How Washington and Moscow could work together against the Iranian bomb

Jonathan Power Columnist London

Why is Washington so worried about Iran building a nuclear bomb, if it is? It never worried that much about India and Pakistan. Indeed in this case it was perhaps rather too insouciant, never contemplating that al-Qaeda's friends in Pakistan's military and intelligence services might attempt to gain control of it.

The reason is simple: Most if not all the powers-that-be in Washington have long ago convinced themselves that nuclear deterrence is a good thing, cooling war passions rather than aggravating them. And, secondly, they believe that the security of the U.S. would not be affected by a nuclear war between India and Pakistan or even between India and China. Millions would die, of course, but the damage would be localized.

Doesn't the same go for an Iranian nuclear bomb? Moreover, Iran in more than 200 years has never started a war with anyone and, despite the history of recent antagonism towards the U.S., it has never come to the point of preparing for war. Of course, it maintains a state of extreme hostility towards Israel and funds Hezbollah, the Palestinian guerrilla movement, yet it has made no attempt to make even a token deployment of its own military forces in Israel's direction.

It has had to fight Saddam Hussein's Iraq and both sides might well have used nuclear weapons if they had been at hand. But then again, they might well have been frightened from destroying themselves as well as the other side and decided not to. Even if they had the rest of the world would not have been too seriously affected since their common border lies well away from non- Iranian/Iraqi population centers.

Yet when President George Bush went to Moscow two weeks ago Iran's supposed nuclear bomb program was the point of contention. Russia feels it is committed to building a civilian nuclear reactor in Iran, even though with its vast oil and gas reserves Iran should be one of the last countries to need nuclear energy.

The Americans are preoccupied about nuclear proliferation and a secret protocol they unearthed between Russia and Iran that showed that at one time Russia was prepared to sell Iran uranium- enrichment equipment that would not only reduce Iranian dependency on Russia for nuclear fuel, it would give the Iranians the possibility of building up their own stockpile of fissile material suitable for building nuclear weapons.

The Russian nuclear establishment, as befits a large nuclear power, is a mighty one, with many companies, numerous research institutes and an enormous cadre of trained nuclear scientists. As was well demonstrated with the long drawn out battle with Washington over the Russian decision to sell cyrogenic rocket engines for inter-continental missiles to India, the Russian bureaucrats are adept in maneuvering against their political masters, waiting for key persona who are against them to change their jobs or be booted out, all in the good cause, they say, of keeping their hard pressed fiefdoms in business. With the Indian case the tug of war went on for nearly a decade and in the end India got most of what it wanted.

Thus, looking at the record of the U.S.-Russian negotiations as just published by the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies, one can see the same tactics. The bureaucrats bested President Boris Yeltsin and look again as if they might be doing the same with Vladamir Putin.

In one of the papers written jointly by two formerly highly placed non-proliferation experts in the State Department and the White House, Robert Einhorn and Gary Samore admit partial defeat with trying to stop the Russian-Iranian deal. Now they feel it is time to argue for more modest aims. One mistake made by Washington, they concede, was to aim to high: To persuade Moscow to cancel everything, even the work on what would be only a civilian power reactor operating under the severe safeguards of the International Atomic Energy Agency.

As the authors have belatedly realized: "If the U.S. sticks with its present approach, it could end up with the worst of all worlds -- additional transfer of power reactors to Iran, continued clandestine and perhaps overt Russian fuel cycle assistance, inadequate constraints on Iranian nuclear activities and persistent U.S.-Russian tensions over the matter".

The way out of the present impasse is for Bush to embrace Putin on this issue as he has on other contentious matters. To tell Putin, as they work together on a widening brief of nuclear related issues, that he trusts him to supervise the Iranian deal with the kind of detailed attention that would make it impossible for the Iranians to use Russian technology and know-how for ulterior purposes.

Bush would work on the assumption that the last thing Moscow wants is a nuclear-armed state on its southern border and that Moscow is in the best position to observe if Iran is up to any devious activity. Washington, of course, can lay out a detailed program of what it expects Moscow to keep an eye on.

Moscow and Washington would make themselves partners in this anti-proliferation work, as they have become on nuclear disarmament and the war on terrorism. The punitive way has few positive results to show for itself after ten years of trying. Cooperation could hardly do worse. And anyway if Iran got its nuclear bomb, despite Russian policing, who would they use it on?