Nuclear Weapons Production in Iran
Posted Dec. 2, 2003
By Kenneth R. Timmerman
Iran has been diverting equipment from its nuclear power plants to its weapons program.
Get ready for another high-profile confrontation with Europe over a rogue state bent on developing weapons of mass destruction. As with Iraq, U.N. arms inspectors have made astonishing finds: undisclosed facilities producing nuclear-weapons material, secret supplier agreements to import banned equipment and officials who have engaged in a systematic effort at deception. This time, with Iran, France and its European partners demonstrated more skill in managing the rhythm of events to prevent escalation into crisis. But, despite their efforts, the crisis emerged on Nov. 20 when the Board of Governors of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) met in Vienna to debate what to do about dramatic new revelations in Iran and that country's clandestine efforts to acquire the bomb.
Just two days before the fateful meeting - which failed to find Iran in "material breach" of its obligations as a signatory of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) - Secretary of State Colin Powell met with European foreign ministers in Brussels but manifestly failed to win their support for more vigorous action on Iran. Powell warned that the European-backed resolution on Iran being massaged by the IAEA board was inadequate because it lacked "trigger mechanisms in the case of further Iranian intransigence or difficulty." State Department spokesman Richard Boucher added that the United States believes "we need to verify the promises and the information that Iran has put forward" and not just continue with business as usual.
Behind the diplomatic language lurked dramatic new events that could catapult Iran from a rogue state with nuclear aspirations to an imminent threat to the United States and its allies in the Middle East. Two things are key to preventing Iran from becoming a nuclear-weapon state, U.S. officials tell Insight: closing down existing but previously undisclosed nuclear plants in Iran and preventing Iran from gaining access to key materials and technologies that Europe and others continue to provide. Neither seems about to occur without vigorous U.S. action.
The emerging crisis with Iran began earlier this year when IAEA inspectors discovered two previously undeclared uranium-enrichment plants under construction at Natanz, a mountain town just north of Isfahan. A subsequent inspection turned up traces of highly enriched uranium (HEU), a sure sign of a clandestine nuclear-weapons program. Elsewhere, IAEA inspectors discovered facilities the Iranians had tried to keep secret, where they admitted they were converting uranium ore so it could be enriched, and where they had extracted plutonium from spent fuel. Pressed by the IAEA, Iran also admitted that it was building a heavy-water production plant and a separate research reactor in Arak that could fabricate weapons-grade fuel. The IAEA suddenly realized that for 18 years Iran had been submitting false declarations about its nuclear activities.
The Natanz site is particularly worrisome because underground production facilities were being prepared to house some 50,000 uranium-enrichment centrifuges which Iran has begun to manufacture locally. Once it goes operational, the Natanz plant could produce enough HEU for an entire arsenal of nuclear weapons within a year.
To head off a crisis, the French, British and German foreign ministers traveled to Tehran for two days of talks in late October and claimed that Iran had pledged to "suspend" its clandestine nuclear programs, including the Natanz enrichment plant. In exchange, Europe agreed to continue trading with Iran [see sidebar] and offered to counter U.S. efforts to haul Iran before the U.N. Security Council for international sanctions. Iran's promises to behave, and Europe's willingness to believe it, left U.S. officials speechless.
Iran has "lied repeatedly" to the IAEA, Assistant Secretary of State for Arms Control Steve Rademaker told an audience of U.S. nuclear-weapons experts at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory on Nov. 14. For years Iran simply claimed that it never had conducted a program to enrich uranium or to reprocess spent fuel to extract plutonium. When U.N. inspectors found evidence that it had done both, Iran's leaders simply changed their story and "lied again," he said.
Despite having discovered previously undeclared facilities suspected of carrying out weapons-related work, IAEA Director General Mohamed ElBaradei concluded in a confidential report on Nov. 10 that the watchdog agency had found "no evidence that the previously undeclared nuclear material and activities . . . were related to a nuclear-weapons program." That conclusion, Rademaker noted acidly, was "simply impossible to believe" and was "not supported by the IAEA's own report."
The United States believes that the "massive and covert Iranian effort" to develop a range of nuclear technologies - from uranium mines to milling plants to a heavy-water plant to a centrifuge-enrichment "cascade" to plutonium reprocessing - "makes sense only as part of a nuclear-weapons program," Rademaker added.
According to the IAEA report, the Iranians showed extraordinary contempt for the U.N. inspectors, apparently in the belief they would not be caught in their lies. When initially challenged in February, they claimed that their entire uranium-enrichment program was indigenous and used no foreign supplies. But when the inspectors found traces of HEU on centrifuge parts, the Iranians switched gears and said the parts were imported and must have been contaminated by the suppliers. Pressed to identify those suppliers, the Iranians replied that they had bought the equipment from "brokers."
Rademaker asks, "Is it plausible that Iran bought centrifuge components and didn't know where they bought them?"
Behind the scenes, the United States has been pressing members of the IAEA Board of Governors to "declare that Iran is not in compliance" with the NPT, officials said. The U.S. goal is to bring Iran before the U.N. Security Council, which then would have to debate whether to take punitive measures against Tehran. The unusual public criticism suggests that the administration is preparing for another high-profile standoff at the United Nations. But unlike the diplomatic confrontation over Iraq, this time it appears likely that Britain will not join the United States in urging vigorous international action against Iran.
"How many times has [British Foreign Minister] Jack Straw gone to Tehran recently?" one administration official told Insight. "We get the sense that the British feel they need to show their independence from us on this one." In fact, Straw accompanied his French and German counterparts to Tehran in October. At the conclusion of those talks the French foreign minister, Dominique de Villepin, hailed Iran's decision to "come clean" on its previous nuclear-research programs and promised that Europe would assist Iran to acquire "peaceful" nuclear technologies in exchange.
That was the original bargain on which the 1968 nuclear treaty was based, but cheaters such as Iran, Iraq and North Korea have shown that it is a dangerously flawed arrangement. "Under the NPT's basic trade-off, Iran can acquire all the capabilities it needs to produce nuclear weapons materials and then later withdraw from the treaty and use the material in weapons," Rademaker said. "This risk will not be cured by Iran's acceptance of more-rigorous inspections by the IAEA."
A former chief U.N. arms inspector, Swedish ambassador Rolf Ekeus, urged the United States and other supplier nations to rethink the terms of the NPT. In comments at a Livermore conference to commemorate the 50th anniversary of President Dwight D. Eisenhower's "Atoms for Peace" program, Ekeus said there was little justification to allow developing countries such as Iran to acquire enrichment technologies or to gain access to the nuclear-fuel cycle. As a condition for providing nuclear-power reactors, he said, supplier nations instead should guarantee supplies of reactor fuel and take back all nuclear waste, he said.
"The recent disclosures by Iran about its nuclear program clearly show that, in the past, Iran had concealed many aspects of its nuclear activities, with resultant breaches of its obligations to comply with the provisions of the Safeguards Agreement," IAEA Director General ElBaradei concluded in his report, which Insight has obtained. Nevertheless, he observed, "To date, there is no evidence that the previously undeclared nuclear material and activities ... were related to a nuclear-weapons program."
Because Iran's nuclear facilities are buried and dispersed, former U.N. arms inspector David Albright estimates, they cannot readily be taken out through aerial bombing.
Kenneth R. Timmerman is a senior writer for Insight. His latest book, Preachers of Hate: Islam and the War on America, has just been published by Crown Forum.
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