Some Thoughts on the Nuclear Deal with Iran

Now that an agreement has been signed with Iran on its nuclear program, the inevitable debate over whether it’s a good deal is raging in the US (interestingly, I haven’t heard anything about intense opposition to the deal in the European countries that are party to it, though there must be at least a little). Since it is a fairly far-reaching agreement and if implemented it has the potential to transform US-Iranian relations and the politics of the Middle East, numerous aspects of the agreement are being discussed and argued about. Those who favor the deal consider it the best chance to avoid even more conflict in that part of the world and prevent Iran from getting a nuclear weapon, not to mention putting the US and Iran on a path toward more friendly or at least less hostile relations. Opponents call it capitulation to the Iranians, argue that Iran can and will cheat, and warn that reducing or ending sanctions on Iran will free it to cause more trouble in the region by backing violent regimes and terrorist groups. They also lament the agreement’s failure address issues such as Iran’s support for terror, its unlawful detention of several American citizens, or its poor human rights record in general.

I will address the latter concern first. I agree that Iran’s human rights record is terrible, its detention and treatment of both Iranian dissidents and the American citizens currently in its prisons is deplorable, and its support for terror groups and particularly the hideously bloodthirsty Syrian regime is appalling. However, those issues are not what the agreement was negotiated to address. Just as the US negotiated arms control treaties with the USSR that didn’t address human rights issues in the latter, there is no reason to expect an agreement over Iran’s nuclear program to address unrelated issues. This doesn’t mean that these issues don’t have to be addressed, though. It is my understanding that US sanctions imposed due to Iranian sponsorship of terrorism, for instance, will remain in place. It is quite possible, even probable, that the US government (and European governments) could and should do far more to pressure Iran over human rights issues. Many Western governments have shown a bad tendency to prioritize economic ties and business interests over human rights in their dealings with countries like China, Saudi Arabia, and others, and we should put pressure on them to act differently not only in Iran’s case but others as well. But the nuclear agreement should be judge according to its purpose, which is preventing Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons rather than for issues it is not designed to fix.

There are no doubt flaws in the agreement which Iran can exploit. Iran may be able to avoid coming clean about past weapons programs, and it may find ways to hide things from inspectors, especially given the uncertainty about whether inspectors will have sufficient access to military sites. But it will require Iran to dramatically reduce its stockpile of enriched uranium and its number of centrifuges, which at a minimum will put a bomb a little further from reach. It is true that it may not prove easy to re-impose sanctions should Iran violate the agreement, but I don’t think it will be as difficult as critics claim, nor do I think it will be as easy for Iran to cheat as they are asserting. Iran does have many incentives for adhering to the agreement, and if the moderates remain in charge (a point I will come back to), they probably will do so.

In any case, as I and many others have observed in the past, those critics calling this a bad deal, whether it is Republicans in the US Congress or Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, have never laid out specifically what they would consider a good deal. From their rhetoric, a “good” deal would be unconditional surrender on the part of the Iranians, involving a complete dismantling of their entire nuclear program. Of course, there was never any chance that Iran would have agreed to such a deal, regardless of the pain sanctions might have been causing. After all, look at how tightly the North Korea clings to its nuclear bombs, even as its economy collapses and its people live at the edge of starvation. If the Iranian leadership is as sinister and power-mad as those most hostile to it claim, they would most certainly not hesitate to continue to pursue their nuclear ambitions in the absence of an agreement regardless of the sanctions, especially if they perceived the West as unremittingly hostile. It is also unlikely that the sanctions regime could be held together for long if the US rejects the agreement, as countries like China and Russia are too eager to do business with Iran. While this is not a good thing, given the authoritarian tendencies of all three, there is not much that the West can do about it at this point.

Given the critics’ lack of a clear vision of what a “good deal” would look like and the extreme unlikelihood of Iran being willing to make more concessions, the alternatives are these. The agreement can be carried out and Iran’s nuclear program can be made at least somewhat more peaceful and subject to a certain degree of scrutiny. Otherwise, the US can reject the agreement, as the Republicans in Congress want. What would follow from that? The Iranians, who are already quite close to acquiring a bomb, would have little reason not to proceed to actually producing one, and the only way the US or Israel could prevent them would be by starting a war. It is by no means certain that a few airstrikes could do sufficient damage to Iran’s facilities to put a bomb out of reach, so we are talking about a major war with a country that is considerably larger and more powerful than Iraq.

Iran’s geopolitical stature is a point worth some additional scrutiny. On the one hand, hyperbolic claims that the Obama administration’s concessions to Iran are equivalent to Neville Chamberlain’s concessions to Adolf Hitler at the Munich Conference are absurd not only in exaggerating the size of the concessions but in implying that Iran is as great a power and as much of a threat to world peace as Nazi Germany, which is not even remotely the case (incidentally, another lesson from that era that many forget is that it was the harsh terms that the Allies imposed on Germany after World War I that facilitated Hitler's rise, which is relevant to a point I'll discuss a little later about the agreement's potential effect of Iranian domestic politics). Conversely, however, Iran is not a small, weak country that the US could easily overpower in a fight. This doesn’t mean that the US should avoid a conflict with Iran no matter what; if, say, Iran actually started assembling a nuclear weapon and declared an intention to carry out the rhetorical threats that some of its more extreme leaders have made in the past against Israel, for instance, a military strike by the US would be justified. But a decision to launch a war should not be taken lightly, and if this agreement is not put into effect, it is hard to see what other options US would have to stop Iran from acquiring a nuclear bomb.

Furthermore, it is worth remembering a bit about Iran’s history and its current society. Over most of the past 2600 years, ever since the rise of the Median and Persian Empires in the wake of the destruction of Assyrian power, Iran has been one of the most dominant nations in West Asia. While its power has waxed and waned. Its current position as one of the major powers in the region is commensurate with its historical position. Of course, history does not give Iran an automatic right to any particular status today, much less the right to push its neighbors around (the same point applies to China, which is fond of misusing history in this manner). But given Iran’s size, population, resources, and relative stability, it is not at all surprising that it has once more become one of the strongest countries in the region.

For these reasons, the Western approach to Iran can’t be merely one of containment. This is not to say that containment of a sort doesn’t have its place. The US and other nations should certainly work to counter problematic Iranian actions in the region, such as its support for the Syrian regime or groups like Hezbollah. But it is necessary to engage Iran too. It is worth remembering that despite the fundamentalist theocracy that is currently in power, Iran has a sizable, well-educated middle class, much of which has a quite secular outlook. Even among the clerics, there are moderate voices. It should be remembered that not all of the Iranian leadership has shown the type of unremitting hostility to Israel and the US that is commonly cited by opponents of the deal. The more moderate leaders should be encouraged as much as possible in the hope that in the future, a new Iranian leadership can take charge, one that will be far less interested in the aggressive approach of the hardliners in the current leadership. It is conceivable that in a few decades Iran could even transform into a secular democracy, if it is allowed to evolve in that direction as moderate forces gain more power. And which option is more likely to help Iranian moderates, accepting the agreement or rejecting it? Since the agreement is, on the Iranian side, the work of the moderate faction in the current leadership, if it proves beneficial to Iran and specifically to the average Iranian citizen, then it will certainly strengthen the moderates. Rejecting it, however, would mean that the hardliners would take over completely. They would probably even gain some support among the secular middle class, as an American rejection of the agreement would support the assertions of the hardliners that the US is completely hostile to Iran and no rapprochement with it is possible. Even those who would still prefer a more moderate approach might feel compelled to publicly support the nationalistic hardline view for fear of being accused of traitors.

All this doesn’t mean that an agreement which entirely favored the Iranians would be acceptable. But the truth is, the Iranians made plenty of concessions of their own. As mentioned above, they are giving up their enriched uranium and most of their centrifuges, as well as submitting to a fairly comprehensive inspection regime, if not as strong as would be considered ideal from a Western viewpoint. Also, the Iranian assertion that they have the right to a peaceful nuclear program is not unreasonable, as many other countries, including some with worse human rights records, also have nuclear power (of course I’d say all of them should be focusing more on renewable energy, but that’s another issue). While a lifting of sanctions may boost Iran’s ability to assist destructive parties elsewhere, the US and its allies can attempt to find ways to counter such actions on the part of Iran, including, if necessary, new sanctions. It is worth reiterating that this agreement, the negotiations that it came out of, and the sanctions that helped bring Iran to the table were all directed at Iran’s nuclear program, not anything else it might have been doing. While resolving the nuclear issue might have both good and bad effects elsewhere, this is unavoidable. As I said above, if the agreement makes it at least a lot less easy for Iran to acquire a bomb and at the same time boosts the moderate forces in the country, then it is adequate – especially considering the very unpalatable alternatives.

[Update: An additional point worth noting is not only do polls show that a majority of Jewish Americans support the agreement, a number of prominent Israeli security figures are also supporting it. Perhaps even more telling is the Iranian side of the debate. As discussed in some detail in this article, moderates, reformists, the majority of Iranian citizens and Iranian Americans and even many dissidents and exiled opponents of the current regime support the agreement, while the conservatives and hardliners have for the most part been critical of it. Not exactly what you'd expect to see if, like the deal's American and Israeli opponents claim, the agreement gave away far too much to Iran.]

Drawing the Curtain Back on Pluto and Charon

I have been interested in space and astronomy, particularly the solar system, for as long as I can remember; at least since I was in preschool. And of all the planets and other bodies in the solar system, the one that I found most fascinating in childhood was Pluto. Of course I am hardly alone in having Pluto as my “favorite planet”, but as to why I especially liked Pluto, it is a little difficult to say. I think it was in part simply that it was different; it was clearly unlike either the so-called terrestrial planets close to the Sun or the gas giants in the outer solar system. It’s status as the most distant planet, with an incredibly long orbit of 248 Earth years, may have played a role. Or maybe it was just that Pluto was so mysterious. When I first became interested in astronomy, most books had practically no information about Pluto at all, as next to nothing was known. Some of the astronomy books I would check out of the library, books that were already somewhat out of date at the time, even included some of the more wild early theories about Pluto, such as the suggestion that Pluto was in fact a fairly large planet, but was almost perfectly black, so that we were seeing the reflection of the sun off its surface like a mirror. This theory was developed to accommodate the idea that Pluto was indeed the theorized Planet X that was supposedly affecting the orbits of Uranus and Neptune (which would require a fairly massive planet) and yet failed to show a disc in even the largest telescopes of the day. More commonly, books of the time would declare Pluto to have a diameter of about 5000 km (3600 miles), which was in truth more of an upper limit than an estimate based on any concrete evidence, or repeat the then-common theory that Pluto was an escaped satellite of Neptune (this idea even crops up occasionally today in articles by non-scientists despite being long discredited; the truth is Pluto never comes anywhere remotely close to Neptune due to an orbital resonance, and actually gets closer to Uranus than it ever does to Neptune). In truth, even though it had been almost 5 decades since Pluto had been discovered by Clyde Tombaugh, the only things known with any degree of certainty about Pluto in those days was its orbital characteristics and that it had a rotation period of 6.39 days.

The mystery around Pluto began to clear up ever so slightly in the late 1970s. First methane was detected on its surface. Since methane ice is highly reflective, this was the first hint that Pluto was in fact even smaller than had been previously thought (with the constant downward revisions in estimates of Pluto's mass from the time of its discovery, at some point an astronomer joked that if the trend continued, it would soon disappear entirely!). Then in 1978 came the dramatic discovery of Pluto’s satellite - or perhaps companion would be a better term - Charon, which at half the diameter of Pluto is the largest moon with respect to its parent planet in the solar system (how hard it is to get a decent image of Pluto from Earth is illustrated by the fact that in the discovery photos of Charon, it appears as a fuzzy lump on the bigger fuzzy lump of Pluto - it took the Hubble Space Telescope to get a picture of the two clearly separated). The discovery of Charon in turn allowed Pluto’s mass to be calculated with some precision, showing that it was actually quite small for a planet, being considerable less massive than even the Earth’s Moon, let alone Mercury, the smallest inner planet, though still much larger than Ceres, the biggest asteroid. This discovery gave rise to the first arguments among astronomers about whether Pluto should be classified as a planet. But for me, while Pluto was now a little less mysterious, it remained as fascinating as ever, especially with the relative size of Charon making it more like a double planet system, if a small one (see here for an example of how Pluto and Charon orbit each other).

I don’t want to delve into the debate over Pluto’s planetary status in great detail here, but there are a few things worth pointing out. First of all, as I mentioned above, while Pluto certainly is very small in comparison with the eight universally recognized major planets, it is still much larger than any asteroid, even Ceres (by far the biggest asteroid). At least one other recently discovered body in the outer solar system, Eris, is somewhat more massive than Pluto (though slightly smaller in diameter), but that alone doesn’t disqualify Pluto from planetary status, it just means that Eris itself also needs to have its status determined, and that it should be classified with Pluto. It should also be noted that the eccentricity of Pluto’s orbit is also irrelevant to whether or not it is a planet, as quite a few extrasolar planets have similarly eccentric orbits. I am not so attached to Pluto’s planetary status that I don’t recognize that it, along with Eris and several other large trans-Neptunian objects, are distinct from the major planets; in fact way back at the end of the 1980s I distinctly remember doing a high school project in which I suggested that Pluto belonged to a completely new class of objects (even though, with the possible exception of Chiron, an asteroid-like body orbiting between Saturn and Uranus, no other similar objects had been discovered at that time) which I think I called cometoids or something like that. But essentially I think both sides are arguing about the wrong question. The argument shouldn’t be about Pluto per se; it should be about the minimum characteristics for a planet, wherever it is located. The definition that the IAU came up with when it reclassified Pluto, Eris and several other objects (including Ceres) as “dwarf planets” is vague and unsatisfactory. While any definition is going to be somewhat arbitrary, I think it makes more sense to define a planet based on its own physical characteristics, instead of vague criteria like “clearing its orbit”, as even in the outer reaches of our own solar system we may someday find an object the size of Mercury or Mars orbiting among smaller objects in the way Pluto does, and extrasolar planetary system will no doubt have all kinds of mixes of objects, whereas I think a definition of a planet should such that the same object would always be a planet if it is orbiting a star, regardless of what else may be orbiting in its neighborhood. What the qualifying characteristics should be is of course debatable, though several good possibilities, such as the object being large enough to maintain hydrostatic equilibrium, would result in Pluto and similarly sized objects being classified as planets. The point is that the definition should not be written either to deliberately include or exclude Pluto, but should be based as much as possible on clearly defined physical characteristics. Probably the easiest solution for the time being would be to keep the term “dwarf planet”, but to acknowledge that, as the name implies, a dwarf planet is still a planet, while we can refer to the eight bigger planets as “major planets” (though in that case we'd still need a definition for "major planets"). But in the end what we call Pluto is not that important, as it remains equally interesting regardless (for more arguments on both sides, see here and here).

In subsequent decades we learned even more about Pluto, first through mutual occultation events between Pluto and Charon, and then in the past few years through observations by the Hubble Space Telescope, including the discovery of four small moons of Pluto, Nix, Hydra, Kerberos and Styx. But despite these advances, our knowledge of Pluto and its companions remained extremely limited, and the best images we had of it were extremely fuzzy, due to its great distance and small size. All of that has finally changed with the flyby of the Pluto system by the New Horizons spacecraft on July 14. As a longtime “Plutophile”, it goes without saying that this is an event I have long awaited. But rather than attempting to summarize New Horizons’ discoveries so far myself (after all, one of the most exciting and dramatic things about it is the pictures, which are best seen elsewhere), I am providing some links to articles about the flyby and some of the discoveries that have been made so far, with many more to come as data continues to be sent back by New Horizons over the coming months.

Articles on Pluto's moons from the months prior to the close encounter can be found here and here.

An article on the significance of the New Horizons mission can be found here, and one about how great a value it is for the money is here.

Articles reporting on the flyby can be found here, here, here and here, with articles focusing on Pluto's atmosphere here and here, articles on the strange mountain on Charon here and here, and an article about the first relatively close-up picture on Nix here (one with pictures of both Nix and Hydra is here). A picture gallery of photos from the New Horizons mission, starting from the most recent images, can be found here.

An article on reactions to the flyby can be found here, and an article on possible future exploration by New Horizons can be found here. Unfortunately, there are no near future plans to send probes to Eris, now the largest object in the solar system that has never been visited by a space probe, or Sedna, which has by far the greatest average distance from the Sun of any known object of substantial size (it probably qualifies as a dwarf planet), but with this flyby of Pluto we have at least begun the exploration of the bodies of the far outer solar system, and after decades of wondering what they were like, I personally am happy to finally get to see what Pluto and Charon look like up close.