Iran and the bomb: unleashing a ‘nuclear arms race’?

Western diplomats struggling to cope with the ramifications of the war in Ukraine now have to deal with another deeply disturbing development, said Yves Bourdillon in Les Echos (Paris). They learnt last week that “Iran almost has the bomb”. The prospect of Tehran developing nuclear weapons has haunted Western governments for decades; now it looks like a reality.

UN atomic agency inspectors in Iran have detected uranium enriched to the “unpreced­ented” level of 84% purity – “just below the level generally consid­ered necessary to produce an atomic bomb at full efficiency”.

Tehran is still some way from being able to turn highly enriched uranium into a proper warhead: it’s not yet ready to unleash a nuclear weapon on its enemies. But the news of where it has got to is profoundly alarming even so.

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The supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has dismissed the finding as “an inspector’s error”, said Jonathan Tirone in Bloomberg (New York). But Iran has earlier admitted enriching uranium to 60% at its Fordow site – far in excess of the 5% needed to produce electricity.

Under the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) signed in 2015, it had agreed to eliminate entirely its stockpile of medium-enriched uranium. But that deal broke down in 2019 after the US withdrew from it, and Tehran has been expanding its nuclear programme ever since. But no one had expected it to go this far so soon.

The change was “discovered by chance”, said Simon Henderson on The Hill (Washington). During a rare random inspection, an experienced expert from the UN’s International Atomic Energy Agency noticed a change to the piping linking groups of centrifuges at Fordow. Such a change is only made to allow for “faster enrichment to higher levels”, and he duly joined the dots.

Whether or not the 84% enrichment level was achieved “on purpose or accumulated by accident”, it’s dangerous: “material of roughly the 84% level” was used in the Hiroshima bomb in 1945. Some reckon Iran “might be able to pro­duce a working nuclear weapon in as little as six months”, said Cora Engelbrecht in The New York Times. It is suspected it also has an arsenal of hypersonic missiles – terrifyingly accurate non-atomic long­-range weapons “capable of travelling up to 15 times the speed of sound” that could be “enabled to carry a nuclear warhead”.

The 2015 deal was never a viable counterweight to Iran’s nuclear ambitions, said Seth J. Frantzman in The Jerusalem Post. Signed by China, Russia, the US, France, Germany, the UK and the EU, but vociferously opposed by Israel, it placed no restrictions on Iran’s missile programmes, and did nothing to stop Tehran exporting arms to foreign-based terror groups such as Hezbollah and Hamas.

What proponents of the JCPOA fail to grasp is that Iran is “dead set on having a nuclear arsenal, no matter the cost”, said Joseph Epstein on Jewish News Syndicate (Boston). Having seen regimes toppled in Libya and Iraq, Iran’s leaders view atomic weapons as “the only way for them to guarantee their safety”. They won’t stop until they have them.

Possibly so, said Andrew Parasiliti in Al-Monitor (Washington), yet Iranian officials are still looking at the possibility of reviving the deal and putting an end to the sanctions imposed on the country, as are some EU governments. Hence Tehran’s decision last month to pardon thousands of prisoners, including some arrested in the recent protests.

Yet it’s too little too late. Iran’s brutal crackdown on anti-regime protests in the autumn, and its support for Russia in its war on Ukraine, have shifted the mood in Washington. Let’s be clear, said Markus Kaim in Der Spiegel (Hamburg).

If Iran does build a bomb, it would have extremely grave consequences for the “regional order” in the Middle East. Israel is already adopting a tougher stance towards Iran, while other countries in the region, notably Saudi Arabia, may well start to seek the security of atomic arsenals of their own in order to counter a nuclear Iran. We could be facing a truly troubling “nuclear arms race” taking hold in the Middle East.