Some of us didn’t see why not. China had declared a no-first-use policy. And we couldn’t? Why not?
But there’s a larger problem here, I think. If we think it’s legitimate for us to use nuclear weapons for “deterrence,” then it has to be a legitimate use for others too.
What does this mean for our argument against “proliferation”? Is it okay to use nuclear weapons to deter proliferation if the proliferation is done in the name of deterrence? Does that even work? It certainly hadn’t in the case of North Korea.
Must we begin to try to imagine a world in which deterrence would not have a home?
If we can’t imagine such a world, won’t the elimination of nuclear weapons be impossible?
Since February 2021, I have been posting on Substack weekly entries on nuclear weapon matters—history, technology, and “secrets,” not current events—in You Might Want to Know. To see the titles of other entries you might find interesting, see the Archive.