Obama Rebuffs Defense Establishment's Hunger for Conflict with Iran

WASHINGTON -- United States President Barack Obama's refusal in a White House briefing this month to announce a "red line" in regard to Iran's nuclear program represented another in a series of rebuffs of pressure from Defense Secretary Robert Gates for a statement that the US will not accept its existing stocks of low enriched uranium.

The Obama rebuff climaxed a months-long internal debate between Obama and Gates over the "breakout capability" issue that surfaced in the news media last April.

Gates has been arguing that Iran could turn its existing stock of low-enriched uranium (LEU) into a capability to build a nuclear weapon secretly by using covert enrichment sites and undeclared sources of uranium.

That Gates argument implies that the only way to prevent Iran having enough bomb-grade uranium for nuclear weapons is to insist that Iran must give up most of its existing stock of LEU, which could be converted into enough bomb-grade uranium for one bomb.

But Obama has publicly rejected the idea that Iran's existing stock of LEU represents a breakout capability on more than one occasion. He has stated that Iran would have to make an overt move to have a "breakout capability" that would signal its intention to have a nuclear weapon.

Obama's most recent rebuff of the Gates position came in the briefing he gave to a select group of journalists on August 4.

Peter David of The Economist, who attended the briefing, was the only journalist to note that Obama indicated that he was not ready to lay down any public red lines "at this point". Instead, Obama said it was important to set out for the Iranians a clear set of steps that the US would accept as proof that the regime was not pursuing a bomb.

Obama appeared to suggest that there are ways for Iran to demonstrate its intent not to build a nuclear bomb other than ending all enrichment and reducing its stock of low enriched uranium to a desired level.

Iran denies any intention of making nuclear weapons, but has made no secret that it wants to have enough low enriched uranium to convince potential adversaries that it has that option.

At a 2005 dinner in Tehran, Hassan Rowhani, then secretary of Iran's Supreme National Security Council, told George Perkovich of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace that Iran didn't need a nuclear weapon, as long as it had the "mastery of the fuel cycle" as a deterrent to external aggression.

Gates raised the issue of the Iranian ability to achieve a breakout capability in a three-page memorandum addressed to national security adviser Jim Jones in January 2010, as first reported in the New York Times on April 18.

In reporting the Gates memo, David E Sanger of the New York Times wrote, "Mr Gates's memo appears to reflect concerns in the upper echelons of the Pentagon and the military that the White House did not have a well-prepared series of alternatives in place in case all the diplomatic steps finally failed."

In the statement issued on the memo on April 18, Gates said it "identified next steps in our defense planning process where further interagency discussion and policy decisions would be needed in the months and weeks ahead".

The Sanger article appeared eight days after differences between Obama and Gates over the Iranian breakout capability issue had surfaced publicly in April.

Obama used an April 1 interview with CBS News to distinguish between Iran's "trying to develop the capacity to develop nuclear weapons" from a decision to actually possess nuclear weapons.

"They might decide that, once they have that capacity that they'd hold off right at the edge - in order not to incur more sanctions," he observed. Obama talked about a new round of international sanctions as his response to that problem.