Unthinkable (8 page)

First off, for more than a decade and continuing to the present, Iran has lied and concealed information from the IAEA (and various other countries and international organizations) about its nuclear program in contravention of its Safeguards Agreement under the NPT.
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For instance, the Iranians concealed the assistance they received from Pakistan and A. Q. Khan. When the IAEA inspected the Natanz and Arak sites in 2002, the inspectors found traces of enriched uranium hexafluoride in the centrifuges (the feedstock used for enrichment), indicating that the centrifuges had been used to enrich uranium, which violated Iran's Safeguard Agreement with the IAEA.
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The Iranians claimed that the enriched uranium had been on the centrifuges when they got them from another country, which they would not name—but which turned out to be Pakistan. The fact that Iran had imported centrifuges without notifying the IAEA was also a violation of its Safeguard Agreement. The inspectors found uranium from two different countries, China and Pakistan. This discovery forced the Iranians to admit that they had acquired nearly two tons of slightly refined uranium (called “yellowcake”) from China; uranium hexafluoride and uranium in two other, lesser stages of
refinement, from another foreign supplier (Pakistan); and had decided to start mining uranium from their own indigenous sources. The Iranians also admitted to having a Laser Isotope Separation program, yet another way to enrich uranium. Finally, the Iranians told the IAEA that they were building a plant near Esfahan that would convert yellowcake into uranium hexafluoride. Since enriching any uranium hexafluoride would have been yet another violation of their Safeguards Agreement, the Iranians claimed that they had not performed any enrichment or even testing as of 2002. Not even the IAEA found that claim credible.
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The list went on and on. The IAEA discovered that Iran had produced polonium-210, a short-lived, unstable element whose only real use is as an initiator for nuclear weapons (although the Iranians claimed it was for nuclear batteries to be used in satellites and deep space exploration vehicles, neither of which they have). The Iranians also continued to dissemble on a range of other issues, and delayed the IAEA from conducting several inspections that hampered its work.

In December 2003, under tremendous international pressure and fearing an American invasion, Iran signed the Additional Protocol to its Comprehensive Safeguards Agreement, a refinement of the NPT that allowed IAEA inspectors much greater access and latitude in conducting inspections and monitoring of Iranian nuclear facilities—and in checking out suspected clandestine nuclear facilities. However, the Iranians have refused to implement the agreement and allow the inspectors the access they promised.
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As a result of all of Iran's deceptions, in June 2004, the IAEA Board of Governors adopted a resolution condemning Iran for failing to provide the requisite information, for obstructing the inspections, and for not suspending its uranium enrichment process as promised. In a momentous decision, the IAEA referred Iran's nuclear program to the United Nations Security Council for further action. It was only the first of many occasions on which the IAEA found the Iranians unwilling to cooperate or abide by its obligations under the NPT and the UN Charter related to its nuclear program.
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Iran's claim that its goal is nuclear power plants for civilian energy
needs is ridiculous.
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An authoritative study by Ali Vaez and Karim Sadjadpour concluded, “No sound strategic energy planning would prioritize nuclear energy in a country like Iran.”
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Building enrichment facilities is expensive, and for that reason, most countries with civilian nuclear energy programs purchase fuel supplies from elsewhere. Although its nuclear program has been in existence for decades, and Iran has insisted the program is intended only for civilian uses at least since 2002, it has belied these claims with the paltry effort it has expended on the construction of civilian nuclear power plants—especially compared to the priority it has placed on developing enrichment capabilities. In 2004, Iranian foreign minister Kamal Kharrazi stated that Iran planned to build the capacity to generate 7,000 megawatts of electricity by 2025, but this statement has never been confirmed or repeated, and Tehran has made no effort to implement it, if it had any official standing at all.
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Iran has only one functioning civilian nuclear plant, a 1,000-megawatt reactor at Bushehr, which did not come on line till 2011. Iran has announced that it will complete the moribund project to build another (360-megawatt) power plant at Darkhovin in southwestern Iran using an indigenous design, but it appears to have little interest from the Iranian leadership and so is languishing far behind schedule. If Iran wanted nuclear energy, it could have begun by building the power plants, bought fuel from abroad, and explored the cost-effectiveness of enriching its own fuel later. That is what states looking to develop nuclear power do.
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In fact, in the late 1990s, Iran shifted resources away from getting the Bushehr power plant operational and devoted them to its enrichment program instead.
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That is what a military program, not a civilian program, looks like.
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Iran sits on the second-largest natural gas reserves in the world. Natural gas is a cheaper and easier method of generating power than nuclear.
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In 2002–2003, when the British, French, and Germans first sat down with the Iranians to discuss the recent revelations about their nuclear program, the Iranians claimed they were pursuing nuclear energy because it was more cost-efficient than natural gas. The Europeans, surprised to hear this claim, requested that the Iranians provide them with the studies
they had done that led them to this conclusion. After all, if Iran had found a way to use nuclear plants to produce energy more cost-effectively than natural gas, the whole world would want to know about such a remarkable breakthrough. According to one British official at these talks, the Iranians “looked at each other as if to say, ‘studies, what studies?' ”
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Needless to say, the Iranians have never produced any documentation to demonstrate that nuclear plants would be more cost-effective than natural-gas-fired plants, which may explain why they have made so little effort to build nuclear energy plants.

At least as early as 2006, Iran began construction of its Fordow enrichment facility near the Iranian holy city of Qom. The Fordow plant now has a full complement of roughly 2,800 centrifuges, many of which are operational. Several aspects of Fordow seem more consistent with a military facility. First, it was built at a Revolutionary Guards base. Second, it was built at enormous cost deep inside a mountain where it is impervious to Israeli air attack. Even the United States Air Force could have difficulty destroying it with conventional munitions. Third, Iran kept the facility secret (a further violation of its Safeguards Agreement under the NPT) until the United States and European nations revealed its existence in 2009. Fourth, in late 2012, Iran began using it to produce uranium enriched to 19.75 percent purity—which it claims will be for the Tehran Research Reactor (TRR), where it manufactures radioactive products needed in medical procedures such as some cancer treatments. Iran has already produced uranium enriched to 19.75 percent purity, in excess of what the TRR requires, for years to come, but is still producing more.
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If Iran's goal is a cost-effective civilian energy and medical research program, why pay the massive expenses of building an underground nuclear enrichment facility (especially when you can buy the fuel from Brazil or Argentina at a fraction of the cost)? And why move the highest levels of enrichment to the most bombproof facility? A better way of proving one's innocence would have been to have left the higher-level enrichment at less heavily defended facilities. Moreover, after the exposure of the Fordow facility, President Ahmadinejad announced that Iran planned
to build ten more enrichment facilities, all of them inside mountains like Fordow.
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There's also evidence that Iran has been working on taking its fissile material and turning it into nuclear bombs and warheads for its ballistic missiles.
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Iran was forced to admit to having both uranium enrichment and plutonium separation programs (albeit, only after being caught red-handed with enormous secret facilities to do so), two paths to producing the fissile material for nuclear weapons. However, it has never admitted to a weaponization program, the engineering effort to build the mechanical device that causes the fissile material to explode in a nuclear chain reaction. Nevertheless, there is evidence that Iran had an active weaponization program at least until 2003 and has a more clandestine (and possibly smaller) effort to this day. In 2007, the U.S. intelligence community publicly stated that Iran had had an active weaponization program at least up until the fall of 2003.
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Many European and Middle Eastern intelligence services have echoed this conclusion privately and publicly. The IAEA has posed numerous questions to the Iranian government to ascertain the validity of this evidence, and year after year Tehran has refused to answer those questions. In 2012, Iran agreed to discuss the matter with the IAEA, but when the two sides met in January, the Iranians did not provide any satisfactory answers and instead just claimed (without any proof) that all of the evidence regarding their weapons program was disinformation manufactured by the Americans, Europeans, and Israelis. When the IAEA asked to visit the Parchin military complex, where much of the engineering work on nuclear weapons had reportedly taken place, Tehran again refused. Satellite imagery showed the Iranians performing an industrial cleanup of the areas there where nuclear weapons research work was believed to have taken place.
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As of early 2013, Iran had still not agreed to allow the IAEA to inspect Parchin despite all of its cleanup efforts.
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The IAEA's frustration with Iran has grown as the agency has acquired more and more evidence indicating that Iran had such a program prior to 2003 and probably still has an ongoing effort of some kind. In February
2010, the IAEA declared that they had extensive evidence of “past or current undisclosed activities” by the Iranian military to develop a nuclear warhead, and that the activities continued past 2004—an important point since the U.S. intelligence community declared in 2007 that it believed the Iranians had discontinued their weaponization program in 2003. The IAEA further stated that they had uncovered evidence that Iran was exploring ways of detonating nuclear weapons, and designing warheads to fit on top of a missile.
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By September 2011, the IAEA announced that it was “increasingly concerned” about credible evidence provided by “many member states,” which it felt was “extensive and comprehensive,” indicating that Iran was continuing to work on developing a nuclear warhead for a missile and other aspects of weaponization.
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The agency indicated that it possessed several Iranian documents that showed that the Iranian military was involved with Iran's nuclear program, an alarming development.
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The November 2011 IAEA report on Iran included an extensive annex that described the IAEA's information on Iran's weaponization efforts, as well as the facilities Iran had built for this purpose.
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At that time, the IAEA stated that “[t]he information which serves as the basis for the Agency's analysis and concerns, as identified in the Annex, is assessed by the Agency to be, overall, credible. The information comes from a wide variety of independent sources, including from a number of Member States, from the Agency's own efforts and from information provided by Iran itself. It is consistent in terms of technical content, individuals and organizations involved, and time frames.” It went on to assert that Iran had acquired information and documentation regarding the development and testing of nuclear weapons—which the report noted had no possible application to civilian uses.
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Perhaps this all sounds familiar. It may seem like déjà vu all over again, to quote Yogi Berra. Didn't we make the same claims about Iraq having an
aggressive nuclear (and biological and chemical) weapons program? And weren't we (including, painfully, this author) completely wrong about Iraq's WMD programs? So, then, why should we believe any of these claims about Iran?

Good questions, and questions we need to keep asking given the Iraq experience. We did get the Iraq WMD problem wrong—the United States' intelligence community, and the intelligence agencies of Britain, France, Germany, Israel, Iran, and many others. Nor can we blame it all on an overzealous and reckless Bush 43 administration. It was the U.S. intelligence community that had this wrong and the Bushies just ran with it (while adding exaggerations or worse about Iraqi connections to al-Qa'ida).
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And that history should make us wary of being overly confident about what we think we know about the Iranian program. There are some discomforting similarities.

In particular, the public has not seen any “smoking gun” evidence of an Iranian weaponization program. That is the key to the whole crisis. Iran acknowledges it is enriching uranium but claims that it is doing so for energy and medical purposes. The United States, the IAEA, the Europeans, Israelis, and others all say that this claim is just a cover for a weaponization program. But those same entities also believed that Iraq was concealing WMD programs, too (although their estimates about what Iraq was concealing varied widely). As was the case with Iraq, the IAEA and all of these governments are telling the public, “Trust us, our information is rock solid.” Which is also what we heard (this author included) prior to the invasion of Iraq.