Retired Brigadier General Lee Denson, who played a major role in negotiating the INF Treaty, is concerned that Trump’s attack on Iran’s nuclear program, however much damage it may have actually done, will have a severe impact on arms control and nonproliferation. “I’ve had a lot of arms control experience,” he told the Harvard Griffin in an interview. “We had nine active negotiations that I was in charge of advising the Joint Chiefs of Staff on for a couple of years. Some of them were bilateral with the Soviets and others were multilateral, and they covered all sorts of weapons and forces and the like. But in all my time, I’ve never seen an agreement as one-sided or as intrusive as the JCPOA” treaty with Iran.
“Yes, the agreement was limited to 15 years, but that’s common in arms control,” he continued, dismissing Israeli claims about the JCPOA. “Political circumstances change. Successful agreements, like those with the Soviets that addressed strategic weapons, were renegotiated and updated. Honestly, I don’t know that we could’ve gotten more. Iran accepted a very one-sided deal because of the intense pressure it was under. For many years, the inspectors were confident they were seeing all enrichment activity and that it was kept within agreed levels.”
Denson now fears that the U.S. strikes will make future nonproliferation efforts more difficult. “If Iran was on the fence about building a bomb, I suspect this has pushed them off it. Rogue states—those without strong alliances—see nuclear weapons as a deterrent against regime change,” he said. “North Korea is a prime example. Iran may go the same way, slowly and stealthily, perhaps even signaling that they now have a nuclear capability.”
