Assessing Iran's nuclear programme

Survival

Volumn 48, Issue 3, 2006, Pages 5-26

  Fitzpatrick, Mark ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 33746620594     PISSN: 00396338     EISSN: 14682699     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/00396330600905494     Document Type: Article

References (59)

1. Joschka Fisher, 'The Case for Bargaining with Iran', Washington Post, 29 May 2006.
2. French Foreign Minister Philippe Douste-Blazy, for example, recently said 'no civil nuclear programme can explain the Iranian nuclear programme - it is a clandestine military nuclear programme'. BBC News, 16 February 2006, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/4718838.stm.
3. Naturally occurring uranium is made up almost entirely of two isotopes, almost entirely of two isotopes, U-238 (99.3%) and U-235 (0.7%). Of these only U-235 is fissile, and its concentration must be increased to 3-5% for use in nuclear reactors, or to upwards of 90% for nuclear weapons. The isotopes are chemically identical but differ in mass by about 1% and can be separated in high-speed centrifuges. The basic module for an enrichment facility is a series of individual centrifuges, or 'cascade', where uranium hexaflouride gas is successively enriched in each of several stages.
4. See, for example, Joseph Cirincione, 'Controlling Iran's Nuclear Program', Issues in Science and Technology, Spring 2006, p. 80.
5. Thomas W. Wood, Matthew D. Milazzo, Barbara A. Reichmuth and Jeff Bidell, 'The Economics of Energy Independence for Iran', Global Security, March 2006, http://pnwcgs.pnl.gov/Newsletter/pdf_versions/ Newsletter2006_Spring.pdf. The authors conclude that Iran's nuclear programme, as structured, will not achieve energy independence and that investments in enrichment and other front-end fuel-cycle facilities may delay energy independence by diverting capital and other resources from projects that would address pressing energy-sector problems.
6. David Albright and Corey Hinderstein, 'The Centrifuge Connection', Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, vol. 60, no. 2, March-April 2004, pp. 61-2.
7. Geoffrey Odlum, 'Iran's Nuclear Program: Indicators of Intent', paper presented at 17-18 February 2006 seminar in Athens, Greece, sponsored by University of California's Institute of Global Conflict and Cooperation, p. 6.
8. IAEA, 'Implementation of the NPT Safeguards Agreement in the Islamic Republic of Iran', GOV/2004/83, 15 November 2004, pp. 15-16.
9. IAEA, 'Implementation of the NPT Safeguards Agreement in the Islamic Republic of Iran, GOV/2003/75, 10 November 2003, p. 10.
10. IAEA, 'Implementation of the NPT Safeguards Agreement in the Islamic Republic of Iran', GOV/2005/67, 2 September 2005, pp. 6-7.
11. The IAEA's own reports do not name the Kimia Madan Company, but Iran did so itself in explanations it asked the agency to make public: IAEA, INFCIRC/657, 'Communication Dated 12 September 2005 from the Permanent Mission of the Islamic Republic of Iran to the Agency', 15 September 2005, p. 21.
12. Paul Kerr, 'IAEA: More Questions on Iran Nuclear Program', Arms Control Today, vol. 35, no. 6, July-August 2005.
13. IAEA, 'Implementation of the NPT Safeguards Agreement in the Islamic Republic of Iran', GOV/2004/11, 24 February 2004, p. 5.
14. Ibid., p. 7.
15. IAEA, 'Implementation of the NPT Safeguards Agreement in the Islamic Republic of Iran', GOV/2004/34, 1 June 2004, p. 5.
16. IAEA, 'Implementation of the NPT Safeguards Agreement in the Islamic Republic of Iran', GOV/2006/38, 8 June 2006, p. 3.
17. IAEA, 'Implementation of the NPT Safeguards Agreement in the Islamic Republic of Iran', GOV/2006/15, 27 February 2006, p. 5.
18. Steve Coll, Ghost Wars (New York: Penguin, 2004), p. 221.
19. Carla Anne Robbins, 'As Evidence Grows of Iran's Program, US Hits Quandary', Wall Street Journal, 18 March 2005
20. Michael Adler, 'US Briefs on Alleged Iranian Nuclear Warhead Work', Agence France Presse, 10 October 2005
21. William J. Broad and David E. Sanger, 'Relying on Computer, U.S. Seeks to Prove Iran's Nuclear Aims', New York Times, 13 November 2005
22. Dafna Linzer, 'Strong Leads and Dead Ends in Nuclear Case against Iran', Washington Post, 8 February 2006.
23. Dafna Linzer, online discussion, 8 February 2006 http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/discussion/2006/02/07/ DI2006020700842.html.
24. IAEA, GOV/2005/67, p. 10.
25. Paul Kerr, 'Questions Surround Iran's Nuclear Program', Arms Control Today, vol. 36, no. 2, March 2006.
26. Linzer, 'Strong Leads and Dead Ends'.
27. IAEA, GOV/2006/15, p. 8.
28. Linzer, 'Strong Leads and Dead Ends'.
29. IAEA, GOV/2006/15, p. 8
30. IAEA, GOV/2006/27, p. 6.
31. Dafna Linzer, 'Iran Is Judged 10 Years from Nuclear Bomb', Washington Post, 2 August 2005.
32. Paul Kerr, 'Iran Nuclear Abilities Limited', Arms Control Today, vol. 37, no. 5, September 2005.
33. Graham Allison, 'How Good is American Intelligence on Iran's Bomb?', YaleGlobal, 13 June 2006, http://yaleglobal.yale.edu/ display.article?id=7553.
34. The case of North Korea is not strictly comparable in that, under the terms of the 1994 Agreed Framework with the United States, the IAEA was restricted to monitoring the facilities frozen under the protocol. Even before 1994, however, North Korea refused access to facilities not strictly spelled out in its safeguards agreement.
35. IAEA, INFCIRC/657, p. 10.
36. Hassan Rohani, 'Beyond the Challenges Facing Iran and the IAEA Concerning the Nuclear Dossier', Rahbord, 30 September 2005, pp. 7-38 (in Persian), translated by FBIS (FBIS-IAP20060113336001), http://www.armscontrolwonk.com/file_download/30.
37. Chen Zane, 'Nuclear Decision-Making in Iran: A Rare Glimpse', Middle East Brief, no. 5, May 2006, http://www.brandeis.edu/centers/crown/ publications/Mid%20East%20Brief/Brief%205%20May%202006.pdf.
38. Javad Zarif, 'We Do Not Have a Nuclear Weapons Program', New York Times, 6 April 2006.
39. Karl Vick, 'Iran's Gray Area on Nuclear Arms; Despite Official Assertions that Islam Requires a Ban, Some Clerics See Justification', Washington Post, 21 June 2006.
40. Jean du Preez and Insook Kim, 'Mohamed ElBaradei Calls for a New Global Security Landscape', Center for Nonproliferation Studies, 2 June 2006, http://cns.miis.edu/cns/media/pr060531.htm.
41. IAEA Board of Governors, Implementation of the NPT Safeguards Agreement in the Islamic Republic of Iran - Resolution adopted on 24 September 2005, http://www.iaea.org/Publications/Documents/Board/2005/ gov2005-77.pdf.
42. John Chipman, remarks upon press launch of Iran's Strategic Weapons Programmes, 6 September 2005, http://www.iiss.org/publications/ strategic-dossiers/irans-strategic-weapons-programmes.
43. Most recently, US Director of National Intelligence John Negroponte repeated the estimate in a 2 June 2006 interview with the BBC.
44. Jonathan S. Landay and Warren P. Strobel, 'Iran Closer to Producing Nuclear Weapons Fuel, U.S. Officials Worry', Knight Ridder Newspapers/ San Jose Mercury News, 23 March 2006.
45. David Albright and Corey Hinderstein, 'The Clock Is Ticking, But How Fast?', Institute for Science and International Security, 27 March 2006, http://www.isis-online.org/publications/iran/clockticking.pdf.
46. Bruno Tertrais, 'Iran: La Bombe fin 2008?', http://www.frstrategie.org/ barreCompetences/prolifDissuasionDefenses/20060315.pdf.
47. See also Jean-Dominique Merchet: 'Téhéran bientôt prêt à dégainer' (Teheran prepared to unsheathe its weapon soon), Liberation, 18 April 2006. Tertrais also reminds readers that Iran would have a second weapons option by extracting plutonium from the light-water reactors at Bushehr. He notes that although the plutonium from Bushehr contains too little Pu-339 and too much Pu-240 for weapons other than of rudimentary quality, a worst-case scenario can nevertheless be constructed. After 15 months' operation, the first irradiated fuel rods extracted from the reactor could produce 300kg of plutonium, which have to be cooled before being returned to Russia. If Iran instead diverted the material, with the necessary reprocessing equipment, it could extract enough metallic plutonium within days for 50-60 bombs, Tertais claims. The diversion would be immediately apparent to the IAEA, however, and Iran is not known to have conducted any reprocessing work beyond laboratory experiments in the 1990s.
48. As a rough rule of thumb, under ideal conditions about 200 SWU are required to produce 1kg of weapons-grade HEU from about 200kg of natural uranium. So to produce 25kg of HEU, approximately 5,000 SWU are needed.
49. Albright and Hinderstein, 'The Centrifuge Connection', p. 65.
50. International Institute for Strategic Studies, Iran's Strategic Weapons Programmes: A Net Assessment (Abingdon: Routledge for the IISS, 2005), pp. 33-67.
51. Albright and Hinderstein, 'The Clock Is Ticking', p. 4.
52. Henry Sokolski, who contends that Iran is one to four years away from acquiring a nuclear bomb, looks at timelines from another perspective. His is not an analytical assessment based on information about Iran's progress in enriching uranium, but rather a strategic assessment that once Iran embarked on the enrichment programme and acquired the basic technology and necessary materials, it has to be considered close to being able to put it all together in a crash weapons programme. From this perspective, the 'one-to-four-year' estimate is a rolling assessment that was just as accurate five years ago as it is today and will be five years hence. Intelligence assessments based on incomplete tactical information will never be able to accurately 'time the market', Sokolski argues; thus policy-makers should make decisions based on strategic intelligence on intentions. Henry D. Sokolski, Getting Ready for a Nuclear-Ready Iran (Carlisle, PA: The Strategic Studies Institute, 2005), pp. 1, 5.
53. See also Henry D. Sokolski, 'The Wrong Culprit', The Weekly Standard, 16 February 2004.
54. It is impossible to evaluate this claim without knowing the assumptions behind it. Israeli Defence Force Chief of Staff Lt-Gen. Dan Halutz told the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defence Committee on 13 December 2005 that Iran's nuclear weapon would be ready between 2007 and 2015. He also said Iran could begin enriching uranium by March 2006, an estimate that proved very accurate. Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said in a CNN interview in Washington on 21 May that Iran's nuclear programme was 'months, not years' away from achieving a critical level of self-sufficiency. Some news reports dropped or mischaracterised the latter part of that statement, implying that Iran was months away from the bomb itself. What he meant was that Iran was very close to reaching what the Israelis used to call the 'point of no return', when they have mastered the enrichment technology and have enough materials and equipment on hand to produce HEU.
55. Iran should have conducted much more testing at each stage in the process, starting with single centrifuges, to prove the viability of the centrifuge design and that each of the components worked properly, to feed back to the component manufacturers before they built more of them. A small number of centrifuges should then have been tested for a period of time with uranium hexafluoride to ensure that the piping held up under the corrosive effects of the gaseous uranium and was properly connected, and to make sure the enrichment level was right. This should have been followed by a slightly larger cascade, again tested for a period of time to get the level right. Iran raced from 1 to 10 to 20 to 164, without enough time for testing at each stage. To ensure long-term viability of a commercial venture (as they claim this is), by definition, the small-scale cascades should have been tested for a long period of time. By comparison, Urenco tested a 16-centrifuge cascade for almost two years before it went to larger cascades. A quick and dirty testing process is understandable if Iran does not care about many centrifuges crashing in the future and if it is more concerned about a demonstration effect. Additionally, one cannot discount the possibility that testing was conducted elsewhere and not reported.
56. William J. Broad and David E. Sanger, 'Iran's Drive to Nuclear Fuel Slows, Diplomats Say', New York Times, 29 May 2006. The purity of Iran's UCF remains a matter of conjecture. Last year, Western intelligence analysts judged that the uranium hexafluoride Iran was producing at Esfahan was overly contaminated with heavy metals. By year's end, however, the consensus among many Western government experts and IAEA officials was that the product is good enough for Iran's initial purposes. News reports that Iran chose not to use its own UCF for the April LEU production at Natanz suggests that the Iranians at least are not yet sure about that.
57. The most current IAEA report on Iran's centrifuge stock was October 2004, when the assembled number was 1,274. Iran can be assumed to have assembled another 70 (the rate of production at the time) in the month before the suspension went into effect. If Iran resumed production at the same rate when it lifted the suspension in January, and assembled the machines at the same rate, it would have 1,700 by mid-June. This is only an assumption, however, and the IAEA no longer can monitor the workshops. Although the total to date is far from enough for Iran's ambitious 54,000-centrifuge fuel-production facility, it is enough for a small weapons programme.
58. Author interviews with diplomats from three UN Security Council member countries, June and July 2006.
59. See, for example, Charles Krauthammer, 'In Iran, Arming for Armageddon', Washington Post,16 December 2005.