Scientists Encourage Trump to Support Iran Deal

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https://nuclearrisk.wordpress.com/2017/01/02/scientists-encourage-trump-to-support-iran-deal/

Scientists Encourage Trump to Support Iran Deal

Posted on January 2, 2017 by Martin Hellman

Earlier today, a letter on which I am a cosigner was sent to President-elect Trump encouraging him to abide by the Iran nuclear deal negotiated by President Obama. An article by New York Times reporter William Broad, noted:

Dozens of the nation’s top scientists wrote to President-elect Donald J. Trump on Monday to urge him not to dismantle the Iran deal, calling it a strong bulwark against any Iranian bid to make nuclear arms. … The 37 signatories included Nobel laureates, veteran makers of nuclear arms, former White House science advisers and the chief executive of the world’s largest general society of scientists.

The letter is a follow-on to one signed by much the same group and sent in August 2015 to President Obama. The new letter gives our assessment now that the agreement has been in place for almost a year and concludes:

The JCPOA does not take any options off the table for you or any future president. Indeed it makes it much easier for you to know if and when Iran heads for a bomb. It provides both time and legitimacy for an effective response. Our technical judgment is that the multilateral JCPOA provides a strong bulwark against an Iranian nuclear-weapons program. We urge you to preserve this critical U.S. strategic asset.

The book my wife and I recently completed has a short section on Iran (pages 201-210) that has some eye-opening revelations that more Americans need to understand if we are to heal our adversarial relationship with that nation. (Links for buying the book or downloading a free PDF are on its website.)

The letter to President-elect Trump is particularly important given calls for regime change by two of the men he had considered for Secretary of State: Rudolph Giuliani and John Bolton. Giuliani said, “The inevitable conclusion of all of this is, we have to have regime change,” and Bolton, “The inconvenient truth is that only military action … can accomplish what is required. … Such action should be combined with vigorous American support for Iran’s opposition, aimed at regime change in Tehran.”

Continuing to threaten Iran and encouraging regime change has the unintended consequence of increasing support for a bomb within Iran since that is the only way Iran can deter such actions.

Martin Hellman

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1. The letter

Last edited Wed Jan 18, 2017, 11:00 PM - Edit history (1)

From the pdf version at https://static01.nyt.com/packages/pdf/science/03ScientistsLetter.pdf

2 January 2017
Dear President-Elect Trump;

On August 9, 2015 a group of scientists and engineers with understanding of the physics and technology
of nuclear power and of nuclear weapons sent an open letter to President Obama about the Iran Deal,
formally known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). We characterized the JCPOA as
“an innovative agreement, with much more stringent constraints than any previously negotiated nonproliferation
framework.”

Eleven months after “implementation day” we write to provide our assessment of the current status of
the JCPOA. As agreed, Iran has deactivated and put into storage under International Atomic Energy
Agency (IAEA) seal about 2/3 of its centrifuges, and it has exported more than 95% of its stockpile of
low-enriched uranium—a springboard to weapon-usable highly enriched uranium. Iran no longer
produces uranium with enrichment near 20%, as it did before the interim Joint Plan of Action (JPOA),
but is restricted to 3.67% enrichment. As a result of the reduced centrifuge capacity and the elimination
of the large stock of partially enriched uranium, the breakout time for Iran to produce enough highly
enriched uranium for a nuclear weapon has increased to many months, from just a few weeks during the
time that the JPOA was under negotiation. IAEA inspectors now have the right to daily access at Iran’s
enrichment plant at Natanz, and monitoring devices there make continuous on-line enrichment
measurements. We are confident that no surprise breakout at this facility is possible.

The large “calandria” or reactor vessel for Iran’s heavy-water reactor has been rendered inoperable, and
Iran’s stockpile of heavy water has been reduced to 130 metric tons and capped at that level. The
overage of 0.1 tons recently reported by the IAEA, of no strategic significance, was remedied by export
of 11 tons as verified by the IAEA. The redesign of the reactor will ensure that its plutonium production
will be about 10% of that from the original design, and, when construction is complete and the reactor
has begun operation, the fuel that has generated plutonium will be removed from Iran. These steps
eliminate the means for Iran to produce plutonium, the alternative material for nuclear weapons.

Furthermore, Iran has agreed to an enhanced version of the procedures of the “Additional Protocol” to
the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, which gives IAEA inspectors access to, inter alia, centrifuge
manufacturing, R&D and storage sites, and uranium mines, as well as any suspect potential clandestine
uranium enrichment facilities.

In sum, the JCPOA has dramatically reduced the risk that Iran could suddenly produce significant
quantities of nuclear-weapon materials. This has lowered the pressure felt by Iran’s neighbors to develop
their own nuclear weapons options and none has announced a new dual-use nuclear program of its own.

In the near term it will be necessary to maintain vigilance using the verification procedures in place. As
we noted in our previous letter, if Iran decides to increase its enrichment capacity as allowed by the
JCPOA after about ten years, enhanced verification measures would be desirable and consistent with
Iran’s commitment in the JCPOA to implement certified modern verification procedures in line with
internationally accepted IAEA practice. Multinational participation in what is currently a purely national
program for producing power reactor fuel may also be a desirable means to enhance transparency.

The JCPOA does not take any options off the table for you or any future president. Indeed it makes it
much easier for you to know if and when Iran heads for a bomb. It provides both time and legitimacy for
an effective response.

Our technical judgment is that the multilateral JCPOA provides a strong bulwark against an Iranian
nuclear-weapons program. We urge you to preserve this critical U.S. strategic asset.

Sincerely,

Richard L. Garwin, IBM Fellow Emeritus
Robert J. Goldston, Princeton University
Siegfried S. Hecker, Stanford University
Martin Hellman, Stanford University
Rush D. Holt, American Association for the Advancement of Science
R. Scott Kemp, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Frank von Hippel, Princeton University

Also signed by:

John F. Ahearne, Member, National Academy of Engineering
Philip W. Anderson, Professor Emeritus, Princeton University
Lewis M. Branscomb, Professor Emeritus, University of California at San Diego
Christopher Chyba, Princeton University
Leon N. Cooper, Brown University
Pierce S. Corden, Former Director, Office of International Security Negotiations,
Bureau of Arms Control, Department of State
John M. Cornwall, Professor of Physics and Astronomy, UCLA
Philip E. Coyle, Former Associate Director for National Security and
International Affairs, White House Office of Science and Technology Policy
Sidney D. Drell, Stanford University
Freeman Dyson, Professor Emeritus, Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton
Harold A. Feiveson, Program on Science and Global Security, Princeton University
Charles D. Ferguson, Federation of American Scientists
Michael E. Fisher, Emeritus, Cornell University and the University of Maryland
Jerome I. Friedman, Nobel Prize in physics 1990
Victor Gilinsky, Former Member of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission
Howard Georgi, Mallinckrodt Professor of Physics, Harvard University
Sheldon L. Glashow, Higgins Professor of Physics Emeritus, Harvard University,
Arthur Metcalf Professor of Science and Mathematics, Boston University
Lisbeth Gronlund, Union of Concerned Scientists
David Gross, Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics, UCSB
Gregory Loew, Emeritus Stanford/SLAC Professor
Allison M Macfarlane, George Washington University
Richard A. Meserve, President Emeritus, Carnegie Institution for Science
Marvin Miller, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
C. Kumar N. Patel, Professor Emeritus, Dept of Physics and Astonomy, UCLA
John Parmentola, Former Senior VP General Atomics and Former Director for Research
And Laboratory Management U.S. Army
Malvin A. Ruderman, Columbia University
Burton Richter, Stanford University
Myriam Sarachik, City College of New York, CUNY
Roy F. Schwitters, The University of Texas at Austin
David Wright, Union of Concerned Scientists

(Affiliations for identification only)

[kacekwl]

2. WAY too many letters . trump lost interest

after the fifth word.