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Building on Biden's Commitments to Block Iran's Nuclear Weapons
(National Interest) Orde Kittrie - Iran will roll back its nuclear program only if convinced that it is futile to seek a nuclear bomb because the U.S. military will ultimately prevent Tehran from succeeding. Iran's nuclear program is reportedly now so advanced that it needs less than a month to produce sufficient highly enriched uranium for a nuclear weapon. The relationship between an explicit U.S. military option and successfully halting Iran's nuclear program diplomatically was elaborated in a December 2021 joint statement by seven experts including former Obama defense secretary and CIA director Leon Panetta and former Obama CIA director David Petraeus. They declared that "[w]ithout convincing Iran it will suffer severe consequences if it stays on its current path, there is little reason to hope for the success of diplomacy....We believe it is vital to restore Iran's fear that its current nuclear path will trigger the use of force against it by the United States." The statement called on the Biden administration to undertake military exercises, pre-positioning, and other "steps that lead Iran to believe that persisting in its current behavior and rejecting a reasonable diplomatic resolution will put to risk its entire nuclear infrastructure." Congress must quickly urge Biden to demonstrate a more explicit U.S. military threat that Iran rejecting a reasonable diplomatic resolution will result in the destruction of Tehran's current nuclear infrastructure, rather than in Tehran gaining a nuclear weapon. The writer, a former U.S. State Department attorney, is a law professor at Arizona State University and a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.