A
year has passed since the release of the 2007 National Intelligence
Estimate on Iran. In a
stunning departure from all the previous estimates dating
back to 1997 under Presidents Clinton and Bush, it declared:
"We judge with high confidence that in fall 2003, Tehran
halted its nuclear weapons program."
It also judged, with modest confidence, that Iran had not
resumed its quest for nuclear weapons.
If correct, this new assessment meant that previous ones,
such as the 2004 NIE that also judged with "high confidence"
that Iran was expanding its nuclear weapons capabilities
under the cover of a civilian energy program, were based
on flawed intelligence.
But
was this astonishing reversal correct?
The
2007 intelligence estimate proceeded from both a reorganization
of the so-called intelligence
community and a re-evaluation of information the CIA had
gotten on a clandestine nuclear
weapon design program code-named by Iran "Project 111."
Even though Project 111 had been
in operation since 1997, the CIA did not get wind of it
until 2004, when it obtained a stolen
Iranian laptop that had been smuggled into Turkey. The computer's
hard drive contained
thousands of pages of documents describing efforts to design
a warhead that would fit in the nose cone of the Iranian
Shahab 3 missile and detonate at an altitude of 600 meters
(which is too high for any explosion but a nuclear one to
be effective).
From the warhead's specifications, which included the kind
of high-tension electric bridge wire
used in implosion-type nuclear weapons, the CIA deduced
that the payload was a nuclear bomb
similar to Pakistan's early bomb. Its conclusion that Iran
was going nuclear was repeated in all
the NIEs through 2006.
By
2007, however, the CIA and reorganized intelligence community
re-examined the issue and
doubts began to emerge. It turned out that shortly after
the stolen laptop compromised Project 111, satellite photographs
showed that buildings involved in it had been bulldozed,
and
conversations intercepted by the U.S. indicated that the
project was being dismantled. Then a
high-level defector from the Iranian Revolutionary Guard,
General Ali-Reza Asgari, confirmed in
his CIA debriefings that Project 111 had been terminated
in 2003.
After
a long review, and "scrubbing" the evidence for
signs of deception, the CIA reached its
new conclusion that Iran's 111 project really had ended
by 2004. In the world of clandestine
activities, it is hardly unexpected that a super-secret
operation such as Project 111, once it was
compromised, would be officially closed down, and the evidence
seems convincing that it was
shuttered.
The issue is why. One explanation is that Iran had abandoned
its efforts to acquire nuclear
weapons. Another is that Iran no longer needed Project 111
because Iran had solved the tricky
problem of triggering a nuclear warhead through other means.
Three
pieces of the puzzle uncovered by the UN's International
Atomic Energy Agency cast a
surprising light on how Iran has advanced its capabilities
independently of Project 111. First,
there is the digital blueprint circulated by the network
of A.Q. Khan, the father of Pakistan's
nuclear bomb. IAEA investigators decoding and analyzing
the massive computer files of this
network found that it had clandestinely provided clients
with a detailed design of a nuclear
warhead of the version used by first China then Pakistan.
Since
the IAEA knew that Iran had been dealing with the Khan network
since at least 2003, and
features of that digital blueprint matched those described
in the Project 111 documents, it was
suspected that Iran acquired the digital blueprint, along
with other components, from the Khan
network. If so, it shortened the task of Project 111.
Then,
in late 2007, IAEA investigators uncovered a detailed Iranian
narrative, written in Farsi,
that described how a Russian scientist helped the Iranians
conduct experiments to help Iranian
scientists solve a complex design problem: Configuring high-tension
electric bridge wire to
detonate at different points less than a fraction of a nanosecond
apart. In an implosion-type
bomb, this is crucial for properly compressing the nuclear
core. As Olli Heinonen, the IAEA's
chief inspector explained at a closed-door briefing in February
2008, these Russian-led
experiments were "not consistent with any application
other than the development of a nuclear weapon."
Finally, there is the Polonium 210 experiments that Iran
conducted prior to 2004. Since Polonium
210 is used to initiate the chain reaction in early-generation
nuclear bombs (and used in the
Pakistan design), IAEA inspectors attempted up until 2008
to get access to the facility, or "box,"
in which the Polonium 210 was extracted from radioactive
Bismuth. Iran insisted that the Polonium 210 was only to
be used for a civilian purpose - powering batteries on an
Iranian spacecraft - and turned down these requests.
Iran had no known space program, but even if the extraction
process was for civilian purposes,
Iran's success with it meant that it could also produce
Polonium 210 to trigger a nuclear bomb of the design furnished
by the Khan network. So, even without further work by Project
111, it may
have acquired all essential design elements for a nuclear
weapon.
Design
of course is only part of the equation. The other crucial
part is obtaining a fissile fuel
for the nuclear explosion, such as highly-enriched uranium.
In 1974, Pakistan, with the assistance of A.Q. Khan, had
pioneered the path to nuclear
proliferation by using centrifuges to enrich gasified uranium
into weapon-grade uranium. In this process, the uranium
cascades from one rapidly-spinning centrifuge to the next,
each gradually increasing the proportion of the fissile
isotope Uranium 235, until it becomes first low-enriched
uranium for power plants, then, if continued, high-enriched
uranium, for weapons. Iran built a similar facility in the
massive underground caves at Natanz, able to house up to
50,000 centrifuges, which became operational in 2002.
Iran
claimed this facility was intended for the production of
low-enriched uranium for the
Russian-built nuclear reactor at Bushehr to generate electric
power (a facility Russia had agreed to fully supply as long
as it operated). But the plant also could be used to produce
weapons-grade uranium.
According to the IAEA, which monitors Natanz, by 2008 Iran
had 3,800 centrifuges in operation
and is adding another 3,000. It has also upgraded many of
the older centrifuges, giving it about
quadruple the capacity it had in 2003. By November 2008,
it has produced and stockpiled 1,380 pounds of low-enriched
uranium, which is enough, if further enriched to weapons
grade, to build a nuclear bomb.
The 2007 NIE deftly ducked this escalation with a footnote
stating it was excluding from its
assessment "Iran's declared civil work related to uranium
conversion and enrichment," which
meant Natanz. However, in light of all the developments
in the past year, America's new
president will have to confront the reality that Iran now
has the capability to change the balance
of power in the Gulf, if it so elects to do so, by building
a nuclear weapon.
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