While the Biden administration appears to be weighing the option of returning to some form of the 2015 nuclear deal with the Islamic Republic (known formally as the JCPOA), R. James Woolsey, William R. Graham, Henry F. Cooper, Fritz Ermarth, and Peter Vincent Pry argue that it is conceivable, if not likely, that Tehran has already produced an atomic bomb. They consider the evidence, and ask why the mullahs haven’t revealed their possession of such a weapon—if they indeed have one—and how America should respond:
Why has Iran not gone overtly nuclear, like North Korea? There are several explanations. For one, North Korea is protected by China and lives in a safer neighborhood, where South Korea and Japan are reluctant to support U.S. military options to disarm Pyongyang. In contrast, Iran’s neighbors, Israel and moderate Arab states, are far more likely to support air strikes to disarm Tehran. As we warned five years ago, Iran probably wants to build enough nuclear missiles to make its capabilities irreversible.
Moreover, Iran wants to preserve the fiction of its non-nuclear status. It has derived far more economic and strategic benefits from the JCPOA and threats to “go nuclear” than has North Korea from “going nuclear” overtly. Ominously, Iran may be forgoing the deterrence benefits of an overt nuclear posture because it is building toward surprise future employment of nuclear capabilities to advance the global theological agenda of the ayatollahs and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard, the world’s largest and most sophisticated terrorist organization.
What can we do to meet this almost-certain threat? Some better options are, unfortunately, far more difficult at this juncture. Arms-control non-solutions like the JCPOA will only make matters worse, just as arms control did with North Korea, by offering false hope while the nuclear threat grows. Disarming Iran of nuclear capabilities by airstrikes or invasion would be very risky since we do not know where all of its nuclear missiles are hidden.
Instead, the authors suggest some careful defensive measures.
Read more on National Review: https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/03/iran-probably-already-has-the-bomb-heres-what-to-do-about-it/