Stanford scholars debate whether the Iran nuclear deal can withstand U.S. withdrawal, if a revitalized nuclear program is possible and what a new deal would look like.

Following the announcement of the U.S. withdrawal from the Iran deal, three Stanford scholars consider what it means for American foreign policy and diplomacy.

Stanford scholars debate how the Trump administration’s decision on Iran will affect foreign relations. (Image credit: ruskpp / Getty Images)

In 2015, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action – known as the Iran nuclear deal, or JCPOA – was agreed between Iran and the U.S., United Kingdom, France, Germany, China and Russia. The international agreement limited Iran’s nuclear activities in exchange for a reprieve from international sanctions.

What happens next remains unclear. What does withdrawal signal about American foreign policy? What would a new agreement look like – and is it even possible? To answer some of these questions, Stanford News Service talked to three scholars about the issues:

• Siegfried Hecker is a top nuclear security scholar, former Los Alamos National Laboratory director and senior fellow at the Center for International Security and Cooperation. Hecker’s research interests include plutonium science, nuclear weapons policy and international security, nuclear security (including nonproliferation and counter terrorism) and cooperative nuclear threat reduction.
• Abbas Milani is the Hamid and Christina Moghadam Director of Iranian Studiesand affiliate at FSI’s Center on Democracy Development and the Rule of Law. He has been one of the founding co-directors of the Iran Democracy Project and a research fellow at the Hoover Institution. In 2016, he launched the Iran2040 Project that produces research on the future of the Iranian economy, population, energy, water, agriculture and the financial system.
• Allen Weiner is a senior lecturer of law, director of the Stanford Program in International and Comparative Law and co-director of the Stanford Center on International Conflict and Negotiation. His scholarship focuses on international law and the response to the contemporary security threats of international terrorism, the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and situations of widespread humanitarian atrocities.

What does withdrawal from the Iran deal signal about American foreign policy?

Milani: It signifies that U.S. foreign policy is dependent on the views, even whims, of one person – the president – and the rhetoric he used during the campaign. Views of U.S. government experts or allies has I think never counted for less.

Weiner: The withdrawal from the JCPOA signals a departure from the notion that the U.S. places high value on the benefits of stability, predictability and consistency in its foreign relations. It also reflects the Trump administration’s belief that the U.S. has the ability to persuade other countries to accommodate American interests through coercive mechanisms.

How will withdrawal from the Iran nuclear deal be viewed from inside Iran?

Milani: Iran is a country divided. The people, suffering from a profound – even existential – economic crisis, are worried about their future. Bickering political factions in the regime are playing the blame game: first blame the U.S., and then opposing factions.

Can the Iran nuclear deal withstand U.S. withdrawal? What options are available – both politically and legally?

Hecker: I don’t see Iran making a mad dash for nuclear weapons to respond to the U.S. withdrawal. The country has too much to lose. Tehran could decide to keep the essence of the deal with the other countries and isolate the U.S. It may find that it will get adequate sanctions relief from the other countries in spite of U.S. pressure. That may be sufficient for Iran to continue to honor its nuclear deal commitments for now.

Milani: I would be surprised if the deal does not survive. It was never a U.S. deal.  The U.S. was simply a key player. Europe, U.K., China, Russia, the UN, and International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) want it to continue – Iran, too.

Weiner: In a sense, yes. Iran is free to continue to comply with the restraints on its nuclear activities negotiated in the JCPOA and to accept IAEA inspections. The other signatories to the JCPOA are free not to re-impose on Iran the sanctions that were lifted under the JCPOA. Because of the reach of U.S. sanctions, however, European companies in particular will face significant risks in doing business in Iran, which means Iran will be deprived of many of the commercial benefits it sought in negotiating the JCPOA. It is far from clear that the remaining, much more limited benefits available under the JCPOA will be appealing enough for Iran to continue to suspend those aspects of its nuclear program that are covered by the JCPOA.

What are reasons to oppose the Iran nuclear deal?

Hecker: The deal was able to get more Iranian nuclear concessions than I had ever thought possible. Apparently, the Trump administration objected primarily that the deal did not include Iran’s other activities, such as missile tests and Iran’s role in the region that it views as unacceptable. However, some of President Trump’s claims about the nuclear deal were simply incorrect.

Milani: The deal surely had flaws. It did not address such critical issues as Iran’s missile program, the regime’s role in places like Syria and Iraq, and human right abuses at home. It surely was not the worst deal in history. It was the least bad option at the time.

Weiner: The key objection voiced by many critics of the JCPOA concerns the “sunset provisions” in the deal, under which many key restrictions in the JCPOA on Iranian nuclear activities last only for 10 or 15 years (depending on the particular restriction). This potentially allows Iran to benefit from sanctions relief now and to merely postpone its pursuit of a nuclear weapon. Other objections concern the failure of the JCPOA adequately to address Iran’s missile development programs or its destabilizing regional activities more generally.

What nuclear facilities remain in place in Iran, and how easily might they be repurposed to create weapons?

Hecker: Iran has dramatically reduced its inventories of enriched uranium in compliance with the deal. It has enrichment facilities that could be restarted rather easily to enrich uranium to weapons grade, but not without withdrawing from the deal. It could also begin construction of a new plutonium-producing reactor, but that would be rather costly since it made the one under construction inoperative in compliance with the deal. The bottom line is that it would take quite some time to get back to the material inventories and facilities Iran had before the deal went into effect.

Milani: Iran’s enrichment facilities remain but much of their capacity has been mothballed. Ninety-eight percent of the country’s low enrichment uranium has been shipped out of the country. The Arak heavy water reactor has been virtually dismantled. All known facilities are under constant surveillance by the IAEA. The regime’s missile program has, however, continued.

What effect could withdrawal have on anticipated talks with North Korea?

Hecker: That’s quite uncertain. North Korea may still want a deal, but it would likely ask for greater assurances from the U.S. about potential withdrawal, just as the U.S. is pressing North Korea about its past history of compliance.

Weiner: Commentators have observed that withdrawal from the JCPOA raises questions about U.S. credibility and its willingness to keep its word. Some suggest that this will make North Korea less likely to move actively in the direction of complete, verifiable, irreversible nuclear disarmament for fear that once it has given up its nuclear program, the U.S. might simply re-impose sanctions or pursue other hostile policies towards it. On the other hand, President Trump has emphasized that he would keep any commitments he makes in negotiations with North Korea; it was only the commitments of the prior U.S. administration that he did not feel obliged to honor. Whether this would provide enough confidence to the North Koreans to trust the United States is, of course, far from clear.

What would a new deal look like?

Hecker: I don’t see a new deal involving this administration as a possibility.

Milani: I think the U.S. could have had more impact on a possible revamped deal had it stayed in the agreement. It remains to be seen whether Europeans will continue to try to coordinate with the U.S. and will try to forge a different agreement with the regime.

Weiner: A new agreement, to be acceptable to the U.S., would have to eliminate (or at least significantly extend) the sunset clauses and address Iran’s missile program. From Iran’s side, a revised deal would have to involve more than just lifting sanctions against Iran. It would also have to more emphatically embrace the prospect of American companies doing business in Iran. With respect to commercial relations, Iran argues that even though the United States formally lifted sanctions against Iran after the JCPOA took effect, the ongoing threat that U.S. sanctions would be re-imposed has effectively dissuaded many businesses in both the U.S. and Europe from pursuing long-term business arrangements in Iran.

The following are remarks by Professor David Holloway at the Sid Drell Symposium on Fundamental Physics given at SLAC on 12 January 2018.

I want to thank the organizers for inviting me to speak at this conference. It’s a particular pleasure for me as a historian and political scientist to be a speaker at a symposium on Fundamental Physics. More seriously it is an honor for me to speak at a symposium in memory of Sid Drell, with whom I had the privilege to work for over thirty years. Sid agreed with Einstein that politics was much harder to study than physics. “The laws of physics stay the same,” he said. “The laws of politics change. And besides, you are supping with the Devil.”

Sakharov

My topic is Sid’s friendship with Andrei Sakharov, whom Sid greatly admired and more than once referred to as a saint. Sakharov was born in Moscow in 1921, five years before Sid. He died in 1989. I don’t want to go through Sakharov’s life, but I do want to mention a couple of things to provide context for Sid’s meetings with him and for their friendship. Sakharov’s mentor, Igor Tamm – a Nobel Prize-wining physicist – drew Sakharov into work on the design of thermonuclear weapons in 1948. From 1950 to 1968 Sakharov lived and worked in Arzamas-16 (now Sarov), the Soviet equivalent of Los Alamos. He played a key role in the development of Soviet thermonuclear weapons.

In 1968 Sakharov was removed from secret work after an essay he had written – Reflections on Progress, Peaceful Coexistence, and Intellectual Freedom – was published abroad. In the opening paragraph Sakharov states that his views were formed in the milieu of the scientific-technical intelligentsia, which was very worried about the future of humankind. Their concern, he continued, was all the stronger because what he called "the scientific method of directing politics, economics, art, education, and military affairs" had not yet become a reality. What did he mean by the "scientific method" in this context? His answer: "We consider 'scientific' that method which is based on a profound study of facts, theories, views, presupposing unprejudiced and open discussion, which is dispassionate in its conclusions." In other words, Sakharov wanted open discussion of important policy issues – something that did not happen in the Soviet Union.

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In his essay Sakharov expressed ideas he had been coming to for some time, but the immediate stimulus to his writing the essay appears to have been that he was refused permission to publish an article about ABM systems. He (and other senior scientists at Arzamas-16) had come to the conclusion that “creating ABM defenses against massed attacks is not realistic, while for individual missiles it is difficult but possible.” Sakharov had written to Mikhail Suslov, an ideologically rigid Politburo member, whom he had met, expressing this view and asking for permission to publish an article on ABM systems. Suslov had denied him permission.

The publication of the essay abroad converted Sakharov from a scientist engaged in secret work into a world-famous figure. The essay sold 18 million copies in one year (it was printed in full in many newspapers).

I mention this episode and this essay to show that Sakharov, like Sid, was interested not only in physics but also profoundly interested in the application of science to policy, something that Sid had begun to do, starting in 1960 with Panofsky’s encouragement. It was the publication of the essay abroad that got Sakharov expelled from secret work. It is only then that he began to turn his attention to the defense of human rights in the Soviet Union, especially after 1970, when he met Elena Bonner, whom he married in 1972. In 1975 he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his work for human rights. In his 1968 essay he had seen intellectual freedom as crucial for progress – how else could we deal with environmental degradation and the danger of thermonuclear war? In his Nobel lecture, Peace, Progress, and Human Rights, he named over one hundred of the political prisoners being held in the Soviet Union. He also made the general point that peace, progress, and human rights were indissolubly linked. For progress to be beneficial and peace secure, human rights (freedom of conscience, freedom of assembly, freedom of expression etc.) had to be protected. Thus the rights of the individual were intimately linked to our capacity to deal with global problems facing the human race.

Sid and Sakharov meet

In the early 1970s Sakharov was under intense pressure to curtail his activities, This came from the authorities and also from fellow members of the Academy of Sciences. That was the state of affairs in 1974 when he and Sid had their first meeting, which took place in Moscow, at a small conference on composite nucleon structure. Sid recalled “what I considered a great compliment to me, he apparently knew enough about me through whomever to sit down next to me at the meeting.” In his memoirs Sakharov writes of this meeting that Sid was a “young man,” “already a very well-known physicist.” They exchanged notes because Sakharov’s English was very poor and Sid’s Russian even worse. They could both get along a little bit in German. Sakharov then asked Sid about people in the West and invited Sid (and Viki Weisskopf) to dinner at his apartment on Chkalov Street (ulitsa Chkalova) where they met Elena Bonner and Bonner’s daughter Tanya Yankelevich, who was probably the person who made the conversation possible. 

At that first meeting Sid and Sakharov formed a bond. They met again two years later at a High Energy International Meeting in Tbilisi. Sakharov and Bonner were both there. Sid spent a week with them, forming a close and warm rapport.

Sid maintained a steady correspondence with both Sakharov and Bonner. In the late 1970s much of this correspondence had to do with the repression of human rights in the Soviet Union and the persecution of physicists (and others). Sid was particularly helpful to Elena Bonner’s children in Boston, Efrem and Tanya Yankelevich. He also did what he could to keep Sakharov’s name – and his plight – in the news. He made sure Sakharov’s papers were published in the West; he helped to organize conferences on Sakharov, and to keep Sakharov’s name in the public mind. He was not alone in this – there was an organization called SOS (Sakharov, Orlov, and Shcharansky) founded at Berkeley – but he was one of a few, and he was persistent.

There is a touching letter from Sakharov to Sid in June 1981:

“Dear Sidney, I want to write to you this time not an ‘open’ but a most ordinary letter, to thank you from the bottom of my heart. Lusia [Elena Bonner] and I feel all the time that in that infinitely distant world to which our children have been mislaid and where they now live, there are some (very few) people who have not forgotten them or us, and you are one of them.” And then Sakharov writes, perhaps rather slyly in view of Sid’s liking for Madras jackets: “I sense that almost physically, seeing you in my mind’s eye in your check suit (although perhaps you now dress differently.)”

In 1978 Sid wrote N.N. Bogoliubov to explain that he would not take part in a Dubna-sponsored symposium on Elementary Particle Theory because of the way the physicist Yuri Orlov was being treated. Orlov had been condemned to seven years in the GULAG for documenting Soviet infringements of human rights, contrary to Soviet commitments in the Helsinki Final Act of 1975. Sid told Bogoliubov that he was very sorry to miss what would doubtless be a stimulating symposium and that he hoped the conditions would soon return for normal scientific collaboration.

The “Open Letter”

 Sakharov was arrested in January 1980 and exiled to Gorkii for criticizing the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan. Gorkii was a closed city; foreigners could not travel there. Up to that point Sakharov had been able to use the prestige he had won by his role in nuclear weapons development to avoid arrest, though he had been under considerable social and political pressure from the authorities. In Gorkii he was cut off from Moscow, though Elena Bonner was able, at least initially, to travel back and forth from Gorkii to Moscow.

In 1982 Sid was invited by the Soviet government to visit Moscow to talk to high-level government and military officials about arms control. He made it a condition that he be allowed to see Bonner; and in fact he did so in a meeting arranged by the American Embassy. Sid gave her papers and copies of recent speeches he had made about arms control to take back to Gorkii.

Among those papers was a lecture Sid had given at Grace Cathedral and also recent Congressional testimony. Those statements prompted Sakharov to write one of his most important papers: “On the Danger of Thermonuclear War – an open letter to Dr. Sidney Drell,” which was published in the Summer 1983 issue of Foreign Affairs. The paper caused a great stir, because it intervened on a particular issue in an American debate about strategic weapons policy. Sakharov expressed qualified support for deployment by the US of the heavy MX ICBM.

Sid replied in a letter to Sakharov, pointing out the many areas of agreement between them that Sakharov had discussed in his letter: the dangers and the scale of disaster of nuclear war, which would be an act of suicide with no winners; the sole purpose of nuclear weapons being to deter nuclear aggression; the importance of parity in conventional arms in order not to feel driven to a nuclear “first use” policy; the grave dangers of escalation once the nuclear threshold was crossed; the overriding importance of arms negotiations and reductions; and the unlikelihood that a “star wars” ABM system would be practical.

Sid justified his opposition to the MX by noting that the silo-based system would be vulnerable to destruction in a Soviet first strike and therefore was essentially a first-strike weapon itself, because it would have to be used first if it were to be used at all.

In his memoirs Sakharov wrote: “I consider [Drell] a friend. For many years Drell was an advisor to the US government on questions of nuclear policy and disarmament. In a series of articles and presentations in recent years he has formulated his position on these questions. I fully share Drell’s basic principled positions, but I can’t completely agree with those assertions relating to recent actions, to assessments of the existing military and political situation, to the ways of attaining the goal of all reasonable people of eliminating the danger of nuclear war.” Then, in a note added in October 1983, he wrote that after reading Sid’s response he thought their differences were not so great after all.

After 1986

Through the years of Sakharov’s exile to Gorkii Sid kept up his activities on Sakharov’s behalf. In January 1986 he wrote an eloquent letter to Mikhail Gorbachev, who had become General Secretary in March the year before, urging him to allow Sakharov to return to Moscow from Gorkii. Gorbachev allowed Sakharov to come back to Moscow in December 1986. That Sid’s letter played a role in this decision seems unlikely, but the campaign for Sakharov in which Sid played such a large part surely was an important factor in Gorbachev’s decision, for it kept Sakharov in the public eye and meant that Gorbachev had to make a decision. Sid visited Moscow in the summer of 1987, seeing Sakharov for the first time in eleven years.

Sid made the comment that if you met Sakharov you would know he was an extraordinary person. Thanks to Sid, I had the opportunity to spend an evening with Sakharov in Moscow in June 1987, and my impression confirms Sid’s judgment. I talked to Sakharov about his role in the nuclear weapons program. I remember as I approached his front door thinking, “What am I doing here? This man has very important things to do in Russian public life. Why am I bothering him with my historical research?” Within a minute of his opening the door that feeling was gone. His personal charm made me feel totally at ease and he seemed very happy to talk about his life at Arzamas-16. Two impressions from that meeting: first, Sakharov did not speak quickly. If you asked a question, you could sense his mind turning like a searchlight and illuminating the issue you had brought up. Second, he had a clear, but detached, understanding of his own importance in Soviet history. I recalled at the time that one of the characteristics the Catholic Church looks for in a candidate for sainthood is the person’s awareness of their own holiness, but that awareness should be devoid of all arrogance. Humility does not mean denying one’s own gifts or role in life, but it does mean not taking the credit for oneself.

Drell, Sakharov, and Panofsky at Stanford,1989

In August 1989 Sakharov and Bonner visited Stanford. There was a physics meeting, I think, but what I remember is the talk Sakharov and Elena Bonner gave at CISAC, in Galvez House. 1989 was a tempestuous year in Soviet politics. Sakharov had been elected in March to the new Congress of People’s Deputies and at the first session of the Congress he had been the focal point of several tumultuous debates. He and Elena Bonner talked about that and discussed three broader issues: the constitutional issue; the question of nationalities; and the question of property. It was an extraordinary session. Four months later Sakharov died in his sleep in his apartment, a huge loss for the Soviet Union and the world.

Conclusion

The friendship between Sid and Sakharov was a genuine and close one, though they did not meet often. But they had maintained a correspondence during the difficult years between 1976 and 1987, and Sid had done whatever he could to help Sakharov and his family. The two men were in some ways alike. Physicists of course, and theoretical physicists. They had similar views on nuclear weapons. They were both greatly interested in the implications of new technologies.

The main similarity that strikes me, however, is their integrity. They both took their ethical responsibilities seriously. They thought about what was right, but once they decided what that was, they stuck with it, even if it looked like stubbornness to others. They had a commitment to do what they thought was right, and that was especially important when you engaged in policy or in politics – for then, in Sid’s words, you were “supping with the Devil.” The situations in which Sid and Sakharov found themselves were of course very different, but I think that integrity was there in both of them. Sid greatly admired Sakharov’s moral courage – he saw it as heroic, tantamount to sainthood. And my sense is that Sakharov recognized the same quality in Sid.

I want to end by reading from a poem by Boris Pasternak, which I think captures that quality. It was written in 1956 and addressed to himself. But it can be applied to physicists too. Sakharov organized his obituary of his mentor, Igor Tamm, around this poem. And I hope you will agree that the qualities Sakharov admired in Tamm are qualities we saw in Sid too. It is a short poem, and I will read only part of it, in my own (inadequate) translation.

It’s not becoming to be famous,

For that is not what lifts us up.

So do not build yourself an archive

Or pore over your manuscripts.

To be creative, give of yourself.

Don’t seek sensation, or success.

It’s shameful, when you don’t signify,

To be on everybody’s lips.

But live your life without imposture,

And live it so that, in the end,

You hear the summons of the future

And draw love in from far and wide.

…….

And never for a single moment

Renounce your true self, or pretend.

But be alive, alive and only

Alive and only, to the end.

Boris Pasternak 1956

Rodney C. Ewing, Frank Stanton professor in nuclear security and co-director at the Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC) in the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI) was named winner of the 2018 Robert Cahn Award by the Journal of Nuclear Materials and the committee of NuMat 2018, the Nuclear Materials Conference.

The annual award recognizes a scientist with a high scientific profile in the field of nuclear materials who has both the ability to communicate science to a broad audience and demonstrated interest in breaking down barriers between different scientific disciplines.

Ewing, also a professor in the Department of Geological Sciences in the School of Earth, Energy and Environmental Sciences at Stanford, the Edward H. Kraus Distinguished University Professor Emeritus in the Department of Earth & Environmental Sciences at the University of Michigan, and a Regents' Professor Emeritus at the University of New Mexico, primarily researches the study of radiation effects in materials. His body of work defined a new research field involving radiation-induced damage in solids from the radioactive elements present in their crystal structures, and has been recognized for its significant impact on the design of nuclear waste forms for containing high-level radioactive waste. Professor Ewing will receive the award in Seattle at the Nuclear Material Conference (NuMat) in October 2018 where he will open the conference with the Robert Cahn Award Keynote Lecture.

Read more about the 2018 Robert Cahn Award on the Elsevier website.

About the Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC)

The Center for International Security and Cooperation tackles the most critical security issues in the world today. Founded in 1983, CISAC has built on its research strengths to better understand an increasingly complex international environment. It is part of Stanford’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI). Though scholarly research, fellowships, and teaching, CISAC is educating the next generation of leaders in international security and creating policy impact on a wide variety of issues to help build a safer world.