31 January 2011

The dangers of substituting testosterone for brains in dealing with Iran




I’ve always found American foreign policy, such as it is, alternatively brilliant and unbelievably stupid by turns. When they invaded Iraq they passed out cell phones to Iraqi commanders and negotiated bribes that insured that when the American army rolled into sight Iraqi troopies had no senior officer corps to direct them.  Once they had the country, however, it seemed like American occupation commanders voluntarily underwent a collective prefrontal lobotomy that led them to do patently idiotic things like not hiring the now jobless Iraqi army to rebuild the country and worse still, not making the destruction of the mountains of Iraqi munitions they found a first priority.

So it goes with America’s response to the Iranian nuclear enrichment initiative.  Like him or loathe him, Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is correct, Iran has a right as a signatory of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty to develop its own indigenous nuclear programme.  There is nothing in the treaty that abrogates that right on the pretext that much of the western world perceives that Iran’s President as a terminally dangerous nutjob. 

George Bush, on the other hand, has cast himself in the role of a latter-day King Canute commanding the tide not to turn.  He can negotiate and bluster and even flail the waves with all his enormously powerful country’s military might.  The tide is going to come in all the same, regardless.

Mind, Bush’s rationale is flawless.  It’s a very short jump indeed from being able to enrich Uranium to the few percent U-235 necessary to fuel a light water reactor with centrifuges to being able to create weapons grade Uranium.  Let the Iranians develop the engineering know-how to run centrifuge cascades and they’ve got the bomb.  The South Africans did it twenty-five years ago with much less need or incentive.

I tend to blame a lot of this on the longstanding tradition of the US State Department of exclusively hiring Ivy League law and political science majors whose total grasp of technology seems limited to an understanding that their automobiles start and stop with the turn of a key.  When you let foreign policy be formulated by that kind of nitwit you tend to get foreign policy that forgets the basics of nuclear technology.

To begin with nuclear technology is very old. The means needed to achieve a nuclear bomb need be no more sophisticated than what the US had in the late 1930’s.  It’s commonly forgotten that even then the technology was brought from nothing to a weaponised bomb in well under four years. 

Today, recreating that know-how is much easier, even without a Dr. Abdul Qadeer Khan selling you Chinese nuclear warhead blueprints and Malaysian P2 centrifuges rotors built on the sly.  Heavens, even a penny-ante nation-state like North Korea with a net GDP of under US$31 billion can contemplate not only a nuclear weapons programme, but also the development, however haltingly, of a guided missile delivery system for their warheads.  That’s out of a total military budget estimated at US$10 billion which also has to equip, feed and house a million man army.

The bald truth is that virtually any national government outside of Africa and several in Africa has sufficient monetary resources and technical acumen to develop an indigenous nuclear weapons capability in a few years if they see a need.  More frightening still is the fact that there are literally thousands of high-tech corporations which could lose such a development project in their bookkeeping.  Remember that Malaysian firm that made the P2 rotors.

The short answer is that as a practical matter you can’t stop nuclear proliferation.  It’s like trying to stop the swapping music files and movies over peer-to-peer networks.  It’s just too easy.

Given that, what do you do?

I'm usually thought to be on the right ... though it seems to me though that too many there have submitted to a voluntary prefrontal lobotomy since the invasion of Iraq finished up.

During the Iraqi invasion we handed out satellite cell phones to any upper-level Iraqi officer who would take one and cut cash deals with whatever local Iraqi military leadership we encountered to fly the coop whenever it began to look like there might be a problem taking a particular objective. That was brilliant. So was the campaign to oust of the Taliban in Afghanistan.

Ever since then, though, the administration has been behaving more like they were directing a second rate Arnie Schwarzenegger or Sy Stallone action movie than running an intelligent military occupation.

I can give you an example that sticks in my mind. I have a video clip of the taking out of an Iraqi sniper that's well over a year old now. Basically, there was a guy with an AK-47 lurking behind a wall about 75 metres down a narrow street in a dusty Iraqi town. He was plinking a few rounds at our guys every time they tried to move down the street. How did our guys solve the problem? They called in the guy's coordinates to an F-16 orbiting over the battle space and he dropped what looked like a GPS-guided 250 kg bomb on the sniper. End of problem.

So what's wrong with that, you say? Simple. It costs about $10K/hour to keep an F-16 in the air, even in the US, the last time that I looked. That GPS-guided bomb costs about $25K. I figure roughly that it cost $50K to take that sniper out. What did it cost the insurgency to put the sniper in place? For the guy, maybe a few hundred a month. His AK-47 costs a few hundred more and his ammunition a few dollars at worst. That's bad economics, any way you look at it.

Krauthammer is urging us to do the same thing in Iran, that is, to substitute testosterone for brains.

Step back and assess the problem rationally for a moment. I know that's hard, but take a shot at it. Like him or loathe him and I certainly loathe him, Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is correct, Iran has a right as a signatory of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty to develop its own indigenous nuclear programme. There is nothing in the treaty that abrogates that right on the pretext that much of the western world perceives that Iran’s President as a terminally dangerous nutjob.

Put into the mix that nuclear weapons technology is basically a bunch of late-1930's engineering tricks and you can begin to see just how difficult halting nuclear proliferation is going to be as an ongoing effort without turning the whole world into a police state. The fact that the South Africans built a nuclear arsenal twenty-five years ago ought to turn on a tiny little light somewhere in Bush's so-called brain trust. Any half-assed little country can build a deliverable nuke if they're sufficiently determined to do so. Heavens, even a penny-ante nation-state like North Korea with a net GDP of under US$31 billion can contemplate not only a nuclear weapons programme, but also the development, however haltingly, of a guided missile delivery system for their warheads. That’s out of a total military budget estimated at US$10 billion which also has to equip, feed and house a million man army.

There was a big deal about Iraq going to Niger to get yellowcake. Do you realise that it only takes a couple of 18 wheeler truckloads of caronite ore to provide the uranium to make a bomb? If you want to keep it quiet you don't even need caronite. You can get uranium out of granite if you want. It costs more to do that, but so what? If you just want a bomb, you can use tuned lasers to do the enrichment. It costs a lot more per kg of enriched uranium to do it that way, but again so what? That Iran is going for centrifuges is a strong indicator that they are being at least partially honest about making fuel stock for reactors. P2 centrifuges ARE economic for THAT purpose.

Okay, so suppose Ahmadinejad actually gets the bomb. Mind, I wouldn't put it past him. But, what can he do with it once he has it? Can he use it on the US or the Israelis? Sure, if he doesn't mind having Iran turned into the world's largest glass-lined parking lot, that is. He may be a nut-job, but he's not that crazy. Neither is Kim Jong Il. Can he threaten his neighbors? You bet. Putting a few Aegis-equipped American warships loaded with SM-3 Block IA interceptor missiles puts paid to that option, though, quite cost-effectively. That's exactly what we've done to North Korea. Can he threaten the "Old Europeans"? Certainly, but who can't effectlively threaten those clowns these days?

Really, the only thing that Iran insures in developing a nuclear arsenal is that it will be effectively impossible to successfully militarily invade Iran. That's why the South Africans developed theirs. There wasn't anything within the range of their air force that cost as much as one of their bombs, never mind being worth dropping one on. Ditto for North Korea.

Postscript:

This article was written in 2005 for the French webzine, Agoravox, which had an English language edition at the time.