Since the late 1980s. political and security developments in the world and the Middle East have markedly reduced the possibility that the strategically important and historically conflict-burdened region might become an arena for a nuclear crisis or even a nuclear war. A dire nuclear event might take one of these forms: a nuclear encounter or nuclear alert, such as that of 1973, involving the two atomic giants; or the use, or threat of employment, of nuclear weapons by the region's only "have" state, Israel, or by a new regional proliferant, or by both.

These leading changes have emerged: European communism's collapse and the Soviet Union's dissolution, thereby ending bipolarity and linked ideological feuds; the virtual termination of Moscow's politicomilitary clientism with such states as Iraq and Syria; an escalation in the giants' nuclear arms reductions; the defeat of aggressor Iraq, found to have been on a bomb-path, by a Western-Islamic coalition headed by the United States; a subsequent realignment of Mideast power markedly beneficial to Israel and the United States, leaving Iran as the only major rejectionist state; and the emergence of a many-sided Arab-Israeli peace process, yielding the Jericho-Gaza accord, the Israeli-Jordanian treaty, a possible Israeli-Syrian deal on the Golan Heights, and ongoing Israel-PLO talks.1  All of these developments appear to be irreversible.

The peace process could collapse because of one or more of these existing or potential conditions: Arab rejectionist violence, Islamic fundamentalism producing unfavorable fatwas, Likud-settler opposition to the Oslo pact, Jerusalem disputes, and imbalanced U.S. brokering. Kismet will have to be kind to sustain the process until next year's Israeli and U.S. elections. Yet even if the process halts before then or later, there is unlikely to be a return to militant pan-Arabism or protracted conflict between Israel and Arab regimes or rejectionists like Hamas which might seriously challenge the reconfiguration of forces emerging during and persisting after the 1990-91 Gulf conflict.

While one must prudently allow for the possibility of the United States exercising its extended nuclear deterrence in the Mideast, there are two immediate questions on the region's nuclear agenda. The first concerns the prospects for additional bomb spread by a "rogue," violating or renouncing the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT), applying safeguards through the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). This matter relates chiefly to Iraq, stripped by Security Council action of both its bomb-dedicated and civil nuclear assets, and to Iran, accused by the United States of having a crash proliferation program.

The second question focuses on the odds for rolling back or at least capping existing regional proliferation found only in nonNPT signatory Israel's considerable nuclear capabilities. Invoking the support of the United Nations and the five declared nuclear-weapon states (NWS) for universal NPT adherence, as well as considering their own political and security interests, Egypt and other regional states have recently increased their efforts to make the region bomb-free.

This paper offers an analysis of selected topics which bear on the two questions. The interplay of world and regional factors is a leading feature of the examination.

ARMS CONTROL AND DISARMAMENT MEASURES

Russia and the United States

Nuclear disarmament and antiproliferation opinion world-wide have been strengthened by the nuclear giants' steps to markedly reduce the symbolic and practical value of their nuclear arms. Many nonaligned and disarmament sources have considered these moves as long overdue, but a welcome start on the road to nuclear abolition, required of nuclear-weapon states (NWS) parties to the NPT.2 Russia and the United States have unilaterally withdrawn and dismantled thousands of tactical nuclear arms. The START I pact is legally in force, and its verification system is operating. The START II accord will slash START I's ceilings by about one-half, producing between 3,000 to 3,500 strategic nuclear warheads on each side by 2003. Communist and ultranationalist pressures on the weakened Yeltsin government may delay Russian ratification of START II, which the United States is ready to ratify.

The Department of Defense's Nuclear Posture Review (NPR), completed in September 1994, held that the United States might make further reductions before the full implementation of START II; but the United States retained a hedge to return to a more robust nuclear level, should the Russian regime revert to an authoritarian, adversarial relationship with the United States.3 Budgetary, physical and political factors limit Russian and U.S. nuclear reduction capabilities.

While the NPR indicated that nuclear arms play a smaller role in U.S. security, it also held that U.S. nuclear doctrines would be retained, allowing last-resort use of nuclear arms against a non-nuclear attack on U.S. forces. This would be true even though the Soviet Union's dissolution has left the United States as the world's leading conventional military power, as well as its only nuclear superpower.

The NPR stand is antipodal to the advice of several arms-control advocates and former high-ranking military officers and defense officials. These sources recommend a U.S. policy holding that, in view of the radically altered world scene, U.S. nuclear arms should be used only as a deterrent against, and possible response to, nuclear assaults by others; this deterrent role could be performed by a few hundred nuclear arms, provided a stable democratic Russia is well established.4 The Union of Concerned Scientists and other groups urge a build-down to a global condition of zero nuclear arms, a goal most nonaligned states also seek on an accelerated schedule.

Persistent U.S. nuclear conservatism lends support to policy makers with similar views in Russia, in the second-tier NWS of China, France and the United Kingdom, and in the ad hoc bomb-states-India, Israel and Pakistan. Yet actual and projected Russian and U.S. nuclear cuts have functioned to (a) influence France and the United Kingdom to reduce their nuclear forces, even as they are being modernized; (b) provide a trend for all lesser bomb-nations to emulate; (c) discourage recourse to bomb-posturing; and (d) work against any temptations the three ad hoc bomb-states might have to declare their assets.

Relevant for bomb-spread potentials in the Mideast and elsewhere, proliferation issues created by the Soviet Union's dissolution have been addressed. Several former Soviet Union (FSU) states have worked with the United States, Russia and other countries to prevent the illicit flow of expertise, materials and technology from FSU nuclear sources to terrorists or covert-bomb seekers in the Mideast. Easily sensationalized, the public record up to July 1995 consisted mainly of a few interceptions of nuclear material smuggling within Europe which had unclear destinations and unconfirmed reports that Russian scientists may be employed in the Mideast. A U.S. sting operation, using a bogus Iraqi agent, seized eight tons of zirconium used to case fuel rods that a Russian general had stolen in Ukraine.

Russian and U.S. efforts, including financial and technical aid, have led to the consent of Belarus, Kazakstan and Ukraine to rid themselves of all nuclear arms left on their territories, adhere to START I and join the NPT as non-bomb parties. Russia, the United States and the United Kingdom have provided the three states with conditional negative and positive security assurances respecting nuclear attacks.

Responding last April to nonaligned pressures, the NWS (all except China having an unequaled no-strike policy towards "have-nots'') harmonized their unilateral, conditional negative assurances given to non-bomb NPT parties, if they are not allied with NWS; and the five NWS led the U.N. Security Council in adopting Resolution 984, which developed the 1968 resolution on the subject by making more explicit and elaborating a qualified positive assurance to non-bomb NPT parties that are threatened with nuclear aggression or are victims of such aggression. Egypt and some other nations remained vexed that Resolution 984 did not authorize an automatic, veto-proof Security Council response to an attack or threat of attack by nuclear arms.5 The NWS are unlikely to satisfy this grievance in the near future.

Missiles and Mideast Arms Talks

In recent years the exceedingly ambitious mission of the Missile Technology Control Regime (MTCR) has become to end proliferation of ballistic missiles, with any range or payload, if they are believed to be intended for use with nuclear, chemical or biological arms, i.e., weapons of mass destruction (WMD). The United States and its allies formed the treaty-less group of missile producers in 1987. Recently, Argentina, China, Israel, Russia, South Africa and Ukraine have formally adhered to the MTCR, or pledged conformity with its rules requiring export constraint. Not affecting the military capabilities of advanced states, the MTCR has focused on developing nations, deemed less responsible than their more developed brethren. Steps taken by regime members have prevented missile transfers to or the completion of imported missile programs in such states as Egypt, Iraq, Libya and Syria.

Part of the world's arms control scene, multilateral talks on confidence-building steps in the Mideast are being conducted within working groups of the Arms Control and Regional Security Committee, established by the 1991 Madrid Conference.6 The IAEA has become a participant. Syria has not yet joined the discussions, for which pariahs Iraq and Iran are currently unqualified. The groups have focused on environmental and conventional military issues, leading to progress in dialogue on mutual inspection. The Arabs seek to inspect Israel's classified Dimona complex and to launch nuclear talks generally. Egypt and the other Arab participants view a bomb free region as a prerequisite or corequisite for regional peace; Israel has stressed achieving durable regional peace accords before the region addresses the nuclear weapon-free zone (NWFZ) issue.7 The gap is wide.

Sooner rather than later, as Congressman Lee H. Hamilton (D-IN) and others have long advocated, conventional arms negotiations deserve to be started for the sake of overall Mideast security. A troublesome problem for Israel would be how and when to deal with recommended limits on conventional weapons, which it might well wish to rely upon to offset any concessions it might make on nuclear issues.

Comprehensive Test Ban

The New Nuclear World is not marching double-time towards the nuclear sunset. But even as Russia and the United States have retained overabundant nuclear insurance, they have also provided circumstantial evidence that they are moving towards nuclear disarmament-the global objective NPT Article VI obliges all NWS parties to seek to fulfill the treaty's basic bargain between "have" and "have-not" adherents. Achievement of a Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT), urged for decades by nonaligned and neutral states, as well as by nongovernmental groups, would presumably constitute progress on the way to disarmament. All Mideast states have ratified the Limited Test Ban Treaty and endorsed a CTBT.

First urged by Nehru, a verified, universally adopted CTBT would supposedly cap vertical proliferation, and also prevent, or at a minimum discourage, horizontal proliferation. To be noted: owing to technological advances, the reliability and safety of nuclear arms can be adequately assured without nuclear tests; and Israel, Pakistan and South Africa crossed the threshold without nuclear explosive testing.

Bipartisan U.S. congressional action imposed on the Bush White House, and Clinton administration follow-through, led the United States to drop its resistance to a CTBT and to make possible restarted test-ban negotiations in January 1994. All declared NWS joined the process in the U.N. Conference on Disarmament (CD). An informal testing moratorium, adhered to by all NWS save China, helped the undertakmg.

Aiding the CTBT cause: in early 1995 President Clinton decided to extend the U.S. freeze on nuclear testing until a CTBT enters into force or September 1996, whichever comes first, and to abandon a proposal to allow easy exit from the test ban after ten years. The draft CTBT will still permit escape for reasons of supreme national interest.

Before adjourning last April, CD negotiations made progress on verification issues. Resuming in May, the bargaining is unlikely to produce a draft treaty before next year. The draft is certain to bar "peaceful" nuclear explosions; it will probably also ban small laboratory blasts (hydronuclear tests), if France's and President Clinton's August stands against them prevail. CTBT verification by intrusive methods could produce resistance from India, Israel and Pakistan, anxious to protect their covert facilities; but these non-NPT states will be under heavy pressure to adhere.

"COUNTERPROLIFERATION" AND "ROGUES"

As a reaction to the Cold War's demise, which finds active or potential threats from a few developing states absorbing the diffusion of technology useable in WMD, and to a linked bureaucratic need to justify defense and intelligence budgets in a less dangerous world, the Clinton administration's Defense and Counter proliferation Initiative (DCI) gives nonproliferation a higher priority than it had before the Gulf War.8 The Iraqi, North Korean and South African proliferation cases supplied credible grounds for an upgrading, but threat inflation took it to a level unwarranted by a non-alarmist view of the risk of new bomb-spread.

Having Bush Pentagon roots, the DCI seeks to add protection to prevention in an expanded understanding of nonproliferation. Leading goals are:

• strengthening of traditional diplomacy, export controls and treaty policing;

• adoption of innovative, conventional technological steps, costing $60 million in FY 1995, to protect U.S. territory and overseas forces, and U.S. allies against attack or threat of attack by "rogues" having one or more WMD in violation of the NPT or some other prohibitory pact; and

• development and deployment of ballistic missile defense, a hedge against deterrence failure, encompassing national missile defense and higher priority, theater missile defense (TMD), including Patriot missile enhancement and high-altitude area defense.

Costing $1.5 billion in FY 1995, and estimated to cost $2.1 billion in FY 1996, TMD programs envision deploying 3,000 missiles. The DCI assumes that theater class ballistic missile threats exist now and could become worse, especially in the Mideast and in northeast Asia.

China, Russia and European NATO members have objected to U.S. TMD steps, which they view as provocative or unnecessary. The United States has minimized these criticisms, which could sour Washington's relations with several capitals.

A leading U.S. analyst has charged that TMD could destroy the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty (an estimate dependent on how the recent Clinton-Yeltsin deal on the treaty is implemented); prevent further START cuts (a possibility); destabilize peacemaking in critical regions like the Gulf and the Korean peninsula (a stronger possibility); and undermine confidence in the NPT, Chemical Weapons Convention, MTCR and diplomacy (a ponderable contention).9 State Department and Arms Control and Disarmament Agency officials have denied that these results would follow. Because of bipartisan Congressional and interest group support for TMD that is indebted to Iraqi SCUD attacks in the Gulf War-as opposed to the mainly Republican-backed missile-defense system revived in Congress this year-the theater program is likely to continue and expand. Serious obstacles could arise, if candidate host states balk or deployments seem likely to roil a region.

The DCI's focus on alleged rogues, parties to the NPT, has distracted attention from the ad hoc bomb-states of India, Israel and Pakistan-non-rogues in the regime's lexicon because they have not adhered to the NPT. Relaxation of U.S. rules for exporting dual-use items to certain states prompted Senator John Glenn (D-OH) in 1993 to urge strict rules applying to all proliferation-risky and post-threshold states. No such rules governed the U.S. approval last fall of a supercomputer export to Israel. The DCI gives the distinct (and I believe unfortunate) impression that rogue states are undeterrable by U.S. power, conventional or nuclear, and by diplomatic pressure. Yet Iraq was deterred from using chemical weapons (CW) in 1991; and North Korea has been deterred from using or brandishing a bomb, if it has one. Contrary to  some  earlier  Defense Department ventilations, the Pentagon official responsible for counterproliferation, Ashton B. Carter, denied in March 1994 that the department had plans for pre-emptive strikes. If the agency did, it would not wish to announce the fact.

Libya, Iraq, Iran and North Korea are the only four states the executive branch has identified on its classified list of 20-odd actual or potential rogues.10 It is no accident that the four countries have authoritarian or quasi-authoritarian regimes, which have repressed dissent and sponsored terrorism. And three of the four have serious differences with the United States on Israeli questions.

LIBYA

Libya's rogue case is the oldest. These highlights of Libya's nuclear history may be noted11: Muarnmar Qadhafi's failing effort to secure a bomb from China in the 1970s; ratification of the NPT in 1975, but no conclusion of an IAEA safeguards accord until 1980, a delay allowing Libyan transshipment of Niger-origin uranium concentrate to Pakistan; petro-dollar import quests for licit nuclear projects, which failed to materialize or to mature, owing partly to U.S. opposition; acquisition of a safeguarded, Soviet-made research reactor; and Qadhafi's pan-Arab, bomb-ambition statements responding to Israel's bomb and U.S. power projections in the 1980s.

Due to U.S. detection of Libyan terrorism, Libya experienced U.S. bombings in I 986 which killed Qadhafi's daughter. Western diplomatic and economic coercion of Libya in the late 1980s stopped its CW development at Rabta that had Western European aid. Libya's missile development and missile imports have troubled the MTCR. Starting in 1989, Libya improved its relations with Egypt and oil-importing European nations.

Yet in 1992 the country came under limited Western and U.N. sanctions, expanded the next year, which sought the extradition of two Libyans wanted in connection with the Lockerbie Pan-Am bombing. In response, Qadhafi shut down terrorist camps, but refused to give up the two men. Offering a bounty for them last March, the United States asked for, but did not achieve Security Council approval of stronger sanctions, including a global oil embargo. With one exception, Qadhafi was later unable to break a U.N. ban on direct flights to and from Libya in the context of Hajj pilgrims; and he heightened his regime's cooperation with Algeria and Egypt on trans-Arab efforts to contain militant fundamentalists, also a U.S. goal

Though still clinging to anti-Zionism and engaging in bomb-quest musings since the Gulf War, Qadhafi is scarcely a challenger on any front. Because of constraints and restraints, and given Libya's 1992 pledge to cooperate with any IAEA requests for "special inspections" (discussed below), which it could defy only at its peril, the country is a low-proliferation risk.

DEFEATED ROGUE IRAQ

The Iraqi case has three dimensions. The first concerns the post-conflict discovery by the IAEA that Iraq had spent huge sums to covertly acquire dual-use items from the West which were employed in diffused secret programs, including three uranium-enrichment projects. Iraq had made progress, exceeding pre-war intelligence estimates towards achieving self-sustained, bomb making capability. Though no important amounts of bomb-useable material had been obtained, Iraq had violated its IAEA safeguards agreement and the NPT, the first treaty party discovered to have done so.

Iraq may have sought the bomb for deterrence reasons relating to Iran or Israel and for prestige goals in the Gulf and Arab worlds. Given the grave risks to Iraq inherent in a first-strike nuclear strategy which derived from Israeli and U.S. deterrence capabilities, it is improbable that a bomb-capable Iraq would have launched an automatic nuclear assault on Israel or used its bomb to threaten the region. Disbelieving that an Iraqi nuclear initiative or bomb-threat could be deterred, this spectral scenario, articulated before and after the Gulf War, emanated chiefly from bomb monopolist Israel and drew upon the Begin regime outlook in 1980-81 that resulted in the Osiraq raid, driving Iraq to pursue a diffused covert bomb-program. Whatever President Hussein's nuclear designs, his colossal misjudgment of likely U.S. reaction to debt-burdened Iraq's seizure of affluent Kuwait destroyed any chance of realizing them.

Iraq and the Nonproliferation Regime

The second dimension relates to remedies U.S.-led actors secured in response to the discovery of Iraq's covert activities and illegal conduct. Intended to prevent emulation of Iraq's behavior by other non-bomb NPT parties, these reforms emerged: enhancement of anti-proliferation intelligence gathering; pioneer sharing of national intelligence data with the IAEA; tightening of dual-use export controls, especially by Western participants in the Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG); the IAEA's movement towards environmental monitoring near suspect nuclear sites; and the IAEA's assertion of the right, never before exercised under full-scope safeguards agreements, to conduct "special inspections" of undeclared nuclear locations suspected of illicit activities in non-bomb states that are parties to the NPT.

A much-needed broadening of the IAEA's traditionally incurious monitoring, the special inspection strategy met a stone wall in its first outing.12 North Korea rejected an IAEA request to examine two waste sites, and nearly quit the NPT in a leveraging reaction. Aided by a CIA finding that North Korea might have enough fissile material to make one or two bombs, scarcely a strategic breakthrough, heightened tensions over the problem gave way to Clinton engagement diplomacy, leading to a Pyongyang-Washington framework accord concluded last October. Negotiated for the United States by Ambassador Robert L. Gallucci, a 10-year plan combined a freeze on nuclear activities; the exchange of two proliferation-risky reactors, reprocessing facilities and spent fuel rods for low-risk reactors; and the two-staged reintroduction of IAEA monitoring, including special inspections. Approved by Seoul and Tokyo, but subject to Republican charges of appeasement, the framework received impetus last June when Pyongyang's objections to Seoul's supplying the replacement reactors at its expense were provisionally surmounted.

Because Libya and Iran have acknowledged the IAEA's right to conduct special inspections, the two have effectively accepted a key Iraqi lesson: the need to have a lower threshold for identifying potential rogues. Where that level is marked is a contentious question.

U.N. Penalties on Iraq and U.S. Policy

The Iraqi case's third dimension covers U.N. disarmament steps taken against the rogue and U.S. domination of the punitive process and terms for Iraq's return to world trade. Keeping previously imposed economic sanctions, e.g., a ban on oil-trade with Iraq, the U.N. Security Council secured the defeated Baghdad regime's acceptance of Resolution 687 (1991). This unprecedented measure required the destruction or removal of the post-war remainders of Iraq's offensive missiles, all unconventional military assets, civil nuclear-related fuel and equipment, and production and research facilities linked to the foregoing. The draconian measure did not cover intellectual and personnel assets in unoccupied Iraq.

The disarmament record to mid-1995 included these highlights:13 Iraq's active noncooperation with the IAEA and the U.N. Special Commission on Iraq (UNSCOM) until late 1992, when Baghdad started to become progressively more compliant, though not to end all prevarications; Baghdad's acceptance of Security Council Resolution 715 (1991) in 1993, leading in 1994 to U.N. agencies, establishing monitoring and verification capabilities applying to Iraq's industries and export-import activities subject to Resolution 687 prohibitions; and Iraq's refusal to accept a plan for U.N.-supervised humanitarian relief that would be financed by limited oil sales.

Other developments of note were rising interest in 1994-95 among some of the Security Council's five permanent members (P-5), but especially France and Russia, in securing a lifting of the oil embargo in view of Iraq's actual or near compliance, with Resolution 687 and foreign nations quests for Iraqi debt repayment and markets; and a mini-crisis last October stemming from Iraqi's moving troops close to Kuwait, apparently to gain a lifting of the oil-sale ban in exchange for troop withdrawal, a ploy deflated by a U.S. Gulf build-up and an effective Security Council pull-back order.14  In November Baghdad shifted under Moscow's brokering to recognize Kuwait's sovereignty and to accept its U.N.-demarcated Iraqi frontier.

U.S. policy towards Iraqi compliance with U.N. orders has been comprehensive and demanding, and in some respects constitutes unilateral moving of the goal posts. Built upon an exclusive superpower status and heavy U.S. funding of U.N. enforcement agencies, the maximalist Clinton policy towards Iraq, which is consistent with Bush policy, requires the defeated rogue to comply fully with all U.N. disarmament orders; to cease repression of northern Kurds and Marsh Shiites; to return stolen Kuwaiti arms and to account for Kuwaiti prisoners; and to demonstrate intentions not to violate bans on acquiring WMD and offensive missiles, not to sponsor terrorism and not to bully neighbors.15 Conceivably designed to compensate for the absence of military occupation of Iraq, and lacking consensual support among the P-5 (also the NWS), the U.S. criteria for lifting economic sanctions on Iraq give the distinct impression that they cannot be satisfied so long as Saddam Hussein remains in power. The CIA has acknowledged that it seeks to replace the Hussein regime via Iraqi opposition groups and propaganda.

The U.S. anti-Saddam Hussein thrust may derive from (a) Hussein's brutal human rights record and instigation of two Gulf wars; (b) fear of Hussein's regime as a conventional, or even a nuclear threat to regional oil resources and related trade; (c) profoundly negative Israeli, Jewish, Saudi and Syrian judgments of the leader; (d) populist U.S. regrets that Operation Desert Storm did not overthrow the Hussein regime, an unauthorized goal; and (e) wary U.S. regime recollections of the Bush constructive engagement policy towards Iraq which. some blamed for encouraging Hussein's adventurism. Bill Clinton entered office _with a more conciliatory approach to Hussein than that of his predecessor; but the president's outlook soon hardened.

Last March, although U.S. ambassador to the United Nations Madeleine K. Albright depicted U.N. disarmament achievements as "monumental," she continued to hold that Iraq had not yet satisfied U.S. terms for lifting economic sanctions. The IAEA and UNSCOM gave no support to high-level U.S. statements that Iraq was prepared to rebuild CW, missile and nuclear programs after sanctions were lifted. Officials made few references to the capabilities of U.N. systems to give timely warning of Iraqi misconduct and to the Security Council's and America's deterrent and punitive power, if Iraq should try to breakout.

Positive about the terminated production of CW and banned missiles amidst completed monitoring arrangements and denuclearization, the April report of UNSCOM Chairman Rolf Ekeus held that the lack of a satisfactory Iraqi explanation for the disappearance during the war of 17 tons of bacteria (an estimate later held to be too low) meant that there was a high risk that they had gone into a biological arms program.16 Iraq denied that this had happened. But the agency's conclusion ensured the success of the U.S.-led effort to keep all sanctions.

The Security Council unanimously adopted a liberalized oil-sale relief plan, authored mainly by the United States and the United Kingdom. The plan was a response to humanitarian appeals from the Pope and other sources to contain the pressures on a stern U.N. embargo policy. But Iraq, holding two Americans jailed for trespassing who were released later, rejected the plan, thereby allowing the world body to hold the high moral ground, even as Iraqi social conditions worsened. In the early summer of 1995, Iraq admitted after four years of denial that it had developed a major biological warfare capability, said to have been destroyed in 1990. Driving UNSCOM into new investigations, the admission served to keep the oil-sale ban in place. Defector Lt. Gen. Hussein Kamel may aid U.N. officials, told by Baghdad he had withheld secrets from them that it would supply. U.S. power over the Security Council's Iraqi policy which might entail use of the veto is likely to continue through at least the 1996 presidential election campaign, in which all major candidates will probably be notably harsh on Iraq and Iran. When U.N. economic sanctions are eventually lifted, U.N. oversight mechanisms, e.g., challenge inspections, and P-5 unity and vigilance should be sufficient to prevent Iraq from ever acquiring or reacquiring unconventional weapons and linked missiles. As a result, the chances that the United States or Israel would have to make deterrence or war-making decisions about Iraq's holding or near-possession of WMD would be virtually nil for the very long-term.

THE MANY-SIDED CASE OF IRAN

General U.S. Policy

Reflecting two sets of divergent ambitions, cultures and grievances, the Islamic Republic of Iran and the United States have become locked into mutual antagonisms.17 These difficulties need not be long-lasting, if the will to moderate them can be found. While the Iranian case has nuclear proliferation potential, it also has non-nuclear dimensions of greater significance.

The U.S. approach to Iran is one pillar of the policy of "dual containment" of Iran and Iraq, which rejects balancing one against the other. According to the 1994 view of the National Security Council's Martyn Indyk, a former Australian-citizen Israeli lobbyist who this year became U.S. ambassador to Israel, the strategy distinguishes the unreformable Saddam Hussein from the Tehran regime, which has made some "correctable" mistakes."18 Yet the recent hardening of U.S. policy towards Iran seems intent on driving the Tehran regime, weakened by corruption, debts, inflation, soft oil prices and political infighting, into bankruptcy, instability and regime change. The theocratic regime remains resilient.

Clinton administration denigrations of Iran have typically focused on Iran's sponsorship of terrorism, criticisms of the Arab Israeli peace process, Iran's military buildup perceived as a threat to Gulf states and oil lifelines, and alleged nuclear-bomb quest.19 While the United States has denied any anti-Islamic motive, it has objected to Tehran's encouragement of Islamic traditionalism linked to violence. Also influencing American policy: the Khomeini regime's humiliation of the "Great Satan" during the hostage-taking Carter period; the U.S. loss of its alliance with the Pahlavi regime, an Israeli oil-supplier; and human rights abuses within Iran and its lethal overseas pursuit of dissidents. The irrevocable Salman Rushdie death fatwa, from which the Tehran government distanced itself briefly last spring, has darkened global images of the country.

Iran's negative view of the United States has several sources. These include the elites' fear and resentment of American power projections in the Mideast, viewed as arrogant, interventionist and unjust; revolutionary nationalist and Islamic self-determination forces; pejorative clerical attitudes towards Western lifestyles, materialism and secularism; and regime anti-Zionism and support for much diminished confrontationism.

Also operating: popular anger at the United States for bolstering the Pahlavi regime, and at the West for tilting towards Iraq, its main security concern, during the first Gulf War; American efforts to discredit the Tehran regime over a wide range of issues and to impede Iranian development; and U.S. unwillingness to bargain over such outstanding problems as blocked funds and U.S. embargoes. Because Iran in actuality contains pluralism, including disaffected and modernizing currents, perceptions of the country as cohesive, broadly hostile and unchangeable deserve to be moderated.

Iran's Nuclear Record

From 1988 to 1991 Iranian leaders like Ali Akbar Hoshemi Rafsanjani made occasional public statements, possibly meant as much for internal morale-boosting as for external audiences, expressing interests in WMD, said to be needed to protect Iran against Iraq and Israel. Reviving parts of the ambitious Pahlavi nuclear programs, including a secret military research unit, Iran has imported questionable nuclear goods and dual-use items, e.g., limited calutron technology from China. In the past, but not in recent years, Pakistan may have aided Iran in sensitive nuclear areas.

The oil-rich and natural gas-endowed country is developing uranium deposits. Allegations of Iranian smuggling of nuclear-related items increased last spring. The CIA has charged that Iran is actively seeking the bomb, a conclusion Russian intelligence has not supported.20 Iran's nuclear infrastructure has remained rudimentary. And up to mid-1995, no government or IAEA official had claimed that Iran had violated the NPT, which it ratified in 1970. Withall, Iran has offended against the NPT's spirit.

Some Israeli and U.S. sources estimated last winter that Iran could secure bomb-capabilities within five years, if it obtains sensitive technology and its alleged bomb-program is not interrupted; Prime Minister Rabin and Defense Secretary William J. Perry estimated 7-15 years, though Perry also said that Iran had "many, many years" to go,21 The five-year estimate was related to Israel's umbilical security relationship with the United States, and perhaps also to considerations of a pre-emptive strike against distant Iran to which Major General Uzi Dayan referred favorably last December.

Denying that it has bomb-making intentions or programs, Tehran has held that the U.S. and Israeli charges have tried to create Arab fears of Iran, distracting attention from bomb-threat Israel. Iran has demonstrated good faith towards the strengthened IAEA, whose inspectors made familiarization visits, precedents for special inspections, to undeclared Iranian nuclear sites in 1992 and 1993, and found nothing amiss. As Israel had done for U.S. tours of Dimona in the 1960s, Iran may have stage-managed the visits, though this is unlikely. The IAEA held in late 1994 that Iran had no signs of non-peaceful programs.

IAEA safeguards apply to a small U.S. supplied research reactor moving from high- to low-enriched fuel. Agency monitoring is to be applied to a Chinese-designed research reactor under construction; to one or more Chinese-supplied, low-risk power stations; and to up to four nuclear power reactors of a low-risk type which cash-starved Russia contracted last January to build at Bushehr. Earlier the United States had persuaded Germany to prevent German firms from completing two war damaged Bushehr reactors inherited from the shah, and it had convinced Brazil, France and India to close down peaceful nuclear exports to Iran. Last April China rebuffed a U.S. effort to secure its withdrawal from the power station deal. In May China indicated reservations about the project. In June Sino-U.S. relations reached a six-year low, owing to the Taiwan president's visit to the United States, a CIA report of China's supplying missile components to Iran and Pakistan, which may have violated the MTCR, and human-rights issues.

The United States, pressed by Israel, pursued a nuclear denial policy towards Iran in 1994 and the spring of 1995 which left no room for civil atomic energy. Understandably, Iran appealed to the NPT's Article IV, recognizing non-bomb parties' right to peaceful atomic development. Majestically, the United States treated Iran's complaint as a non-issue. Ventilating its grievance in IAEA, non-aligned and other fora, Iran hinted at one point that it might quit the NPT, a ploy North Korea had used, in order to receive a nuclear-transfer deal based on the North Korean model.

Leading America's denigrating of Iran as an "outlaw state," even though it had not committed aggression nor violated the NPT, Secretary of State Warren Christopher rejected any analogy between the two cases. Christopher's pro forma calls for dialogue went unrequited. While Iran had some sympathizers, its position was weakened by (a) Egyptian and Saudi denigrations of Iran as a security challenge and purveyor of distorted interventionist Islam and (b) a reluctant rallying of Western European states to Clinton's nuclear policy toward Iran.

U.S. Policy on Trade with Iran

The Clinton administration has moved progressively to tighten restrictions on U.S. trade with Iran. Major impulses have come from Israeli lobby objections to sizeable U.S. exports with Iran ranging from oil and gas equipment to women's underwear, and also from a U.S. desire to set a self-restraint example for other traders. The United States has had some success in persuading third parties not to grant debt relief or to make new loans to Iran.

A key breakthrough for draconians came last March, when Mr. Clinton forced DuPont-owned Conoco to disengage from a $1 billion deal with Tehran, reaching out to the West, to develop two off-shore Iranian oil fields. The step was indebted to protest from DuPont's Bronfman-Seagram stockholders. France may fill the void.

Influencing an Israeli-prompted review of U.S. policy towards Iran dating to late 1994, anti-Iran trade bills affecting U.S. and foreign firms proposed by Senator Alfonse M. D'Amato (D-NY), which had the backing of the American Israeli Public Affairs Committee, shaped a Clinton step having domestic as well as foreign policy goals. Formally announced by the president at a World Jewish Congress dinner at April's end in which he mentioned bombings in Buenos Aires, Israel, New York and Oklahoma City, an executive order emerged prohibiting all direct and indirect U.S. trade with and investment in Iran. U.S. firms had been allowed to trade in oil not sold directly to America. Citing economic or security grounds, some U.S. officials had opposed the Clinton step, contrasting with U.S. economic engagement with China. The action did not cause major injury to Iran or the United States; it led to President Rafsanjani's calling for the United States to end its hostile policy.

Though President Clinton urged the industrial democracies to emulate the U.S. trade ban, none was immediately willing to go beyond existing G-7 and NSG bans on selling Iran military, nuclear and dual-use items. Possessing policy-making systems less influenced by Israel than America's system, the resisters balked at adding an Iranian embargo to the Iraqi embargo several of them wanted to lift; and they had oil importing interests not shared with the United States. Isolated, the United States did not risk asking the U.N. Security Council to impose sanctions on Iran.

Without withdrawing his sweeping approach, Senator D' Amato welcomed the Clinton move; but he and Senator Robert Dole (R-KS) held that Congress might end aid to Russia unless it stopped its Iranian reactor sale, the central focus of U.S. concerns about third-party trade with Iran.

The United States shared data with Russia last April that purported to show that Iran had sought to buy enriched uranium in the FSU and to purchase centrifuges for plutonium separation, and that it had imported equipment to aid other aspects of a bomb-program to which a North Korean built missile, perhaps capable of reaching Israel, would be link ed.22 The United States argued that (a) Iranians would learn proliferation skills from Russian technicians; (b) Russia would be put at risk if Iran proliferated; and (c) Iran could not be relied upon to pay for the deal and, more importantly, to return spent fuel as provided for in the $790 million bargain contract for one reactor. Later Iran reconfirmed the requirement.

Offering financial inducements, the United States pressed its brief unsuccessfully during Defense Secretary Perry's visit to Moscow last April. While the State Department hinted that a lapsing nuclear cooperation pact with Russia might not be renewed, the United States avoided wielding more substantial penalties, notably ending or reducing aid to Russia's various de-nuclearization programs and economic conversion projects. To do so would be markedly counterproductive.23 A compelling Russian retort to the United States stressed that Moscow's nuclear engagement with Iran involved the same kind of low risk, light-water reactors found in the U.S.-North Korean deal.

Raising the Iranian issue with President Yeltsin during the May meeting encompassing weighty Chechen and NATO issues, which was held in Moscow during V-E Day commemorations, President Clinton secured Russian withdrawal from a disposable side pact to sell Iran a gas centrifuge that could enrich uranium to bomb grade quality. This was a symbolic U.S. achievement. The leaders referred the reactor question to a bilateral study commission, thus freezing but not terminating the deal. For Yeltsin to have agreed to U.S. cancellation requests would have humiliated his already weakened regime facing elections and helped ultra-nationalists.

Iran welcomed the summit's results and spoke of grandiose reactor plans. Congressional leaders Robert Dole and Newt Gingrich (R-GA) criticized the outcome and retained threats to cut $540 million from Russian aid (75 percent of Cincinnati's budget). If the executive discovers that only greater inducements, financial or political, will convince Russia to end the Iranian deal on which Democrats and Republicans have placed an excessively high nonproliferation value, decision-makers will face a dilemma whether to pay for Russian disengagement. The payment might be non-monetary, and m a non-Mideast policy area.

THE NPT AND ISRAEL

Israel's non-NPT status and nuclear development explain why other Mideast states have had proliferation programs or temptations. Except for Israel, Oman and the United Arab Emirates, all Mideast states are NPT parties. The unevenly oil-endowed developing region has no advanced, sensitive nuclear facilities, apart from Israel's, which run a wide range of achievements, and no operating nuclear power reactor. The IAEA safeguards small research reactors in Algeria, Egypt, Iran, Israel and Libya. Unstable Algeria also has a large, recently safeguarded research reactor.

Despite Israel's enduring ambiguous position that it will not be the first to introduce nuclear arms into the Mideast (a role the Sixth Fleet performed), there is a virtual worldwide consensus that Israel has acquired an impressive arsenal of perhaps 200 nuclear weapons having at least last-resort purposes.24 A vital part of Israel's strategic premises is the unacceptability of another regional bomb-state, i.e., of mutual nuclear deterrence.25 Successfully launching a low orbit spy satellite last April, Israel has used self-help and imports from the United States and other sources to acquire aircraft and missile delivery capabilities, and also anti-missile assets which far surpass any rivals' inventories.

The opacity of Israel's nuclear assets, notably Dimona's large, French-supplied research reactor and reprocessing plant, has diminished. Leading causes have been Israel's periodic deterrent hints about its bomb, the 1988 Vanunu revelations, and Israeli inaction respecting U.S. requests and international organization calls for Israel to accept the NPT. Yet even "dovish" Israeli analyst Avner Cohen, who supports working with Egypt on a free-zone course, advises retention of Israel's bomb to deter an Arab or Iranian bomb.26 Israeli nuclear abolitionists are virtually non-existent.

Israel's covert bomb development has been aided by customary public silence on the subject which has waned in recent years; U.S. condoning of Dimona's activities traceable to Ben-Gurion-Kennedy contacts;27 and an intra-regime U.S. tradition, indebted to domestic politics, and also to concerns about stirring new Mideast proliferation, not to discuss Israel's bomb nor to try to use bountiful Israeli aid to leverage it into the NPT. Leverage has worked the other way: Israel's bomb, which the United States wants to remain unused and undeclared, has been a subtle tool for Israel to ensure that the United States keeps its pledge to maintain Israel's conventional military edge over combined regional foes.28 Defense Secretary Perry reiterated the pledge during his Israeli visit last January. The United States may view the pledge as a collar on Israel's bomb.

Egyptian Activism

Unamplified cnt1cism from Arab, Nonaligned Movement and some Western quarters has charged that, while the United States advocates universal NPT adherence, it has a double standard when Israel is involved.29 An Egyptian-led attempt to remedy or at least to publicize this allegation emerged last fall and continued into the spring in anticipation of the NPT Review and Extension Conference. The conference had to decide whether to extend the 25-year-old pact permanently, as the United States, its allies, Russia and some nonaligned states like Argentina urged, or for a fixed period or periods, as several developing nations like Indonesia wanted. The extension question meshed with discussion of disarmament responsibilities of the NWS, CTBT progress, atomic development and NPT universality.

Egypt's initiative sought to link voting by Arab and other states on extension to achieving Israel's consent to adhere to the NPT within a certain time-span,'.  Cairo did not target nonaligned colleagues India and Pakistan, the two other major holdouts. Given the U.S. recruiting of a pre-conference majority behind its position, Egypt could not expect to prevent indefinite extension by a majority vote; but it could hope to gain something on the universality issue, because the United States was dedicated to avoiding a visible split on permanent unqualified extension.

Seeking to correct a gross strategic imbalance, Egypt's campaign drew upon Egypt's long-standing advocacy of regionwide NPT adherence, developments eroding Egypt's importance as the major Arab proponent of Arab-Israeli peace, Egyptian concerns that the peace process would produce Israeli politico-economic hegemony, and a need to demonstrate to Islamists that Mubarak could stand up to Clinton and Rabin.

A high point of the initiative was a joint declaration adopted by Egypt, Syria and the six GCC states meeting in Cairo last February.30 The statement held that exempting Israel from full-scope safeguards threatened regional stability, called upon international opinion to work to remove Israeli-created obstacles in the peace process, and criticized Iraq and Iran for raising tensions.

Israeli responses to Egypt's activism included accusations that it damaged the peace talks and interfered with Israel's diplomacy and economic outreach to some Arab states. Pointing to Iran as the real nuclear threat in the region, Israel indicated that it would keep its nuclear deterrent and reject the NPT for as long as some regional states remained its foes. Israel's most concessionary response was Foreign Minister Peres's stand that Israel would address bomb-free issues two years after undefined, full regional peace emerged.

In a context where Jewish American groups were poised to pressure Congress, whose Republicans were in an aid-slashing mood, to reduce Egypt's $2.1 billion package for FY 1996, the administration, telling Egypt that it would not seek cuts, was unable to persuade Cairo to withdraw its campaign. Egyptian activism faded just before and during President Mubarak's Washington visit last April. The visit included (a) congressional Republican leaders' assurances to President Mubarak about projected U.S. aid; (b) the Cairo leader's statement that he had no problem with the United States on the Israeli-NPT matter nor with the NPT as such; and (c) President Clinton's telling his guest that the United States would support actions to rid the Mideast of nuclear arms after regional peace was achieved.

Reviving a stronger line in the NPT Conference, Egypt held that, because the NPT did not include Israel, a dangerous condition existed in the Mideast; and, though it endorsed the NPT's goals, it could not vote to extend the pact indefinitely. Yet Mr. Rabin confidently urged House Republicans in early May not to reduce U.S. aid to any of Israel's peace partners. Virtually an entitlement, aid ($3 billion for FY 1996) to Israel, long the premier U.S. aid recipient, was not vulnerable, though the future may yield another condition.

NPT EXTENSION CONFERENCE

Major Results