Speed Bumps, and an Exit, on Iran's Nuclear Road

Wall Street Journal

Think of Iran's nuclear program as a car chugging down a highway, moving relentlessly ahead but with miles to go before reaching its destination.

Now think of U.S. policy as an effort to slow that car down and make it increasingly expensive to drive—while also building an exit ramp off the highway. The great question to be answered in the next few months is whether Iran has any interest at all in taking that exit ramp.

Right now, the effort to increase the cost of Iran's nuclear journey is going reasonably well. International sanctions to stop Iran before it can develop nuclear weapons are having a deeper bite than skeptics expected when the United Nations Security Council imposed a new round of them in early June. The European Union and Canada have since joined the U.S. in imposing additional restrictions on doing business with Iran; American officials say Japan and South Korea will follow suit shortly. Most notably, the sanctions seem to be limiting Iran's ability to import badly needed refined gasoline. So Tehran's drive is getting more costly.

But are the U.S. and its allies also succeeding in slowing it down? That's harder to tell.

Iran's enrichment effort certainly seems to be hitting some technical problems. At the big uranium-enrichment facility at Natanz, U.S. officials say, only about half the installed enrichment centrifuges appear to be operating, with others broken or held in reserve.

Whether that's the result of technical deficiencies or sabotage is anybody's guess. In either case, the pace of enrichment isn't what was once feared. Iran probably has enough low-level uranium to produce two nuclear weapons, if it were to clear the considerable hurdles to turning raw material into arms—something Tehran insists, of course, it isn't interested in doing anyway.

So there's some good news on making Iran's journey slower and costlier. That's where the exit ramp comes into play.

U.S. and European officials realize that if the economic pressure now being applied has any chance of succeeding in changing the game, Iran needs to be given a face-saving way to back away from its current nuclear program into one more clearly designed for peaceful purposes. Much of the conversation in coming weeks with America's allies in this effort—the other four permanent members of the Security Council, plus Germany—will be devoted to this topic.

The latest Security Council sanctions resolution starts to sketch out what this exit ramp would look like. Iran would suspend enrichment activity and its work on a heavy-water nuclear research reactor, and cooperate with the International Atomic Energy Agency to answer a host of questions about its previous, often secretive nuclear activities. Then sanctions would be lifted.

But the U.S. and its allies know that, if only to retain the diplomatic high ground, they will need to offer something more to make it clear that a truly peaceful nuclear program will be acceptable. That was the point of the offer the allies made to Tehran last fall, proposing to take a good chunk of its low-enriched uranium, process it further for use in a medical-research reactor in Tehran, and then ship it back to Iran strictly for that purpose.

Look for further offers to show Iran, and the world, that the world would accept a legitimate nuclear-energy program, and that Tehran has no need to enrich uranium to have one. That's why Russia's move this month to provide the fuel to start a new nuclear power plant at Bushehr wasn't all bad. By providing the fuel, and taking away spent fuel, the Russians have undercut Iran's argument that it has to do its own enrichment.

Beyond calling Iran's bluff, there's a genuine need to find out whether Iran's leaders—at least some of them— might actually be interested in a way out. Nobody thinks the odds are very good, but the economic pressure now is real enough to test the possibility.

Signals from Iran are typically mixed. Last week, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said he was interested in talks with the West this fall, while supreme religious leader Ali Khamenei promptly ruled them out until sanctions are lifted. Then, over the weekend, President Ahmadinejad said in a Japanese newspaper interview that he was ready for talks with no preconditions.

Meantime, an important new IAEA report on the status of Iran's program is only weeks away. As they wait, U.S. officials console themselves with the knowledge that Iran's dithering serves at least one useful purpose.

"If they refuse to talk," says Gary Samore, the White House official in charge of nuclear issues, "that obviously makes it easier for us to make the case that Iran is the obstacle, and that there is a need to increase the pressure."