America and Iran recklessly ride the escalation ladder

The highly enriched uranium is partly being produced for the Tehran Research Reactor (TRR), which is used to develop medical isotopes. If operating at capacity the TRR reactor requires 9 to 18kg of HEU annually or if at historic capacity some 5 to 11 kg of HEU fuel annually. Iran has just announced that it is able to fabricate the fuel rods for the TRR without foreign assistance. The TRR previously was fuelled by uranium supplied by Argentina, but the TRR now needs to be refuelled.

The break out calculations, for one bomb, are based on the assumption that both Fordow and Natanz are devoted to HEU production and no HEU is being diverted to the TRR. Those are tight assumptions.

We have known for a while that Fordow would come online about now. This is not a revelation that has come out of the blue as often breathlessly reported. In June 2011 Iran announced that it shall be enriching to 20% at Fordow when the FFEP comes online, widely anticipated to be January 2012.

It will be very interesting to see what happens at Natanz from here on. The Iranian announcement in June 2011 stated that HEU production would be shifted from Natanz, above ground, to Fordow, below ground, not that it would be done in addition to HEU production at Natanz.

That TRR fuel is being produced and fabricated in Iran follows the failure of a Turkish and Brazilian initiative to have the TRR fuel rods fabricated in Russia. A key reason why that deal fell through was a UN sanctions resolution. Furthermore, in September 2011 Iran offered to halt the production of highly enriched uranium if the TRR was to be supplied by fuel from outside Iran. An opportunity existed to pursue a diplomatic initiative to halt the production of HEU and to cap its production for an extended period thereafter. That opportunity was not pursued.

It is thereby odd that something that might well have been prevented diplomatically is now being put front and centre in the case for war.

Surely this invites speculation as to whether nuclear proliferation is the real issue here.

The financial sanctions bill recently passed by Congress, an important factor in the escalation of tension, stipulates that sanctions can only be lifted after Iran has released political prisoners, established an independent court system and tried those responsible for killing Green Movement protestors. Iran would need to cease support for international terrorism, halt all weapons of mass destruction related activities and, to boot, stop working on ballistic missile technology.

These, naturally, are all laudable goals but clearly they go well beyond nuclear proliferation and are politically unrealistic. This is because they have been the key set of demands that successive administrations have made of Iran. Absent a pledge in return to normalise relations with Iran and demilitarise the Persian Gulf such demands are fantasy and known to be so.

There is surely an element of domestic politics involved. Other than Ron Paul, a genuine libertarian of the type rarely seen in Australia, the leading GOP candidates for the presidency have accused Obama of being soft on Iran. Yet it also demonstrates that there exists a strong constituency within the American political elite for using concerns about nuclear proliferation as cover for a policy of regime change by way of graduated economic and strategic pressure. This is the simplest and most rational hypothesis that one can draw. That doesn't make it right, but if one were a scientist from Mars surely this hypothesis would be taken seriously.

I believe that the most likely route to an Iranian nuclear bomb would be if Iran, much like North Korea, uses its nuclear activities asymptotically in tit-for-tat fashion to gain leverage as it rides the escalation ladder with Washington. If so, graduated pressure using nuclear weapons as a cover could well lead to a nuclear armed Iran.

We might call this type of nuclear proliferation as "asymptotic proliferation." A non-nuclear weapon state might seek to approach closer and closer to overt weaponisation as relations with another state grow more distant, eventually breaking through to proliferation if escalation reaches a hot spot even though proliferation was not strictly intended.