Earlier this week, Vice President Joseph Biden misspoke. Normally, this would not be news. But unlike using obscene language, or confusing which Supreme Court Justice administered his oath of office, or talking about the president's "big stick," this time it matters.

The vice president said:

"When we took office, let me remind you, there was virtually no international pressure on Iran. We were the problem. We were diplomatically isolated in the world, in the region, in Europe."

Beyond the obvious point that "we" were not the problem, that Iran's longstanding and repeated violations of its IAEA Safeguards Agreement, multiple IAEA Board of Governors Resolutions, and multiple United Nations Security Council Resolutions were and are the problem, the vice president ignores history and distorts the present.

The United States was not isolated on Iran when the Obama administration took office. U.S. diplomacy had succeeded in passing, with Russian, Chinese, and European support, four United Nations Security Council Resolutions from 2006-2008, tightening the web of sanctions on Iran. Moreover, the Bush administration began innovative use of financial sanctions in cooperation with U.S. allies -- a policy the Obama administration has succeeded in continuing and expanding. Russia and China have always favored an incremental approach, so it is to be expected that over time, sanctions efforts would grow more forceful and the Obama administration has succeeded in making them so.

More disturbing is the isolation from reality implied by the vice president's remarks. Touting the success of the administration's Iran policy, he went on to say, "today it is starkly, starkly different." Well, yes, the situation is starkly different. In 2009, Iran had about 4,000 centrifuges enriching uranium; today, its production capacity is more than double that. Iran's declared stocks of low enriched uranium are five times what they they were in 2009. Two years ago, Iran began enriching to the much higher level of 20 percent, and can do so in a new, deep, underground facility near Qom.

Despite sanctions, Iran's nuclear program is expanding and accelerating. Iran is to blame for that, not the United States, but whatever can be said for the administration's policy on Iran, it is not halting the nuclear program.

The announcement that North Korea has agreed to halt nuclear and missile tests and to freeze uranium enrichment at Yongbyon is welcome news, but it is far from a solution to the entire nuclear problem. Even if the agreement holds, and so many have failed, it apparently ignores a likely covert North Korean uranium enrichment program.

Pyongyang expelled U.S. observers working at the Yongbyon nuclear site in March 2009, and two months later the North's second nuclear test shook the Korean Peninsula. By November 2010, i.e. within about 20 months, North Korea built and revealed to former Los Alamos National Laboratory director Sigfried Hecker a modern uranium enrichment plant at Yongbyon, with perhaps as many as 2,000 centrifuges. This effectively ended years of debate within U.S. policy circles as to whether or not North Korea had been cheating on an earlier commitment not to enrich uranium.

It is virtually inconceivable that North Korea could have constructed such a facility so quickly without transferring equipment or drawing upon experience from another uranium enrichment plant built elsewhere. But such a facility has never been disclosed, and the latest agreement apparently does nothing to reveal or halt it. Thus, while perhaps a constructive step, absent further disclosures and actions, there is no reason to believe that the latest agreement has halted North Korea's nuclear weapons production program.

The Obama administration says it won't pay North Korea for the same horse twice. That is sound policy. This nag isn't worth paying much for even once.

What does last Friday's International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) report on Iran's nuclear program tell us?  The inescapable conclusion is:  international efforts to prevent Tehran from drawing closer to a nuclear weapons capability are failing.  Iran has shortened considerably the distance it must travel to construct a nuclear weapon, and the pace of its program is accelerating.

First, the facts according to the IAEA:  Iran continues to build both stocks of low-enriched uranium, and new production capacity.  Moreover, Iran is producing uranium enriched to about 3.5 percent, which it has been doing since 2006, and to almost 20 percent, which it has done for about a year.  Stocks of the former stand at almost six tons; and of the latter, at about 220 lbs. (after subtracting a small amount reportedly fabricated into research reactor fuel), both in the form of UF₆.  Monthly outputs of both enrichment levels are at all time highs, and Iranian engineers are apparently adding new production capacity to Natanz and the newer deep underground facility at Fordow. 

If further enriched to weapons grade, depending on the amount of processing waste, the material Iran now has on hand could be enough for several nuclear weapons.  The move to enrichment at almost 20 percent U-235 is particularly troubling.  Graham Allison has likened it to moving from the 30 to the 10-yard line in a football game-and, of course, the 10-yard line is inside what gridiron experts call the red zone, because it is so hard to prevent a team from scoring once there.  Should Iran decide to break out or sneak out of its treaty obligations and build a nuclear weapon, the timelines would be shortened accordingly.  Under present trends, by the end of the year, Iran will amass 5-600 lbs. of material enriched to almost 20 percent -- more than enough for a nuclear weapon if further enriched to weapons grade.  Estimates of how long it would take Iran to do so are hotly contested, but range from 2-6 months (NPEC  and ISIS).   

The IAEA also reported that its latest efforts to resolve issues with Iran, including two recent trips to Tehran, met with no joy.  Iran continued to refuse inspectors access to Parchin, a military complex suspected of nuclear activities.  The Agency and Iranian officials failed to reach agreement on procedures to resolve outstanding discrepancies and issues that raise the possibility of "a military dimension" to Iran's nuclear programs.  Iranian negotiators simply dismissed the Agency's detailed November 2011 report on indicators of a nuclear explosive program, including specific allegations regarding program management, procurement activities, material acquisition, components for an explosive device, detonator development, experiments, tests, and modeling, and work to integrate a device into a missile delivery vehicle, including on fuzing, arming, and firing.  In short, the inspectors concluded that their efforts to seek cooperation from Iran had failed.

If these are the facts, what then are their implications? 

First, Iran's attempts to cloak its nuclear program in the mantle of peaceful activities are daily growing more threadbare.  Abraded by facts and logic, large holes are opening in Iran's case that it is merely pursuing legitimate programs.  Tehran is willing to suffer potentially devastating economic sanctions and to risk a military confrontation for an enrichment program of marginal economic value and that violates repeated United Nations Security Council resolutions.  Iran contends that it needs to enrich to 3.5 percent to fuel the Bushehr power reactor and to almost 20 percent to fuel the Tehran Research Reactor, which produces medical isotopes.  However, alternative sources of fuel are available for both reactors.  Russia has pledged a ten year supply of fuel for Bushehr and in 2009 negotiators reached what they thought was a deal to fuel the research reactor, only to have it scuttled in Tehran.  Iran also contends that it is enriching uranium to fuel future planned-but un-built-power reactors; risible this, no one buys  gasoline before buying a car, or coal for a power plant before constructing it.  Furthermore, Iran's stock of 20 percent enriched uranium is growing disproportionate to any plausible peaceful purpose; it is already about equal to the amount of research reactor fuel Iran consumed over the past two decades. 

Second, Tehran's response to stepped-up sanctions and other pressure has been to accelerate the pace of its nuclear activities.  Sanctions may have cut Iran's GDP, unleashed inflation, and created friction on trade with Iran, but they are failing miserably at slowing uranium enrichment. 

Third, Tehran's stonewalling of the latest IAEA efforts to resolve outstanding issues offers little reason to believe that a negotiated solution may be possible.  Some contend that Western negotiators merely need to cut through confusion, internal Iranian divisions, or suspicions in Tehran but, repeated attempts to negotiate by very different diplomats and governments, extending back nearly a decade, have done little or nothing to halt Iran's steady progress toward the ability to construct a nuclear weapon.  

Iran's nuclear program presents an immense challenge with no obvious solution.  Iranian intentions-if not their progress on uranium enrichment-remain unclear to the West.  The only certainties are that the problem will grow a great deal more difficult and dangerous should Tehran obtain a nuclear weapon, and it is making steady progress toward that point.

Over the past five years, five scientists and engineers associated with Iran's nuclear program have died violent deaths, and one survived a bombing attack. The latest incident took place last week. While news reports of such attacks are incomplete, and perhaps inaccurate, there is little doubt that someone has mounted an assassination campaign against Tehran's nuclear scientific community. I've reviewed the history of attacks on scientists involved in nuclear programs, detailed reasons why a state might undertake such a campaign, and assessed the odds of its success in the current issue of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists.

Very likely, an existential imperative is driving the attempts to kill Iranian nuclear scientists; a group or a state feels that its very existence is threatened by the Iranian nuclear program, and is willing to undertake significant risks for a payoff that may well be quite limited, even by its own lights. Delaying a nuclear weapons program might be possible through such attacks, but stopping one is not. It is difficult to imagine a state with a scientific and industrial base large enough to sustain a nuclear weapons program, but so small that killing a few individuals would cripple the effort. Moreover, without detailed and intimate knowledge of such a program (which is very hard to come by and might be put to better use in other ways), it is impossible to know whom to target.

On the other side of the ledger, the assassination campaign has reportedly already increased Iran's operational security, may well limit visibility into Iran's illicit nuclear activities, and could provoke retaliation. Moreover, the head of Iran's nuclear program, himself a target of an attack, bitterly demanded that the International Atomic Energy Agency deny complicity in the violence in a speech to the Agency's General Conference-not auspicious for access by international inspectors.

Given the limited probable payoffs and the significant likely costs, an assassination campaign can only be interpreted as an act of desperation, driven by an Iranian nuclear program that has now operated for years in violation of International Atomic Energy Agency Board of Governors and United Nations Security Council resolutions. Acts of desperation are often an ominous sign that things will soon get worse.

In a column again lamenting the benighted state of the United States, Thomas Friedman criticizes China's treatment of Nobel laureate Liu Xiaobo. Liu is a political prisoner serving an 11-year sentence for subverting state power. Of course, just a bit more than a year ago, Friedman was comparing the U.S. government with China's -- unfavorably!

On Sept. 8, 2009 he wrote, "[I]t is hard not to draw the following conclusion: There is only one thing worse than one-party autocracy, and that is one party democracy, which is what we have in America today. One party autocracy certainly has its drawbacks. But when it is led by a reasonably enlightened group of people, as China is today, it can also have great advantages."

Friedman went on to note approvingly Beijing's ability to command orderly entry into the clean technology industry, versus the United States' reliance on chaotic markets.

Of course, Milton Friedman understood, but Thomas Friedman apparently does not, that over the long haul, capitalism and freedom work together, and that they are not separable from each other. The Beijing government's powers to throw a human rights activist in jail and to command massive economic projects are of a piece. They are antithetical to representative democracy and rule of law.

It is understandable that in these tough times people will question how well our system is working, but some perspective is necessary. The past 100 years of U.S. economic performance are unmatched in human history. The engine of the U.S. economy powered enormous improvements in the health, welfare, and living standards of hundreds of millions of people. The political and economic freedoms guaranteed by our system of government made such prosperity, innovation, and achievement possible.

Twenty-five years ago, the passing intellectual fancy was the United States' decline relative to another rising Asian power, Japan, because of Tokyo's ability to plan economic growth and manage private sector investment. Such predictions look silly today.

Warren Buffett, who has the true perspective of a long term investor, has observed, "In the 20th Century, the United States endured two world wars and other traumatic and expensive military conflicts; the Depression; a dozen or so recessions and financial panics; oil shocks; a flu epidemic; and the resignation of a disgraced president. Yet the Dow rose from 66 to 11,497."

As we consider what is next for the United States, rather than turning to the coercive power of centralized planning, as Thomas Friedman seems to consider, we should affirm our confidence in the values that have brought us so far -- capitalism and freedom -- as Milton Friedman knew. Nobody ever made money for long by selling America or American values short.

Yesterday, an agreement -- originally negotiated under the Bush administration -- allowing for civil nuclear cooperation between the United States and Russia passed its final milestone before taking effect.  Such agreements are required under section 123 of the Atomic Energy Act before any significant cooperation involving nuclear technology may take place, and are already in force with some 50 other nations and entities.  Given that the United States and Russia have two of the largest nuclear industries in the world, the absence of such an agreement was an anomaly. 

The agreement does not require any specific actions.  Rather it serves as a framework that will enable cooperation on projects established under later deals.  A recently concluded joint study by Harvard's Managing the Atom Project and Russia's Kurchatov Institute (in which I participated), concluded that promising areas for future work include:  commercial cooperation on new reactor designs, including factory-built reactors with high levels of inherent safety, security, and proliferation-resistance; establishing "cradle-to-grave" fuel services to address waste disposition and nuclear weapons proliferation issues associated with atomic energy; and, use by U.S. firms of Russia's more extensive base of experimental facilities.  None of these activities are guaranteed by the "123 Agreement," but none are possible without it.

In the long run, the "123 Agreement" with Russia may prove to be even more significant than the far more controversial New START Treaty.  It focuses on future areas of cooperation, rather than on Cold War nuclear arsenals, which both nations were reducing with or without an agreement.  It can facilitate new approaches to energy production that will make nuclear power safer, more secure, and less susceptible to abuse by would-be nuclear weapons proliferators.  Finally, it is one of the few points of genuine intersection between the U.S. and Russian economies. 

Some have criticized the deal because of Russia's nuclear proliferation track record.  There is no doubt that Russia's proliferation record has not been good, but it has improved in recent years, perhaps in part because of the far larger opportunities offered by legitimate nuclear commerce that could otherwise be put at risk.  Indeed, the "123 Agreement" actually creates more leverage to stem proliferation, because valuable cooperation could be cut off, whereas prior to the Agreement, it simply was not possible. 

As leading nuclear states, Russia and the United States should be working together to prevent nuclear weapons proliferation, while addressing the world's energy needs.  The new "123 Agreement" will help to advance these vital and common interests.

North Korea's revelations of a long-suspected illicit uranium enrichment program, construction of a new, larger nuclear reactor, and its unprovoked artillery attack on South Korean territory raise the stakes in an already dangerous situation. It is time to think strategically, not tactically, and for resolve, not appeasement.

North Korea's benighted regime is corrupt, brutal, incompetent, and violently aggressive. The scale of its crimes against the Korean people is evident even from outer space at night as a black armband of poverty across the Peninsula, surrounded by the bright lights of prosperity burning from China and South Korea. Very likely over a million people in the North starved to death during the 1990s due to Pyongyang's twin policies of juche (self-reliance), and meeting military needs first. Political prisoners are held in camps scattered throughout the North, but in a very real sense, nearly all of its citizens are prisoners of the state.

The North Korean regime could not exist without support from China. Beijing provides trade, aid, and political sustenance sufficient to keep the failed state from complete collapse. It does so to avoid a flood of refugees or political instability which might spread to China. Moreover, this tragic situation is made dangerous by North Korea's behavior overseas.

In the 1980s, North Korean agents committed acts of terrorism, including bombing an airliner and attempting to assassinate the South Korean president during a state visit to Burma.  North Korea kidnapped dozens of Japanese and South Korean citizens to exploit them for intelligence purposes. Pyongyang is the leading exporter of ballistic missiles to dangerous regimes, most likely was the source of some of the material shipped to Libya's nuclear program, and helped Syria to build a covert plutonium production reactor, which could have been used to produce nuclear weapons, had it not been destroyed by Israeli jets in September 2007. Twice recently, North Korea has attacked the South with military force.  These actions are inconsistent with international peace and security.

The newly unveiled uranium enrichment program is a particularly dangerous development. It gives the North another path to make fissile material for nuclear weapons-and might provide a further revenue source from illicit sales. It is very unlikely that this program grew to its present size-reportedly 2,000 centrifuges in a "stunning" modern facility-in the months between the departure of U.S. and international inspectors in the spring of 2009 and now. A more plausible explanation is that the newly-revealed facility is the fruit of a long-suspected program, undertaken in violation of numerous international agreements.

An early temptation will be to view the situation tactically-to ask what can be done to calm the crisis? This is a sensible impulse; preventing war is a worthy goal. Strategic considerations, however, are also important. Consistent with its paramount interests in avoiding political instability and refugee flows, China will be eager to calm the situation. The United States and its allies must take the case to Beijing that long term stability on the Peninsula can only be guaranteed by truly ending the Korean War. Eventually -- like all dynasties -- Kim's will end. The choice for Beijing is thus whether it will continue heroic measures to maintain a terminal patient, thereby extending the North Korean people's misery and threats to international security, or alternatively plan for and work toward a peaceful, stable, democratic, and reunited Korean Peninsula. Beijing's apparent acquiescence to dynastic succession in North Korea was a mistake. In light of recent developments, China has the opportunity to correct that mistake, and Washington has stronger arguments to persuade Beijing to do so.

Rules must be binding. Violations must be punished. Words must mean something. The world must stand together to prevent the spread of [nuclear] weapons.

-President Obama, Prague, April 5, 2009

Iran has not provided the necessary cooperation to permit the Agency to confirm that all nuclear material in Iran is in peaceful activities. Iran is not implementing the requirements contained in the relevant resolutions of the Board of Governors and the Security Council, including implementation of the Additional Protocol, which are essential to building confidence in the exclusively peaceful purpose of its nuclear program.

-International Atomic Energy Agency, September 6, 2010

The latest International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) report on Iran's nuclear program is circulating in Vienna among governments, but has not yet been released officially. Media reports have highlighted Iran's conflict with inspectors, but other developments are more troubling. While couched in the calm tones of international civil servants, the report's message is unmistakable: Iran continues its steady march towards nuclear weapon capabilities, and no recent progress has been made in halting it. 

Since the current U.S. administration took office, extending its hand to the leaders in Tehran, Iran has: continued to violate a series of U.N. Security Council Resolutions, now numbering six; increased its declared capacity to enrich uranium by about one-third -- despite U.N. Security Council Resolutions requiring that it halt enrichment; nearly tripled its stocks of low-enriched uranium; begun production of small quantities of uranium enriched to 20 percent, versus earlier production at 3.5 percent; revealed a secret, underground enrichment facility near Qom, while announcing plans for several more; and continued to chip away at the IAEA's ability to monitor nuclear developments. 

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