ROBERT SIEGEL, host:
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Robert Siegel.
MELISSA BLOCK, host:
And I'm Melissa Block. Iran's supreme leader had a warning today for the U.S. If you attack us, we will hit back.
Ayatollah ALI KHAMENEI (Supreme religious leader, Iran): (Foreign language spoken)
BLOCK: Americans should know if they attack Iran, Iran will harm their interests around the world. That's Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, speaking earlier today in Tehran. Other senior Iranian officials threatened this week to hide their nuclear activities and end all cooperation with United Nations weapons inspectors.
SIEGEL: As the diplomatic war of words plays out, Iran experts here are pondering this question, when will the country have passed the nuclear point of no return? One camp argues it's time to face a hard truth, that there may be no way to stop Iran from building nuclear weapons. Others disagree. They say a nuclear-armed Iran is far from inevitable. NPR's Mary Louise Kelly has been talking to people on both sides of the debate.
MARY LOUISE KELLY reporting:
To hear Robert Joseph tell it, Iran is racing towards a nuclear bomb.
Mr. ROBERT JOSEPH (Under Secretary, Arms Control and International Security): It's fair to say the Iranians have put both feet on the accelerator.
KELLY: Joseph is the State Department's point man on proliferation issues. He says a lot depends on how you define the point of no return. Is it when Iran has enough fissile material to make a bomb, or when they've successfully weaponized that material?
Mr. JOSEPH: There is an earlier point of no return, and that is when Iran has acquired the confidence and the capability of running centrifuges over a sustained period of time. And the key point there has always in the past been the 164-cascade centrifuge. So the answer I would give you is we are very close to that point of no return.
KELLY: Joseph was referring to Tehran's announcement two weeks ago that it has successfully enriched uranium using a small cascade of 164 gas centrifuges. That's only a first baby step on the path toward large-scale production. Nonetheless, the announcement has given ammunition to conservative hawks such as Max Boot. He's a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. Boot believes it's inevitable that Iran will, sooner or later, acquire nuclear weapons, though he does believe the West has options.
Mr. MAX BOOT (Senior fellow for national security studies, Council on Foreign Relations): The most obvious one, of course, being to bomb their nuclear facilities. That's not going to stop them from getting nuclear weapons for all time, but it's certainly going to set them back for a number of years.
KELLY: Boot says the most realistic goal for the U.S. is not to stop but to delay the day Iran joins the nuclear club. Paul Pillar begs to differ.
Mr. PAUL R. PILLAR (Professor, security studies program, Georgetown University; National intelligence officer for the Near East and South Asia, Central Intelligence Agency, from 2000 to 2005): I don't think there's any such thing as a point of no return.
KELLY: Pillar was, until last year, the CIA's top intelligence analyst for the Middle East.
Mr. PILLAR: Between where the Iranians are now and where they would be years up the line with a nuclear weapon, there are many, many decisions that Tehran would have to make, and any one of those represents a possible point of return.
KELLY: Pillar argues that diplomacy could still convince Tehran to reverse course. He points to the South African model. That country went all the way down the road to developing nuclear weapons and then decided, in 1990, to give them up. Pillar says there's a lesson there. Nothing is inevitable. Columbia University professor Gary Sick agrees.
Professor GARY G. SICK (School of International & Public Affairs, Columbia University): If you'd asked people at the dawn of the nuclear age how many nuclear powers there would be by now, nobody would have said only nine. That's pretty amazing, actually, given all the years that these weapons have been around and the number of countries. There are at least 40 countries in the world that could develop a nuclear weapon within the next few months if they wanted to. And they're not doing it.
KELLY: Sick spent years working U.S.-Iranian relations for the National Security Council, starting under President Ford. Not surprisingly, he takes a long view of the situation. Sick notes wryly that if you believe the latest intelligence estimates, Iran is always just on the verge of getting the bomb.
Professor SICK: Since at least 1991, U.S. and Israeli intelligence has been estimating that Iran was three to five years away from a bomb. We now say that they're five to ten years. They have been having real problems with their nuclear program.
KELLY: Nonetheless, Sick concedes the current situation is worrying. So does David Albright, a former nuclear inspector in Iraq who is now president of the Institute for Science and International Security. Albright says the real danger lies in whether Iran's neighbors might start flirting with nuclear weapons, too.
Mr. DAVID ALBRIGHT (President, Institute for Science and International Security): If Iran gets nuclear weapons, or even gets close, you could see countries like Saudi Arabia, Syria, Turkey, Egypt getting very nervous, both about their own prestige and about their own security.
KELLY: As negotiations continue to prevent the arrival of a nuclear-armed Iran on the world stage, another effort is quietly underway. Paul Pillar, the former CIA analyst, says small pockets of experts both in and outside the U.S. government are studying what would happen if that scenario does come to pass. Pillar says they're asking what deterrents might work, how nuclear war could be avoided. In other words, trying to figure out how the United States might learn to live with a nuclear Iran.
Mary Louise Kelly, NPR News, Washington.
Copyright © 2006 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information.
NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.