As noted here in my last post, Avner Cohen has drawn an important contrast between Israel’s strategic position with respect to Iran today and its position when it first confronted the danger of an Iraqi bomb, thirty years ago. In 1979-80, Cohen correctly observed, Israel stood essentially alone: Though Saddam had started to mess with IAEA inspectors, tripping alarms, nobody outside Israeli intelligence seemed to be hearing them, including the IAEA itself (which was a very different agency then than it is today). Today it is Iran that is isolated and having to deal with concerted hostile actions that are beginning to seriously hurt.
Two weeks ago the Financial Times reported that Iran was having increased difficulty exporting oil because international sanctions were cutting into vitally needed shipping and banking services. “Traders and oil company officials said European and Middle Eastern banks have all but stopped issuing letters of credit–an instrument used in trade–with Iranian financial institutions. This makes it very difficult to transact payments for oil sales,” the FT reported. “Shipping companies are also refusing to send tankers to Iranian oil terminals, while insurers are reluctant to cover cargoes. . . .”
Thus, while other OPEC countries have seen their production levels climb in recent months, Iran’s output has continued to drop.
Separately but in the same issue, the Financial Times reported that South Korea’s Kia Motors had suspended car shipments to Iran, “ending one of Tehran’s most successful commercial alliances as international sanctions strike home.”
This week comes the widely reported news that a computer malware worm, which experts believe likely originated in the Israeli or U.S. intelligence communities, has infected control systems at Iran’s Natanz uranium enrichment plant. Iran’s been having trouble with that plant’s operation in the last year, and perhaps in part because of the worm, the number of centrifuges running has declined 23 percent. Accordingly, as the New York Times reported today, Israel now thinks Iran will be in a position to produce its first atomic bomb only in 2014, at earliest. That leaves ample time for additional counter-measures to be put in place and, just as importantly, for diplomacy.
Given Iran’s firm intention of developing a nuclear weapons capability, and the broad support for that ambition across the country’s political spectrum, it’s most improbable that it will be dissuaded from that course except within the context of some wider diplomatic settlement.
Iran can be said to be in a state of virtual war with the bulk of the world, a situation without parallel in diplomatic history. When a computer worm attacks Iran’s control systems and cripples its nuclear work, it’s pretty much taken for granted in the world press and among experts that the country is the victim of covert operations. There are regular rumors of Iranian nuclear scientists being lured out of the country, kidnapped, or even murdered–and when such rumors are reported, they are not dismissed out of hand.
The process that led to this startling situation began eight years ago with the disclosure by a revolutionary group that Iran was building a hardened uranium enrichment facility at Natanz. When the IAEA investigated, it not only verified the allegation but discovered a 20-year pattern of NPT violations by Iran that was “without precedent in the agency’s history.”
In early September, the same insurgent group–which by the way is classified as a terrorist organization and has a mixed record when it comes to Iran’s nuclear program–alleged that Iran was building another highly hardened enrichment plant. If the claim is authenticated, and it almost surely will be, this will be the second such small-scale but highly secured enrichment plant to have been revealed.
A year ago, the Obama administration disclosed evidence that an enrichment plant was under construction near the city of Qom or Qum, at a site sometimes spelled Fordo, sometimes Fordow. In due course Iran conceded that this was a new enrichment facility, but only after coming to an impasse with the IAEA over its unilateral interpretation of a provision in its safeguards implementation agreement with the agency known as Code 3.1: A revised version of that provision required Iran to notify the agency immediately upon beginning to build any facility in which controlled nuclear material would be used; Iran claimed it only had to inform the agency 180 days before introducing such material. (It is mainly because of Iran’s footdragging on safeguards–most importantly its failure to ratify the Additional Protocol to the NPT–that it is presumed to be hell-bent on developing nuclear weapons.)
The Qom/Fordo allegation prompted a side skirmish among nonproliferation specialists in Washington, with David Albright of the Institute for Science and International Security squaring off against Ivanka Barzashka and Ivan Oelrich at the Federation of American Scientists. Albrlght seemed to think the FAS team was taking too complacent a view of how fast the facility would be able to produce highly enriched uranium; Barzashka and Oelrich believed he was misinterpreting and misrepresenting their position.
Since journalists are constantly being accused of amplifying or even fomenting controversy, I’m not going to dwell on the technical details of that dispute, which I am in any case not qualified to evaluate. However, Barzashka and Oelrich say their main point was that Fordo was too small not only to be a plausible component of a peaceful nuclear program, but too small also to serve by itself as a plausible source of nuclear weapons material. Accordingly, they predicted that it would prove to be part of a larger network of hardened enrichment facilities.
That prediction appears now to be vindicated, with the allegation that a second such facility is under construction, and with Iran’s earlier confession that in fact it is planning to build 10 small buried enrichment facilities in all.
Why is Iran building a distributed uranium enrichment network? Natanz itself is a hardened facility, after all, and indeed it was the discovery it was being build underground that really set the UAEA’s alarms ringing.
Barzashkas says that Natanz is indeed hardened and built several meters underground. “But Natanz would unlikely survive a U.S. or Israeli strike. Also, keep in mind that centrifuges are a delicate piece of equipment, so it doesn’t take a lot to damage them. Fordow, on the other hand, is built in a tunnel inside a mountain and is protected by missile defenses at a nearby military base. This significantly complicates an attack.”
Debate around this issue tends to focus on whether and how Iran is positioning itself to “break out of the NPT,” either by suddenly and secretly building nuclear weapons, or by announcing its withdrawal from the treaty and then only building weapons.
What people tend to lose sight of in this conversation is that the NPT contains a standard clause allowing for a party to terminate membership under “fundamentally changed conditions,” a very vague condition that members of course can pretty much interpret at will. If Iran gets to the point where it knows it can build nuclear weapons and knows it can withstand any military attempt to stop it, it will be in a position to withdraw from the NPT, and though everybody will bitterly complain, it will be quite within its rights to do so.
