Removing Congressional Illusions About An Iran Nuclear Deal

Removing Congressional Illusions About An Iran Nuclear Deal

George Perkovich 

February 12, 2014

Summary

Recent testimony before the House Foreign Affairs Committee highlighted an interesting—and unrealistic—approach to negotiations on Iran’s nuclear program.

Occasionally, congressional testimony can be interesting in ways unintended by the staff who invited the witnesses. On January 28, the House Foreign Affairs Committee invited Gregory Jones of the Nonproliferation Policy Education Center to testify in a hearing on implementation of the Iran nuclear deal agreed to in November 2013. Jones’s testimony was interesting, and likely not what the majority wanted to hear. But his words do highlight what is not realistic to demand in the negotiations with Iran.

The Nonproliferation Policy Education Center is well-known for its absolute opposition to non-nuclear-weapon states’ possession of “any materials or facilities that can quickly provide fissile material for nuclear weapons,” as Jones put it during the hearing. The purity of this position extends to calling for “shutting down” facilities that enrich uranium “not only in Iran but also in Germany, the Netherlands, Brazil and Japan” as well as facilities in Japan that separate plutonium from spent nuclear fuel.
This was not the most interesting part of Jones’s testimony. (Though, if committee members had asked how the United States or anyone else really could induce all non-nuclear-weapon states to give up fuel-cycle programs, they might have stumbled upon reasons why Iran will not agree to abandon all of its enrichment capabilities.) Even more interesting were the corollary analyses of the Iranian challenge that followed. More at link.http://carnegieendowment.org/2014/02/12/removing-congressional-illusions-about-iran-nuclear-deal/h0ps