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Don't Underestimate the Mullahs
By Gary Milhollin
The New York Times
August 23, 2005
Valletta, Malta
EARLIER this month Bush administration officials leaked to the press
what they said was a new official estimate of when Iran might be able
to build a nuclear weapon. Speaking anonymously, they told reporters
that American intelligence agencies now believe it would take at least
6 and maybe as many as 10 years before that fateful day arrives.
Whew! Instead of worrying over the previous estimate of only five years,
we can relax. And if this administration can't figure out how to stop
the Iranian bomb, there will be plenty of time for someone else to
do it. Right?
Actually, no. We should be alarmed rather than comforted by this latest
prediction. Consider this: American intelligence agencies completely
missed Saddam Hussein's giant machines for processing uranium to weapons
grade before the Persian Gulf war in 1991. Then, overreacting to that
mistake, these agencies wrongly reported that there were weapons of
mass destruction in Iraq before the 2003 invasion. Now, they appear
to be
overreacting to their last overreaction by underestimating the threat
from Iran.
What must Iran do to make a bomb? This month it started an essential
part of the process. It resumed the conversion of about 37 tons of
natural uranium into the gaseous form that can be fed into centrifuges.
Those
machines, by spinning the gas at high speed, enrich its potency - either
to a low level for fueling a reactor, or to a high level for fueling
a bomb. These 37 tons, which should be ready for enrichment in a month
or so, would be sufficient for six to nine weapons.
Why does the administration think it will take up to 10 years to process
this material? The intelligence estimate is secret, but foreign and
American officials involved in monitoring Iran's efforts tell me that
Washington
assumes Iran's centrifuges are of poor quality and that Iranian scientists
may have trouble connecting them into what is called a cascade, in
which the uranium must flow from one machine to the next.
This prediction, however, discounts an overwhelming amount of countervailing
evidence. First, an official at the International Atomic Energy Agency,
which monitors Iran's nuclear progress in detail, told me that his
agency is confident that the Iranians can produce high-quality centrifuges.
Officials at the agency also know that Iran has built a string of workshops
as part of a plan to produce some 50,000 centrifuges, with an assumed
production rate of many thousand per year. It also has thousands of
components
for the centrifuges on hand, some it made itself and others imported,
likely from Pakistan.
It is unreasonable to assume that Iran could not, after deciding to
begin a concerted effort, assemble a 2,000-machine cascade in a year.
In 2002,
Iranian scientists enriched a small amount of uranium in an experimental
cascade at the Kalaye Electric Company, a secret operation in Tehran
that the International Atomic Energy Agency didn't discover until 2003.
After a year's operation of such a cascade, Iran would have one bomb's
worth of highly enriched uranium, and could have built and started
running 2,000 more centrifuges. Continuing at this pace would yield
three bombs'
worth of enriched material in three years, and about six bombs' worth
in four. This is the sort of calculation that experts at American government
laboratories have been doing for a long time, and one such scientist
told me he was stunned by the administration's 6-to-10-year estimate.
And then there is the problem of what we don't know. Inspectors from
the atomic energy agency frequently complain that Iran has never explained
how far it got in its efforts to build a more advanced model of centrifuge
that could save lots of production time. Iran got the blueprints for
this machine around 1995 from the notorious Pakistani scientist Abdul
Qadeer Khan, and imported hard-to-find components like specialized
magnets.
This raises the possibility that Iran may have centrifuges or laboratories
we still don't know about, a risk that seems quite high given that
for almost two decades Iran managed to hide work on uranium enrichment
that
international inspectors found out about only after visiting the site
at Natanz in 2003.
And the concealment continues: last year Iran razed a building at one
suspected nuclear site and scraped away the underlying soil to prevent
analysis (hiding evidence in this way was a favorite ploy of Saddam
Hussein's in the 1990's). Iran is also barring inspectors from following
up their
work at another site, the Parchin military complex near Tehran, which
many suspect is being used for work on the non-nuclear parts of a nuclear
weapon.
This latter activity - the making of bomb parts other than the uranium
or plutonium metal that explodes - is easily hidden because it would
most likely occur in parallel at laboratories not involved in creating
the nuclear fuel. And it seems very possible that Iran received a complete
bomb design, plus blueprints showing how to manufacture it, from Mr.
Khan. In the 1990's he sold both Iran and Libya packages of centrifuge
technology; we know that in the case of Libya he threw in the bomb
design for good measure. Why would he not have given the plans to his
other
good customer, Iran, as well?
Americans should resist the latest intelligence-agency lullaby. Given
the dismal performance of our spies and analysts in recent years, why
should we think they have suddenly wised up? Iran is determined to
get the bomb - all the agencies agree on that - and dealing with that
threat
is not a job that can be left for the next administration.
Gary Milhollin is the director of the Wisconsin Project on Nuclear
Arms Control in Washington and the publisher of IranWatch.org.