Eye on IranFred Kaplan takes readers' questions about future relations and remaining nuclear potential.

Slate columnist Fred Kaplan was online at Washingtonpost.com on Dec. 6, 2007, to chat with readers about Iran's long-halted nuclear-weapons program and what Bush should do next. An unedited transcript of the chat follows.

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State College, Pa.: My question is less about the NIE itself than about the president's press conference that coincided with its being declassified. Given that this NIE was a pretty dramatic change in position, did it seem the president was less than prepared for the sorts of questions that would come from it? I would think that if the president had a couple of weeks with the knowledge of Iran having ceased its nuclear weapons program, that he could have better prepared for his news conference.

Fred Kaplan: I'd say you're right. It was very puzzling.

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Koersel, Belgium: Why is everyone focusing so much on Iran, if the real discussion should be to ban all nuclear arms? During the Cold War, the bomb did have a function: deterrence. The two powers kept each other in balance. But the world has changed -- anybody can acquire nuclear weapons. A terrorist group could get its hands on the technology, or even on a ready-made bomb, a threat that the atomic scientists of the Manhattan Project (who made the first bomb) already realized way back in 1945 -- hence their proposal to ban nuclear weapons altogether, the so-called Lillienthal-Acheson Plan. What they feared then now becomes reality: North Korea is a nuclear power, and India, and a very unstable Pakistan. Will the U.S. take the lead to ban all nuclear weapons from the world -- including its own?

Fred Kaplan: The idea of "general and complete disarmament" (as it used to be called) is a pipedream and has been, I'm afraid, all along. Possession of the bomb gives a country a huge amount of leverage - it's a very effective deterrent, for one thing - and those who have the bomb are not likely to give it up. A little experiment: Let's imagine that everyone with a bomb does disarm. The first country that builds a bomb becomes the new superpower. Others will build their own bombs in response. Pretty soon, the world will be littered with bombs again (though not as many as there are now). The prerequisite to total disarmament is some kind of superpowerful world government, and I don't see that happening. At the same time, it's obvious that the Non-Proliferation Treaty has many holes (eg, non-nuclear powers are rewarded with "peaceful" nuclear technology, which, we now see, can be converted to "non-peaceful" devices more easily than was once assumed).

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Boston: Froomkin did a good piece yesterday on Bush's changing rhetoric before and after August (presumably around the time that McConnell first briefed him on the change in Iran nuclear program conclusions) from the threat of Iran "developing nuclear weapons" to the threat that Iran would "gain the knowledge" to develop nuclear weapons. Considering Bush and Cheney's view that the Iranian leadership is evil, does their changed rhetoric fit into your notion of the "fog of moral clarity"? How confident are you, after analyzing their change in redline rhetoric and noting other insiders' cautions that Cheney isn't one "relentless SOB," that they won't just button up their chinstrap and bomb Iran anyway given the threat "their knowledge" and continued uranium processing possess (in their minds)?

washingtonpost.com: Neck-Snapping Spin From the President (washingtonpost.com, Dec. 4)

Fred Kaplan: If Bush wanted to bomb Iran, he has the physical ability - and he would argue the political authority - to do so. Cheney, though isolated in some respects, is just down the hall. However, it is worth noting that the Secretaries of State and Defense, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the commander of U.S. Central Command have - remarkably - all made very clear, privately and publicly, their extreme skepticism about the wisdom of taking such a step. The rationales for this skepticism have, I'm told, been put forth to the president clearly and explicitly in the Oval Office, with all top officials present. There have even been high-level discussions within the military of group-resignations in the event of such an order (though how serious this prospect is, I don't know, and I have mixed feelings about it - we don't want military officers throwing a coup, do we?)

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Arlington, Va.: Kaplan says "According to the latest reports on this, McConnell did tell the president the gist of the new findings." But I heard the president himself say that he was not told. Are you saying the president retracted that ?

Fred Kaplan: The White House has issued a "clarification."

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Princeton, N.J.: Why is checking on the enrichment level hard? It seems to me that all you have to do is put sombody periodically (but randimly) at the last centrifuge with an accurate scale.

Fred Kaplan: I think it's a bit more complicated than that. But the big problem is: If you have several hundred centrifuges whirring, you could break out of the agreement and have several thousand whirring in short order. It's much more reliable to keep the level at zero than to keep it some finite number. But we're beyond zero now, so it may be time to reassess the risk levels of agreeing to something beyond that.

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Lyme, Conn.: What are the concerns that, even if Iran is not developing nuclear weapons, that they may not be positioning themselves to rapidly change towards developing nuclear weapons -- especially if they could do so in cooperation with another country, such as Pakistan or China?

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