Iran’s Nuclear Steps Quicken, Diplomats Say VIENNA – With efforts to halt its nuclear program at an impasse, Iran is moving faster than expected and is just days from making the first steps toward enriching uranium, said diplomats who have been briefed on the program. If engineers encounter no major technical problems, Iran could manufacture enough highly enriched uranium to build a bomb within three years, much more quickly than the common estimate of five to 10 years, the diplomats said…. According to one non-Western official who closely follows Iran’s progress, engineers at a pilot plant in Natanz are likely to start crucial testing in the next couple of days to ensure that the centrifuges and the pipes connecting them are properly vacuum sealed. They are likely to begin feeding uranium hexafluoride gas into a series of 164 connected centrifuges within about two weeks, the official said. Diplomats and experts say Iran has forgone usual testing periods for individual centrifuges and small series of linked centrifuges, instead apparently trying to put together as many as possible, as quickly as possible. They said Iran also was likely to begin assembling more centrifuges in mid-April to put together additional cascades of linked centrifuges. The pilot plant can hold up to six cascades of 164 centrifuges each. It could take many months to complete that work, the diplomats said. The U.S. and its British, French and German allies believe Iran intends to build nuclear weapons, and must be stopped before learning how to enrich uranium. They view the ability to operate a series of centrifuges as a technological tipping point. “If you can do one centrifuge, you can do 164,” said Emyr Jones Parry, British envoy to the U.N. “If you can do 164, you probably can do many more. That means you have the potential to do full-scale enrichment. If you can do enrichment up to 7%, you can do 80%. If you can do 80%, you can produce a bomb”…. The three-year time frame for Iran to produce a bomb cited by diplomats is the same as an estimate by former nuclear weapons inspector David Albright. In a paper that will be released Monday by the Institute for Science and International Security, which Albright founded, he and a colleague give a detailed description of how, under a best-case scenario, Iran would be able to manufacture enough highly enriched uranium for a crude nuclear device in three years. Albright cautioned, however, that Iran faces many technical hurdles it might find difficult to overcome…. The European Union and the Americans want to exert vigorous pressure on Iran. They insist on a reinstatement of a total moratorium on uranium enrichment that Iran had voluntarily put in place in late 2004 while negotiating with the EU. The U.S. and EU are willing to use a U.N. procedure that gives Security Council resolutions the force of law, and to impose sanctions. The Russians and the Chinese, mindful of the buildup to the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq three years ago, fear that taking too hard a line would lead to an escalation of tensions that could result in military action against Iran. They believe that sanctions and other measures might push Iran to abandon the nonproliferation treaty, which keeps international inspectors in the country. Russia and China would be willing to allow Iran to retain a small cascade of centrifuges for research purposes…. “We’re getting to the point where this fundamental difference between the U.S. and EU position and that of the Russians is being overtaken by Iran’s … putting new facts on the ground,” said Mark Fitzpatrick, a nuclear nonproliferation expert at the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London, who previously worked for the U.S. State Department on nuclear issues. “Iran is closer and closer to enrichment, so the effort to deny them the capability is rapidly failing.”
Let’s hope our intelligence on the status of Iran’s nuclear program is better than we had on Saddam’s in 1991. From a Worldwide Standard post, January 13, 2006: Saddam Came Close to Having a Nuke in ’91; Today, Iran Follows Saddam’s Nuclear Procurement Playbook It’s easy to forget that the resolution authorizing force to kick Saddam out of Kuwait barely passed Congress. It’s easy to forget that Iraq had passed frequent International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) inspections designed to ensure its compliance with the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) or that its Manhattan Project-sized nuclear program went undetected by US intelligence. It’s also easy to forget just how skilled Saddam became at deception post-Osirak. Some history — Iraq ratified the NPT in 1969. Twelve year later, Israel bombed the Osirak nuclear reactor near Baghdad. According to the June 22, 1981 Newsweek,
[t]he Osirak reactor was theoretically only for research purposes-but Iraq twice refused a French offer to supply it with low-enriched uranium, insisting instead on weapons-grade, 93 per cent enriched fuel. Iraq was also operating an Italian-built “hot cell” lab for extracting plutonium, and had arranged to buy large quantities of uranium from Brazil, Portugal and Niger-all without any investment in a nuclear-energy program.
In his 2002 book, The Threatening Storm, Clinton NSC official Kenneth Pollack wrote that Osirak “was the key to Saddam’s nuclear weapons program and … was due to go online within a matter of weeks.” The bombing set Iraq’s “nuclear bomb program back by several years,” but it also “taught the Iraqis an important lesson. Thereafter, Saddam ordered a redoubling of the Iraqi program…camouflaged against detection.” (Pollack would subsequently note this regarding Saddam’s nuclear program.) After the Osirak attack, Iraq would pursue a secret nuclear weapons program that had gone undetected by Western intelligence and the IAEA until after the 1991 Gulf War. As former U.N. inspector David Kay wrote in a 1995 Washington Quarterly piece, Iraq would pursue this program while maintaining “its status as a full member” of the NPT because it was “the desire of the military and security services not to attract any undue attention to Iraq’s developing nuclear program that would complicate procurement and development efforts.” The fact that Hussein was able to conceal his nuclear program was even more remarkable given that: 1) as the Washington Post noted in October 1991, the “scope and sophistication” of its program “resembled the Manhattan Project, the American effort that produced the first atomic bomb”; and 2) Iraq had passed regular inspections by the International Atomic Energy Agency. On August 11, 1991, the Post reported that:
International inspectors…unearthed one of the most important-and disturbing-finds of the post-Cold War era: a huge assembly line for the covert manufacture of equipment to make an Iraqi bomb. The location of the sophisticated, secret factory for manufacturing hundreds of uranium gas centrifuges was unknown to any foreign intelligence agency despite intense scrutiny and untouched by five weeks of severe aerial bombardment during the Gulf War that supposedly eviscerated the Iraqi nuclear project. As such, it is a monument to the world’s ignorance about what a determined bomb-builder such as Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein can do. The factory was a key component in Iraq’s elaborate highly redundant and largely secret network of physics, chemistry and metallurgical laboratories, industrial mines, metalworking factories, electrical power generators, nuclear research reactors and radioactive waste processing sites-all aimed at swiftly putting a nuclear weapon in the hands of one of the world’s most ruthless leaders.
The Post also reported:
Despite repeated warnings and Saddam’s own public statements, Western experts consistently underestimated Iraq’s scientific and technical capabilities. Inspection officials now believe Iraq was only 12 to 18 months from producing its first bomb, not five to 10 years as previously thought.
Kay wrote that Iraq hid its program by keeping it “heavily compartmentalized” and employing a variety of deception techniques. For example, Iraq created a network of front companies to import nuclear-related materials “in quantities that were below the size that triggered controls.” Equipment was imported ostensibly for civilian purposes but was diverted to the nuclear program as well. (see here for UNMOVIC May 2003 report on Iraq’s attempt to “conceal the extent of its import activities and to preserve its importing networks” for missiles, chems & bios) The Iraqis, Kay continued, had an “accurate understanding of the limitations of U.S. technical collection systems…” and exploited these vulnerabilities through various methods, including:
construction of buildings within buildings… hiding power and water feeds to mislead as to facility use… diminishing value of a facility by apparent low security and lack of defenses… moving critical pieces of equipment at night….
Apparently, Iran has taken a page out of Saddam’s nuclear weapons procurement book.
