Weeks away from a final international accord on Iran’s nuclear program, Stanford scholars are focusing on the technical, political and practical aspects of the pending deal intended to loosen sanctions while restricting Tehran’s ability to build a nuclear weapon.

“In two to three weeks we will have what some pundits are already calling the most revolutionary positive change in Iranian-American relations and others are saying a disastrous policy of appeasement to the Iranian regime,” said Scott Sagan, a senior fellow at the university’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies. Sagan moderated a discussion at the FSI's Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC) on Tuesday that included FSI’s Siegfried Hecker and Thomas Fingar, as well as Abbas Milani, director of Stanford’s Iranian Studies.

Hecker, a former director of the Los Alamos National Laboratory, said Iran has developed its civilian nuclear capabilities to concurrently have a nuclear weapon option. However, at this point, they do not yet have nuclear weapons, nor have they produced the fissile materials, plutonium or highly enriched uranium, that would fuel such weapons.

“They’ve demonstrated they can enrich uranium to the levels allowed for civilian applications, but that gives them the capability to produce highly enriched uranium for bombs should they choose to do so,” Hecker said. “If they complete the Arak reactor, they will have the potential for plutonium production, although they have not developed a facility to extract the plutonium. If you look in terms of timelines for making fissile materials, they were somewhere between weeks to a month or two away for making enough fissile material for one bomb at the start of the negotiations in November 2013. The nuclear deal would move that timeline, called the ‘breakout’ time to one year, giving the international community more time to respond.”

Hecker said the technical issues are “secondary to whether Iran actually wants to go ahead and decide to build the bomb.”

He met with Iranian negotiators – including Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif – in 2013, and said the officials were anxious to reach a deal.

“Zarif told me that the cost of acquiring strategic capabilities will make Iran less safe rather than more safe,” Hecker said.

Fingar, who chaired the National Intelligence Council while also serving as the U.S. deputy director of national intelligence for analysis between 2005 and 2008, stressed the need for strong verification mechanisms if any deal with Iran is going to work.

“Verification can establish some facts but what it means is fundamentally a contextual and political judgment. What is most important? Catching somebody in a technical violation or preserving the overall purpose for which you are conducting verification. Verification requirements are an integral part of the negotiating process,” Fingar said.

That is especially true for Iran, which has proven that it is not trustworthy, he said.

“It did have a military program, it was seeking the bomb. It continues to lie about it. It lied to the European negotiators, to the UN, to the IAEA,” Fingar said. "This history mandates having a rigorous verification capability."

Monitoring is done in three bins, he said. The first, and most important, is the IAEA on-site inspections. The second is that done by other countries’ intelligence services, including those of the other P5 plus 1 countries and Israel. The third bin is the U.S. intelligence community.

“We will learn far more about what Iran is doing from the IAEA inspections than from any other mechanism,” Fingar said.

Milani focused on the politics of the deal inside Iran. Discussion of this political dimension, he said, cannot be understood unless we take into account two critical issues: Recent concerns with the health of Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and the heated battle on who might succeed him; and secondly the rise of ISIS and the fact that they are near Iran’s borders and have repeatedly threatened the country’s Shiites.

The debate in Iran is heated, he said, with many in favor of the agreement and a few opposed to it.

“Part of what is being fought over is what happens after the deal,” he said. “Who can claim victory for the deal? Who can take blame for it? These are profoundly political issues and they are being fought over.”

Milani said that he has never seen any policy issue, in the entire 35-year history of the Islamic Republic, being discussed with as much detail, and with as much ferocity as the nuclear deal.

There are occasional, detailed debates happening in Tehran University and other places Milani said. One side –typically pro-regime hard-liner – argues that this is the worst deal in Iran’s history. Reformists and scholars supporting President Rouhani’s government defend the agreement.

But he said these conservative opponents of the agreement are in the minority. He estimates that they have no more than 7 to 10 million supporters in a country with a population of 75 million. The vast majority of the population wants a deal, he said. The Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, which wields more power than any other group, is not all in favor of the deal and has made threats against the government in recent weeks.

Still, the ultimate political obstacle is that the deal must contain language that all actors can sell to their respective constituencies as a victory. And finding a language that passes this political hurdle is every bit as hard as the problems discussed by Hecker and Fingar.

Joshua Alvarez is a freelance writer.

It’s been 29 years since the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, but two nuclear security experts affiliated with the Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC) say there are still lessons to be learned from the worst nuclear accident of the 20th century.

In a new book by Sonja Schmid, the former CISAC science fellow argues that the consensus in the West about the cause of the disaster – that it was an inevitable result of a deeply flawed, backward Soviet system –  has precluded Western nuclear industries and policymakers from meaningfully incorporating the Soviet experience into their own practices.

The book, “Producing Power: The Pre-Chernobyl History of the Soviet Nuclear Industry”, is being praised by leading experts in the nuclear security field, including Freeman-Spogli Institute (FSI) Senior Fellow David Holloway who wrote: "[Schmid's] argument that the Soviet experience has to be incorporated into our broader understanding of the nuclear industry is both convincing and important."

Schmid was a social science research associate at Stanford University, a science fellow at CISAC, and a lecturer in the Program in Science, Technology and Society (STS) at Stanford from 2005-2007. She is now an assistant professor in Virginia Tech’s STS Department.

Schmid credits CISAC with providing resources crucial to the conception, research, and completion of “Producing Power,” including multiple travel grants to conduct research for the book, help with editing preliminary drafts, and a final book edit.

Schmid also tapped CISAC’s stable of nuclear experts. Along with Holloway, CISAC Associate Director for Research Lynn Eden mentored and supported her project. Siegfried Hecker, an FSI senior fellow, connected her with multiple Russian interviewees.

“Mentoring Sonja was a great pleasure. She came to CISAC with deep insight about the close connection between Soviet state bureaucracies and the reactor design choices that those bureaucrats made. It was an amazingly interesting and ambitious project,” Eden said.

“CISAC is a scholarly community that encourages and supports outstanding research and writing that is in some way policy-relevant,” she said. “For our pre- and post-doctoral fellows especially, we want to encourage them and help them to think deeply and/or broadly about a question that affects people’s lives, and to write clearly about it.”

Edward Geist, a MacArthur Nuclear Security Fellow at CISAC, said Schmid’s book is the first to grapple with the institutional history of Soviet nuclear power.

“The traditional accounts have tended to organize events around a ‘what went wrong’ narrative,” said Geist, whose article “Political Fallout: The Failure of the Emergency Management at Chernobyl”, appeared in the spring issue of Slavic Review. ”There’s a school of thought that emerged in the Soviet Union and was readily picked up abroad that says the Chernobyl disaster was the ultimate example of everything that was wrong with the Soviet Union,” Geist said.

This worries Geist, who specializes in nuclear power, Soviet history, and emergency management.

“As a result of having lived through the worst, Russian and Ukrainian nuclear energy industry leaders, to my mind, actually have a more realistic mindset regarding the hazards of nuclear energy than their Western counterparts,” Geist said.  “While a catastrophic nuclear accident in the United States is really unlikely, the nuclear industry claims to have made nuclear power safe through superior methods and procedures–and that attitude can forestall effective emergency planning.”

The Chernobyl disaster hurt popular trust in nuclear energy, including in the United States. The still-popular narrative that Chernobyl was a problem purely of Soviet making was spun by representatives of nuclear industries in other countries to protect their interests from popular backlash.

By detailing the decision processes and procedures behind the Soviet Union’s nuclear reactor choice, design and commercialization, Schmid aims to show that the Soviet process was rational and the product of expert input rather than an irrational byproduct of the Communist regime. Chernobyl, in short, was an accident of history rather than a byproduct of an illegitimate system and should therefore be studied by members of the Western nuclear industry and policymakers.

“The Western nuclear field has more to learn from the Soviet experience than they care to admit. The bureaucratic practices of the Soviets are not really that unique to them and can be repeated by our bureaucracies,” said Geist.

The 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster in Japan was a case in point. Fukushima’s reactors were designed and built by Americans.

It’s Schmid’s hope that by putting Chernobyl in the context of what was a sophisticated nuclear energy bureaucracy that had many more successes than failures, much like its American counterpart, that lessons of caution can be drawn by the latter.

“What Chernobyl has demonstrated (and Fukushima has only confirmed),” writes Schmid, “is that organizing a civilian nuclear industry remains at best a high-stakes process of trial and error.”

Geist, with an eye on his field of emergency management, agrees.

“The lesson from Chernobyl and Fukushima is accidents happen no matter what procedures or levels of sophistication, but accidents need not be catastrophes if you’re willing to learn from others’ errors and incorporate them into planning.”

On April 22, 2015, the Wall Street Journal published the article “China Warns North Korean Threat is Rising,” reporting on estimates from Chinese and American nuclear experts of the DPRK nuclear arsenal. The article quotes CISAC’s Siegfried Hecker, director of the Nuclear Risk Reduction Project, on his assessment of the North Korean nuclear crisis and presents the estimates of Dr. Hecker’s Chinese counterparts. In the following Q&A, Hecker, who has been an authority in the United States on technical assessments of the progress of the North Korean nuclear program — having visited North Korea seven times since 2004 and having been granted unprecedented access to North Korea’s Yongbyon nuclear facilities — discusses the information presented in the Wall Street Journal article and provides insight both on the nature of technical estimates of the DPRK nuclear arsenal as well as on the critical takeaways from these assessments.

What was the nature of the meeting referenced in the Wall Street Journal article in which China’s estimates were presented?

This meeting was an off-the-record, non-governmental, non-official dialogue on U.S. – China security issues. The discussion on North Korea’s nuclear program was one of many security topics discussed. Both Chinese and American experts made presentations. The headline of the WSJ article is misleading – it is not “China” that made these estimates, but Chinese nuclear experts.

Have you conferred with Chinese nuclear experts about the North Korean nuclear program before the referenced meeting?

As part of my Nuclear Risk Reduction project at Stanford University, I have conferred regularly with nuclear and policy experts in China and Russia, as well as American experts and officials, of course. We have done so since January in 2004, when I first visited the Yongbyon Nuclear Center and returned through Beijing (the normal transit in and out of Pyongyang).

On that trip, North Korean nuclear officials showed me plutonium metal that they had reprocessed from the spent fuel rods that were stored since the beginning of the Agreed Framework in 1994. When the Agreed Framework fell apart in late 2002, Pyongyang expelled the international inspectors and withdrew from the Nonproliferation Treaty.  I believed they showed me their nuclear facilities and the plutonium to try to convince Washington that they had the bomb.

How did these visits inform your assessment of the DPRK nuclear program?

I visited North Korea seven times in total, with four of those visits to the Yongbyon Nuclear Center. After each of these visits, I compared observations and analyses with Chinese nuclear experts. During the first few visits, the Chinese experts and Chinese international relations scholars were quite skeptical of North Korea’s nuclear capabilities. I believe that my observations helped to inform their subsequent analysis since Chinese experts did not have access to Yongbyon at the time.

So what precipitated the change in the perception of your Chinese colleagues of North Korea’s nuclear capabilities?

During the first few years of discussion, my estimates of North Korea’s capabilities exceeded those of Chinese experts.  However, during my most recent visit to Yongbyon in November 2010, North Korean nuclear officials showed me their newly constructed uranium enrichment facility, housing 2,000 modern centrifuges, and the beginning of the construction of an experimental light water reactor. Overhead imagery shows that the exterior of the reactor is essentially complete, that the size of the centrifuge hall has been doubled, and that significant additional construction has occurred in the fuel fabrication complex, where the centrifuge facility is housed.

Pyongyang’s move to augment their limited plutonium production in the 5 MW-electric reactor (at most one bomb’s worth of plutonium per year) with enriched uranium changed the game.

Changed the game, how?

It opened the second path to the bomb and made it difficult to assess North Korea’s nuclear capabilities. Unlike the reactor production of plutonium, centrifuges are easy to hide. So, post-2010 it became more difficult to make accurate estimates, but all of us believed that North Korea enhanced its nuclear capacity significantly.

I published my most recent estimates in an article in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists along with a brief history of North Korea’s nuclear build-up. The latest estimates by Chinese nuclear experts now exceed mine. I believe that we base our estimates on the same open-source data.

If you base your estimates on the same information, what accounts for the discrepancies between your assessments and the estimates from your Chinese colleagues?

Developing these estimates is not an exact science. There are huge uncertainties in estimating the enrichment capacity that is likely present at covert sites. One particular problem is the difficulty in assessing how much indigenous capacity North Korea has to make the key materials and components for centrifuges. To demonstrate the great uncertainties, the WSJ article cites a recent report by David Albright of the Institute of Science and International Security that shows the possible range of bomb-fuel capacity in 2020 to vary from 20 to 100 bombs. The Chinese experts’ and my estimates fall within that range.

The Wall Street Journal article reported that American officials recently stated that North Korea possesses an intercontinental ballistic missile with sufficient range to reach the United States. Is the threat of nuclear attack on the United States from North Korea imminent?

I view the threat to the United States posed by an untested missile, the so-called KN-08, with a hypothetical miniaturized nuclear warhead as unrealistic any time in the near future. The KN-08 has not been tested to our knowledge. I believe North Korea would require more long-range missile tests and more nuclear tests to pose a direct threat to the United States.

With the international community’s attention directed toward the U.S.-Iran nuclear deal, what are your thoughts on the analogy made in the article between the Iran Nuclear Deal and the 1994 Agreed Framework with North Korea?

I don’t concur with the analogy of the failings of the Agreed Framework to the potential Iran deal. It is true that North Korea continued to develop uranium enrichment capabilities during the Agreed Framework. However, without the Agreed Framework, North Korea could have produced a nuclear arsenal as large as they have today 10 years earlier. And, by terminating the Agreed Framework, Washington traded the threat of uranium bombs that was at least 10 more years away for plutonium bombs that were built within a year.

Then what is the critical takeaway from your and your Chinese colleagues’ assessments of North Korea’s nuclear capabilities?

The real tragedy, in my opinion, is that whereas in 2003 North Korea likely had no nuclear weapons, it appears to have a rapidly expanding arsenal today. During the past 12 years we have witnessed the North Korean program grow from having the option for a bomb in 2003, to having a handful of bombs five years later, to having an expanding nuclear arsenal now.

Why does an expanding arsenal matter?

I believe it has made Pyongyang increasingly reliant on its nuclear weapons for regime survival and has dimmed the prospect of a denuclearized Korean peninsula. Such an arsenal may instill Pyongyang’s leadership with a false sense of confidence and almost certainly expands what it may think are its tactical and strategic options. The potential for miscalculations and accidents increases, and the consequences will be greater if it has more bombs and more sophisticated bombs with greater reach.

Retired Pakistani Lt. Gen. Khalid Kidwai told an audience of some 50 South Asia and nuclear experts at Stanford that India and Pakistan need a joint strategic vision to attain permanent peace and economic stability on the Subcontinent.

Kidwai, addressing a CISAC seminar on March 30, 2015, said the enmity between India and Pakistan - born from the partition of the subcontinent in 1947 that effectively divided Hindus and Muslims into two separate nations - will never be resolved until people are brought out of abject poverty.

"The obvious is not sinking into our regional calculations," he said. "The obvious is the elephant in the room: sustained socioeconomic progress."

More than 22 percent of Pakistan's 196 million people are living in poverty and 46 percent of its rural population falls below the global poverty line, according ot the Sustainable Development Policy Institute.

"Conflict resolution without socioeconomic progress will never work," said Kidwai, who is one of the most decorated generals in Pakistan. "There is no running away from this stark reality. For 68 years we have blustered and blundered our way through solutions, leaving 1.5 billion people condemned to hunger, filth and squalor."

He offered hope, in that there are two relatively new, democratically elected leaders now leading the nuclear-armed neighbors, which have gone to war three times since partition. Narendra Modi became India's 15th prime minister last year; Pakistan elected a new president, Nawaz Sharif, the year before that. They represent two political parties with strong elctroal mandates.

"We are waiting for the two leaderships to grasp, sit together, explore conflict resolution and go for it in a manner that all partners on all sides win," Kidwai said. "It needs vision, statesmanship and guts."

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Kidwai is advisor to Pakistan's National Command Authority and was the inaugural director general of the country's Strategic Plans Division, which he headed for 15 years. He conceived and executed Islamabad's nuclear policy and deterrence doctrines. He also is the architect of Pakistan's civilian nuclear energy and space programs.

Kidwai, who was hosted by CISAC's Siegfried Hecker, told the Stanford audience that he wanted to dispel what he called "two fallacious counter-narratives that have taken root in our neighborhood."

The first, he said, is that Pakistan supports and conducts terrorism inside India. "What would Pakistan attempt to achieve from this strategy?" he said, adding that the Mumbai terrorist attacks of 2008 were not backed by Islamabad. On that day, 10 Pakistani men associated with the terrorist group Lashkar-e-Taiba killed 164 people during four days of attacks throughout the city. India has repeatedly accused Islamabad of supporting the terrorists; Islamabad said non-state actors were responsible for the attacks.

"Terrorism is not a Pakistani invention," he said. "What would Pakistan attempt to achieve from this strategy?" 

The second myth, he said, is that the Pakistani military purposely keeps tensions at a high boil in an effort to boost its defense budget.

"Nothing could be further from the truth," he said. "The Pakistan Army is all for an equitable, just and ordinary peace with India. We recognize that war is not an option."

Kidwai believes the presence of nuclear weapons in South Asia is a stabilizing force and that any new peace initiatives lay with India. 

India conducted its first "peaceful" nuclear explosion, code-named "Smiling Buddha," in May of 1974; it would then conduct five nuclear tests in May 1998. Seventeen days after the first of those tests, Islamabad announced that it had detonated six nuclear devices, which happened to match the Indian total.

Today, India is believed to have between 90 and 110 nuclear warheads; Pakistan has between 100 to 120, according to the Arms Control Association.

Kidwai said the tried-and-tested concept of Mutually Assured Destruction has maintained a tenuous truce between the two nations. MAD follows the theory of deterrence, where the threat of using nuclear weapons against the enemy prevents the enemy's use of those same weapons.

He considered the concept of space for limited conventional war highly problematic and explained that Pakistan opted to develop a variety of short-range, low-yield nuclear weapons as a defensive deterrence response to what he called an aggressive Indian doctrine.

Kidwai assured the Stanford audience that Pakistan's nuclear weapons were safe, secure and under complete institutional and professional control. 

"For the last 15 years, Pakistan has taken its nuclear security obligations very seriously," he said. "We have invested heavily in terms of money, manpower, weapons and preparedness."

Kidwai was challenged about the deterrence utility of tactical, or battlefield, nuclear weapons compared to the increased security and safety risks of their potential deployment. Although Kidwai made a convincing case for improved security of Pakistan's nuclear assets during his tenure at the Strategic Plans Division, concerns were nevertheless expressed because of Pakistan's challenging internal security environment.

You can listen to the audio file of his talk here.