can help move the country towards some sort of regime change. regime change would obviously be best if it occurred from within. i think that's the hope of a lot of us, but i think the problem is that iran's political -- internal political development timeline and that of its nuclear program are not in sync and i fear that we do not have enough time to wait for the iranians to change the regime themselves. so i guess i'll just end by saying, i think the down sides of containment are clear. the costs of containment are incredibly significant. i think the costs of containment outweigh those of any military strike. and -- but i do think a limited strike has some serious downsides. and i finishing we go down the path considering the military option, we need to remember that it's the regime that is the issue, not just the nuclear program. thank you.

>> thank you very much. i'd like to thank the cato institute for hosting this event. thanks particularly to justin logan for organizing. i want to applaud justin for his impeccable sense of timing. secretary panetta said recently that, quote, there's a strong likelihood that israel will strike iran in april, may or june. here we are on march 30th. it's impressive that you were able to organize not only his statement but this conference. well done. if he's right, israel might strike soon. and if israel does strike soon, we have a lot of important questions to ask. what would happen next? how might iran respond? would such a strike help or hinder u.s. efforts to deter iran in the future? my bottom line is that deterring iran even a nuclear iran, is a

relatively straightforward proposition. but deterring iran after it has been hit with a preemptive or preventive or delaying strike, especially from israel will make it much, much harder in the future. this is the reason why bombing is a bad idea. a little bit of theory is necessary to explain my argument and then i'll get to the nitty-grit nitty-gritty. iran is the latest example of a longstanding problem. that is, how do you deal with an emerging nuclear power? deterrence theorists and scholars and observers have worried a lot about new nacent nuclear powers for a number of reasons. they have incomplete and immature security protocols. not sure if they can be reliable custodians. they have command and control arrangements. nuclear powers are usually flush with nationalism. achieving the nuclear threshold is a moment of intense national pride and nationalism can be a very dangerous animal.

and new nuclear powers tend to overestimate the ability of having a nuclear arsenal. they make this technological breakthrough and think, we've got it. we can do a lot of things with our newfound nuclear strength. actually, they can't do that much with nuclear weapons. nuclear weapons have very little use beyond basic deterrence. and it takes nuclear powers some time to learn that. but the learning process can be dangerous. so this is one -- these are reason yes s why we worry about. the debate how to deter an emerging nuclear power focused on whether they were rational. deterrence theorists say, in order for deterrence to work you have to face a rational adversary who weighs costs and benefits. and some have argued that the nature of the iranian regime, as jamie was saying is such that it doesn't weigh costs and benefits in the way that we weigh costs and benefits. that it's motivated by ideology, religious extremism and they

might be willing to take extraordinary risks. that is, it's not rational as we define the term. i think this is an important question of rationality and i'll come back to it, but it's not enough. if you really want to think about how to deter a country like iran you have to ask, what exactly are you trying to deter? what kinds of threatening actions are we really troubled by? and there are four. first, we would like to deter a rapid expansion of iran's nuclear program. if iran achiefs some modest nuclear arsenal, we wouldn't be happy with that, but we wouldn't want it to go on a campaign of rapid expansion. that would be destabilizing and exacerbate all of the concerns that i just mentioned. we'd be especially concerned if they did it covertly. best case scenario is they'd expand slowly and transparently. that we could probably live with. if they do it quickly and opaquely, we would be very, very nervous. a second thing, we would like to deter the transfer of nuclear

materials or technologies to third parties. a couple of speakers have already mentioned that. in the case of iran, we're particularly concerned with the transfer of nuclear materials to terrorist groups, hezbollah. third, we would like to deter the use of nuclear weapons as cover for conventional aggression. we've heard this already as well. this notion that iran would be somehow emboldened by having nuclear weapons. they would be more likely to take conventional risks because it would be confident that they would not intervene. so they would be emboldened either to act out conventionally or to increase their support to proxies. finally, and perhaps most importantly, we would like to deter iran from actually using a nuclear weapon in war. in once sense, this is the easiest thing to deter because this is the only kind of action for which we can credibly threaten them with our own nuclear arsenal. nuclear threats against all of

the lesser kinds of threatening actions simply are not credible. nobody would believe us if we say we are threatening to nuke you if you do something conventionally. it just would not -- it would not be credible at all, but we can credibly threat to respond in kind in response to a nuclear attack, right? on the other hand, again, some observers worry that iran is simply not rational, right? they're not motivated by old-fashioned cold war calculations of costs and benefits, right? in the summer of 2006, for instance, bernard lewis wrote in "the wall street journal" that according to his reading of islamic text, and i'll quote here, august 22nd, 2006, might well be deemed an appropriate date for the apocalyptic ending of israel and if necessary of the world. he had gone back and scoured islamic texts and he said, wow, this might be the day where they decide to just end the world. they've got these apocalyptic

notions. happily it didn't happen. right in we made it to august 23rd, 2006. but the sense that this regime is not rational continues to linger, as well as the idea that it's insensitive to our deterrent threats. i think this is wrong. i think that we can deter a nuclear iran. i think we can deter all of the threatening actions that i laid out earlier. it will take time. it will take patience. it will take a lot of hard thought, hard work, but it's a relatively straightforward problem. we've done deterinence the past against equally bizarre regimes. we can do it against iran today. first, we can deter iran from rapidly expanding its nacent nuclear capabilities. some leaders like mahmoud ahmadinejad use very heated rhetoric, really over the top rhetoric. other iranian leaders treat him with disdain. a lot of iranian leaders are worried about international

prestige and international respect. and if we carefully and continually promise them that a rapid expansion of their nuclear effort will lead to international appropium it may slow down. i think it's likely they will slow down. second, we can deter transfer to proxy actors. one way we can do this is by disabuse iran of the notion it can remain anonymous. one thing people worry about is iran could quietly and covertly deliver nuclear hardware to hezbollah, right? that it would be safe as long as they could do this anonymously. we can convince iran it can't do it anonymously. just think about it. think through the actual chain of events. if a nuclear blast went off against israel or the united states, who would we immediately look at? without question, without hesitation, iran would be number one and pakistan probably number two. we can also indicate to iran that we've actually made some

pretty substantial developments in the science of nuclear forensics. that is the ability to trace fissile material back to its origin. there's debates among physicists about how far long we are on this process. all i care about is tell iran that we're going at a pretty steady pace and planting a seed of doubt in their minds to dispel again the notion that they can remain anonymous providers. third, we can be confident about deterring use as cover for conventional aggression. for a couple of reasons. one, iran's conventional capableities are pathetic. they have no power projection capabilities of any known. they have decaying conventional capability. they are reliant on 1970s hardware that they purchased under the regime of the shah. they've sacrificed spending on their air force because they know they can't keep up. their surface navy is just not very capable at all. iran can cause some problems.

they can lash out a little bit but they can't launch anything like a sustained conventional operation. especially not against countries like israel or the united states. so i think that we exaggerate this concern. what about the danger that they increase their -- they increase their support for proxy actors? i think this concern is overblown. as a lot of observers have pointed out, iran's history with proxy actors has been tepid at times. when they feel heat from the international community, they pull back from hezbollah. and i don't know why that would change just because they had a very small arsenal of nuclear weapons at their disposal. i think they would still respond. i see no obvious reason why not. finally, the united states can deter the use of weapons in war. this is the one case in which we can make a serious and unambiguous threat of reprisal. i think the threat would stick. now, unfortunately, so my bottom

line is deter sense not only possible but it's likely. and it can succeed. it will get a lot harder if israel launches an attack. it will be a lot harder to deter all four kinds of behavior. in the aftermath of a strike on its nuclear complex, iran will have gigantic incentives to disperse and conceal its program. it will basically mimic the actions of iraq after 1981. this is what we don't want. it will become more covert and harder to deal with in the future. it will be harder to deter transfer to proxy actors for the same reasons. iran may believe that to reduce its vulnerability to subsequent strikes, better to give the stuff to hezbollah. it would make sense. in the aftermath of the strike it will be harder to deter the use as cover. simply because it will be harder to assemble and maintain an international coalition to block iranian expansion. especially among key regional actors. the gulf states come to mind.

they will face significant pressure to move away from the united states, not towards it. finally, and most worrisome, it will be harder to deter the use of nuclear weapons in war. deterring the use of weapons requires two things. it requires threats of reprisal and it also requires assurances. we always forget this. there has to be an assurance attached to the target of the deterrent threat that if you restrain yourself, we're not going to hit you anyways. you will not be targeted as long as you subdue yourself. it will be almost impossible to issue any sort of anything like a credible assurance in the wake of a strike. iran would have no reason to believe us, and i disagree with matt kroenig on this. iran would also face a use it or lose it program. it worked for decades. if it worried it was going to

suddenly lose this program this, crown jewel of its regime it would have incentives to fire away and crises would be very, very unstable. so i'll end there, and just finish with a couple of thoughts. we have been containing iran for a long time. we will continue to contain iran, whether or not our politicians say so publicly. what we do and what we say are not always the same things. deterrence will also precede a pace. we will continue to deter iran. and this is actually pretty straightforward. about the only thing we can do to undermine the quality of deterrence is to attack now. i'll stop there. >> all right. thank you all for your contributions. i think in the interest of fairness, matt, you left yourself a little time and probably some v some plate clearing to do if you want. but i want to pile on if i can. i'll be the imperial moderator here if that's all right. you mentioned, if i remember, i don't remember how you phrased

it but during your talk that you didn't necessarily think it was time to strike iran today, but that if some future threshold were crossed, it would be. so i wanted to get to ask that question of both you and jamie. is it your position we should strike today or when at some theoretical point in the future? to jamie if it's the regime, stupid, would you favor bombing it if it had no nuclear program whatsoever? so i think if we're going to start over here and then mix it up with questions. >> great. thanks for that question, justin. so as i said in my introductory remarks, i think if we get to the point of deciding between a nuclear-armed iran or a strike at that point we should strike. so the question is, when do you get to that point? as i said in the opening remarks, we are returning to the negotiating table. it would be wonderful if iran agreed to give up its iranian enrichment program. i would immediately go out and celebrate.

i hope some of you would join me. but i don't think that's likely. when do we reach the point of decision? what i say in the foreign affairs article is that there are certain thresholds iran would cross that would indicate they are clearly dashing toward a nuclear weapon and if we don't act at that point we'd be forfith our last chance to prevent them from acquiring a nuclear weapon. right now iran is enriching uranium to 20% in order to construct nuclear weapons. it would need to enrich up to 90%. if iran enriches above 20% toward the 90%, i think that would be one red line. if we don't act then, iran will have nuclear weapons. a second would february iran kicked out international inspectors. inspectors on the ground in iran visiting the nuclear facilities about every two weeks, writing detailed reports every three weeks or so. so we can know that they are not -- have some confidence that they're not enriching above 20%. if they kick out the inspectors, that would be evidence they were up to no good and would be another red line that if they crossed, we should take military

action. now there are some other things, i think, that would cause me some concern. so there are things that -- let me back up. right now experts estimate that if iran made the decision today to enrich to 90%, that it could have enough material for its first weapon in about four months. but that timeline is shrinking as iran brings more and more centrifuges online, increases stockpifls 20% low-enriched uranium. experts predict by the end of this year, december 2012, that timeline will have shrunk to about one month. so i think that just this progress, you know, at some point, facts on the ground will take the military option off the ground, even if iran doesn't cross any of those clear red lines. so i think there are other things, introducing advanced centrifuges that should cause us reason for concern. the difficulty there is that i think the united states if we took military action would do it very different than israel would. israel has conducted these strikes in the past. i think we'd work in advance to

make a case under international law to try to build an international coalition, and that would take time. and i think that it's easier to sell these kind of clear, bright red lines such as kicking out inspectors or enriching towards 90% to an international audience. >> on the question of whether the u.s. should strike now, i mean, i think as i said in my remarks, this all would have been much easier and the options would have been much better if this would have been done several years ago. so the longer we wait, we're in position -- the longer we wait, the more difficult the military option becomes. now having said that, i do think that it's worth seeing what happens at this next round of talks in mid-april, although i said in my remarks i don't have a lot of high hopes. i don't think the iranian regime is currently in a situation because of internal divisions where they're going to be willing to even accept the most basic offers from the p5 plus 1,

but i do think that needs to play itself out. i'm also all in favor of piling on any additional sanctions, getting towards what some call crippling sanctions as much as possible in the coming months. i do think the obama administration believes that's this is an issue for 2013, not for 2012. i have some fundamental concerns with how they are going about making that assessment. i think that the u.s. intelligence community has overlearned the lessons of the iraq wmd intelligence debacle that they are overly cautious in their assessments. i think that this whole notion that senior obama mrgss officiaofficial have laid out in the public domain that they are willing to allow iran to get to a nuclear threshold and then wait for it to make the final political decision before action would be taken is very dangerous. i don't know the u.s. intelligence community would ever see or know the supreme leader has given that go-ahead. and as matt laid out, we're getting to the point with the various elements of iran's

various capabilities where we're talking about it in some experts accounts about a matter of months that it would take if that decision was made. that's a very dangerous situation to get into given our intelligence community's past failures about wmd. one thing i'll say in regard to an israeli strike. i don't think it's ideal at all from a u.s. perspective. and i do have some concerns that if israel feels they do not have enough support or assurances from this administration, they act alone, the united states will likely get dragged in and we'll have the worst of all worlds. so if it comes down to the fact that israel will take action in the coming months, i would much rather see the united states take action rather than israel because i do think that we're going to be left to deal with a lot of the consequences if israel acts alone. and so although i think if israel was not an actor or player in this situation that we probably could wait a bit longer. i do think that just the israeli concerns and their unwillingness to see iran get the capacity of

nuclear weapons might encourage the u.s. to act sooner. >> nunu, you wanted to jump in? >> i wanted to jump in and address a couple of points that jamie made about the likelihood of nuclear proliferation cascade. so i was pleased to see that you agree that we can debate whether emboldenment and nuclear exchange of likely effects. but your major concern is with the possibility of a nuclear cascade. and there's two points you made. one is to be unlikely the u.s. would be willing and able, but mostly willing to extend the nuclear umbrella to saudi arabia to deter the saudis from acquiring their own nuclear weapons. and on this point, we don't need to extend the nuclear umbrella. that's not the only type of security assurance we can provide to our allies, friends and allies, in order to deter their nuclearization arms supplies to the level that we have done them in the past with the saudis worked pretty well. so the supply of conventional

arms is usually sufficiently reassurance that it is enough for our allies not to nuclearize. you also mentioned north korea that they are, in fact, more of a problem than i claim they are. i just don't see any evidence that the north koreans have been embold end since acquiring nuclear weapons. of course they are a problem. i don't think the iranian regime is my favorite regime, but the question is have the north koreans become emboldened and become more of a problem? i don't think so. one last point and i'll conclude on this. it's actually striking to realize that, no pun intended on the striking. it's interesting to realize that the states we fear were nuclearizing are states that did not nuclearize in response to an israeli nuclear weapon. and these are states that cannot count on u.s. support against israel but can count on u.s. support against iran. so they did not nuclearize against the state that's far more threatening for them than iran, why would they now?

i'll leave it at that. >> all right. we'll throw it open to questions. same rules applies. please identify yourself. please wait for the microphone, first of all, and please ask your shortest, smartest question among the many that you no doubt have. i think the gentleman on the aisle there was first with his hand up. yes, that's you. >> dave, cato adjunct scholar. fundamental to any formulation of strategy is a connection between ends and means. your advocacy of a military strike is a means is pretty clear, but your end seems undefined. you seem to put it as creating space in the future for something to happen which doesn't seem a very concreed goal. are you going to go to war for that it should be something. what's your response to that? >> it's a good question. i think actually that the connection between ends and means is pretty clear. there are four nuclear facilities iran is operating

that we're trying to get them to shut down. we're negotiating with them, asking them to shut it down. they are unwilling to shut it down. if we bomb those facilities they'll be shut down. so that is the ends means calculation. now if what you are getting at is this point that there's no guarantee that iran will never develop nuclear weapons, that's absolutely right. on the other hand, if we sit back while iran builds nuclear weapons, we will be guaranteed that they have nuclear weapons. so a strike at a minimum imposes a significant delay. and then i think there's a lot of reasons to believe that this delay could become permanent. so iran might give up. most people assume that iran will be bombed on friday and be back out saturday morning rebuilding their nuclear program. that's possible. i think it's also possible that iran would give up. that they would say, we've invested decades building this expensive nuclear. we've gone through this attack. are we going to go through another decade of building this

nuclear infrastructure only to invite another attack? maybe they would decide not to. i think time is valuable in and of itself if we need to face all these threats that i think most people on the panel agree would emerge from a nuclear-armed iran. i'd much rather face them in ten years than next year. and then third, i think that there is a lot of -- there's a lot that can happen in that 3 to 10-year window. so it's possible to buy us time for further diplomacy. creates space for possible indigenous regime change, a new government. might have a different nuclear policy to create space for this government to decide to give up the program. create space for some kind of future conflict that would lead iran never to develop nuclear weapons. and fourth and finally it changes the bargaining space. i think a strike in a lot of ways can make diplomacy harder. in other ways it can make diplomacy easier. i'd be much more willing to trade away a shattered nuclear program than one within months of delivering me a coveted

nuclear weapon. >> throw it open. the gentleman back there that i was -- yeah, trying to point to but successfully doing so now. >> could the united states -- my name is steven shore. could the united states restrain israel if israel is determined to abort the iran's nuclear program. and if so, could that possibly be used as a bargaining chip in american negotiations with iran? >> could the united states restrain israel? >> no, and no. >> succinct. anyone else care to get in on -- no. next question. let's go back there. i think i see john muller. all right. >> john muller from cato and from ohio state.

i've lived long enough to have sat through this debate several other times with several other countries. like matt in particular, since he has a background in nuclear proliferation to suggest any parallels. one of the biggest ones is with china in 1964. more dangerous than just about anybody. and, you know, very more unstable than pakistan. and the concern then, the debate then was about bombing china to stop them from getting nuclear weapons. the debate was determined they wouldn't do that. they did get nuclear weapons. and what's happened since that time is they built far fewer than they could. they immediately had no first use policy and basically haven't done much of anything. so the question is, why -- what experience in the past makes you think that proliferation will necessarily be that dangerous when it seems to have been relatively undangerous so far? >> question about whether to strangle the baby in the cradle

as it was termed in china and whether it applies to iran today. >> well, it's, of course, a difficult question to answer in some ways because it depends on an assessment of what would have happened if the united states had struck and how history could have played out differently. and we just don't know. it might have been better. the other examples that people often look to are north korea and pakistan. and nuno said we didn't bomb north korea and it hasn't been that bad, and, you know, i think i would strongly disagree with that. i think that north korea has transferred nuclear technology to syria, possibly to burma, possibly to other states. i think north korea has been more aggressive. it attacked a south korean ship recently. and then north korea has only had nuclear weapons for a few years. we still haven't seen the full range of consequences that would play out from a nuclear-armed north korea. we could have a nukes problem, an exchange between north korea and other states.

and so i think, you know, while we've been lucky in the past and haven't had a nuclear exchange, we did come very close a number of times, and i think it's just naive to think if we keep playing this movie over and over again, more and more countries getting nuclear weapons in dangerous regions with real military conflicts that these weapons will never be used just because they haven't been used for 50 years, i think, is probably wrong. >> can i jump in? >> sure. >> on the point, i disagree. i am struck that we've had this discussion in the 1940s and 1950s and 1960s and 1970s. we hear this again and again and again that history really isn't a useful precedent for understanding the dilemmas of deterrence because eventually at some point it's going to go wrong. that's very fatalistic. i don't think it's right. i think we do have a good track record now with knowing how emerging nuclear powers behave, right? i will agree that in the first few years, they are -- they can

be unstable because they simply don't know the limits of their own arsenals. but over time, they realize that it's just not that valuable. it really doesn't get you that much coercive leverage in international negotiations or the ability to -- your rivals or anything else. so i'm not willing to toss off this danger simply because some hypothetical nightmare scenario might happen in the future. >> sure. by all means. >> one thing i want to pick up on what josh said. one thing that's being overlooked by our colleagues arguing in favor of deterrence, i think you can really only make that argument if the middle east does not go nuclear because i would argue that the sort of deterrence that would be required in this case if you had four, five nuclear powers in the middle east would really be ground-breaking. i just don't think we've been