Collision Course With The Mad Mullahs

The Iranian theocracy's dash towards a nuclear arsenal as picked up speed as they make no attempt now to engage in even the motions of cooperation on the nuclear issue. The U.S. changed its policy and met as part of unilateral negotiations with Iran to no avail. Ahmedinejad has announced a near doubling in centrifuge capacity at Natanz, turning out enriched uranium on an industrial scale. There are many meetings going on between U.S. and the Israeli government. The immediate question is whether President Bush will deal with this problem while he is still in office or whether he will kick it down the road. The former is seeming more likely.
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The mad mullahs race towards a nuclear weapon grows ever apace. On Saturday, Ahmedinejad announced that Iran had doubled the enrichment capacity of its Natanz plant to 6,000 centrifuges. Iran has no use for this nuclear fuel in any sort of civilian energy program. Nonetheless, as Fox reported:

A total of 3,000 centrifuges is the commonly accepted figure for a nuclear enrichment program that surpasses the experimental stage and can be used as a platform for a full industrial-scale program that could churn out enough material for dozens of nuclear weapons.

Iran says it plans to move toward large-scale uranium enrichment that ultimately will involve 54,000 centrifuges.

Moreover, Iran has announced a complete halt to cooperation with the IAEA and their probe of the nature of Iran's nuclear program. This also from Fox News:

Iran on Thursday signaled it will no longer cooperate with International Atomic Energy Agency experts investigating for signs of nuclear weapons programs, confirming that the probe — launched a year ago with great expectations — was at a dead end.

Coming from Iranian Vice President Gholam Reza Aghazadeh, the announcement compounded international skepticism about denting Tehran's nuclear defiance just five days after Tehran stonewalled demands from six world powers to suspend activities that can produce the fissile core of warheads.

Besides demanding a stop to uranium enrichment — which can create both fuel and the nuclear missile payloads — the international community also has been pressuring Tehran to cooperate with the IAEA in its probe of allegations that Tehran hid attempts to make nuclear arms.

That investigation was launched a year ago under a so-called "work plan" between the Vienna-based agency and Tehran.

Back then, IAEA chief Mohamed ElBaradei hailed it as "a significant step forward" that — if honored by Iran — would fill in the missing pieces of Iran's nuclear jigsaw puzzle; nearly two decades of atomic work, all of it clandestine until revealed by dissidents nearly six years ago. And he brushed aside suggestions that Iran was using the work plan as a smoke screen to deflect attention away from its continued defiance of a U.N. Security Council ban on enrichment.

But the plan ran into trouble just months after it was put into operation. Deadline after deadline was extended because of Iranian foot-dragging. The probe, originally to have been completed late last year, spilled into the first months of 2008, and then beyond.

Iran remains defiant, saying evidence from the U.S. and other board members purportedly backing the allegations was fabricated, and on Thursday Aghazadeh appeared to signal that his country was no longer prepared even to discuss the issue with the Vienna-based IAEA. . . .

Read the entire article.

And a month ago, Bush radically reversed U.S. policy and took part directly in a meeting with Iran on its nuclear issue. The meeting, which also involved the EU-3, China and Russia was a joke, with Iran refusing to discuss nuclear enrichment then or in the future. Was that meeting designed to justify a U.S. attack on Iran? That is certainly looking more plausible as time goes on. This from the Jerusalem Post:

Recent talks the United States held with Iran are aimed at creating legitimacy for a potential attack against Iranian nuclear facilities, defense officials speculated on Sunday as Defense Minister Ehud Barak headed to Washington for talks with senior administration officials.

Barak will travel to Washington and New York and will hold talks with his counterpart Robert Gates, Vice President Dick Cheney, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Admiral Michael Mullen, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley.

. . . IDF Chief of General Staff Lt.-Gen. Gabi Ashkenazi returned to Israel on Sunday from a week-long visit to the US as Mullen's guest. Ashkenazi held talks with Cheney, Hadley and other senior officials with a focus on the Iranian nuclear program.

"There is a lot of strategic thinking concerning Iran going on right now but no one has yet to make a decision what to do," said a top IDF officer, involved in the dialogue between Israel and the US. "We are still far away from the point where military officers are poring over maps together planning an operation."

In recent weeks, Mullen has said publicly that he is opposed to military action against Iran which would open a "third front" for the US military which is currently fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan. . . .

Barak's talks in the US come a little over a week after the Bush administration sent its number three diplomat to Geneva to participate in European Union talks with Iran over its nuclear program.

The move led to reports that the US was changing its isolation tactic vis-à-vis Iran but Israeli defense officials speculated Sunday that the move was really a ploy to buy international support in the event that Bush decides to attack Iran in his last months in office.

"This way they will be able to say they tried everything," one official speculated. "This increases America's chances of gaining more public support domestically as well as the support of European nations which are today opposed to military action." . . .

Diplomatic officials have speculated that the Iran-US talks were also connected to the presidential elections.

Read the entire article. If we are going to go to war with Iran over the nuclear issue - and I think it is inevitable - the sooner the better. Waiting will only benefit Iran, much like waiting through the mid-30's allowed the Nazi's to go from extreme weakness to a war machine of sufficient size that it cost tens of millions of lives to defeat. The problem is exponentially more dangerous when the topic under discussion is a nuclear arsenal. We forget the lesson of Nazi Germany at our peril.

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Evidence That Iran Is Seeking A Nuclear Arsenal

There are many people apparently willing to take Iran at its word that its nuclear program is peaceful and solely aimed at producing civilian nuclear power. Such people cite to a supposed lack of direct evidence indicating that Iran is seeking a nuclear arsenal. Many of these people seemingly would accept nothing less than Iranian President Ahmedinejad marching through Tehran with an ICBM as proof otherwise.

Whether the world should simply acquiesce in Iran's nuclear program, irrespective of its goals, is a separate issue. For the reasons I set forth in a separate post, I believe that would be suicidal. But as to the issue of whether Iran is seeking a nuclear arsenal, there is a wealth of both direct and circumstantial evidence in the public record that strongly supports such a reasonable belief:

1. Iran is mining yellowcake uranium and processing it as nuclear fuel, nominally for use in a nuclear reactor. Reactors can be either light water or heavy water. Light water reactors are safer and produce less waste, but such reactors are far less efficient than heavy water reactors at producing weapons grade fissile material. Most power reactors worldwide, and all in the United States are cooled by ordinary “light” water. Heavy water reactors are the type generally relied upon for creating weapons grade plutonium. Iran has built a facility to make heavy water, even though the sole power plant currently claimed and known to be under construction in Iran is a light water reactor.

2. Iran is now executing “industrial grade production” of nuclear fuel by bringing on-line 3,000 gas centrifuges. It has plans to bring that number up to 8,000 gas centrifuges. It takes 3,000 centrifuges working for one year to produce sufficient fissile material for one nuclear bomb.

3. Iran has no use for the “industrial scale” production of nuclear fuel it is doing today other than for creating a nuclear arsenal. Iranian nuclear facilities produce precisely 0 watts of electricity. Nuclear fuel has a life of three to four years. Within that time, Iran will have one nuclear power plant capable of generating electricity. That is the light water plant being built by Russia. And Russia is required by the contract with Iran to provide the nuclear fuel for that plant during its first ten years of operation. Again, it must be emphasized that there is no other nuclear reactor currently claimed or otherwise known to be under construction in Iran at present time.

4. Iran asserts that it's working only with the P1, an older centrifuge that it admitted buying in 1987 from an international black-market network headed by A.Q. Khan, the father of Pakistan's nuclear arsenal. But IAEA inspectors determined that Iran failed to reveal that it had obtained blueprints for the P2, a centrifuge twice as efficient as the P1, from the Khan network in 1995. Iranian officials say they did nothing with the blueprints until 2002, when they were given to a private firm that produced and tested seven modified P2 parts, then abandoned the effort. IAEA inspectors, however, discovered that Iran sought to buy thousands of specialized magnets for P2s from European suppliers, and Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said last year that research on the centrifuges continued. The IAEA has been stymied in trying to discover the project's scope, fueling suspicions that the Iranian military may be secretly running a P2 development program parallel to the civilian-run P1 program at Natanz.

5. The CIA turned over to the IAEA thousands of pages of computer simulations and documents from a defector's laptop that indicated that Iranian experts studied mounting a nuclear warhead on a ballistic missile. The laptop also contained drawings and notes on sophisticated detonators and conventional high explosives arrayed in a ring — the shape used to trigger nuclear weapons — and implicated a firm linked to Iran's military in uranium-enrichment studies. The documents included drawings of a 1,200-foot-deep underground shaft apparently designed to confine a nuclear test explosion. Iran denounced the materials as "politically motivated and baseless," but promised to cooperate with an IAEA investigation into so-called Project 111 once other questions are settled. U.S., French, German and British intelligence officials think the materials are genuine.

6. Iran itself, apparently by mistake, gave to the IAEA a document supplied by the Khan network on casting and milling uranium metal into hemispheres. Uranium hemispheres have no application in power plants, but form the explosive cores of nuclear weapons. Iran denied asking for the document or doing anything with it. It barred the IAEA from making copies but agreed to have it placed under seal. IAEA investigators have been interviewing Khan network members to verify Iran's version of how it got the document. They also have been looking into whether Iran received a Chinese warhead design from the Khan network. Libya, which bought the same materials Iran did, had the design.

7. Iran has failed since 2003 to satisfy IAEA inquiries about experiments it conducted from 1989 to 1993 that produced Polonium-210. Polonium-210 is a highly radioactive substance that has limited civilian applications but is used in warheads to initiate the fission chain reaction that results in a nuclear blast.

8. Many U.S. and European officials dispute Iran's claim that it needs to enrich uranium for nuclear power plants. They point out that the only Iranian nuclear power plant under construction is the one reference above being built by Russia, which has an agreement to supply it with low-enriched uranium fuel for 10 years. Moreover, they contend that Iran doesn't have enough uranium to provide fuel for the lifetimes of the seven to 10 civilian reactors it says it needs to meet the demands of its growing population. It would be far cheaper for Iran to expand domestic consumption of natural gas, of which it has the world's second-largest reserves, and oil, of which it has the world's third-largest reserves, according to a study by the Los Alamos National Laboratory.

9. If Iran is not developing a nuclear weapon, they have nothing to hide. There is no reason whatsoever to keep the IAEA from inspecting and documenting its nuclear development. Yet, as the IAEA Report just released indicates, Iran is in fact decreasing its cooperation with the IAEA. “Iran has continued to shield many aspects of its nuclear program. Iran’s ‘cooperation has been reactive rather than proactive,’ the report said, adding that because of restrictions Iran has placed on inspectors the agency’s understanding of the full scope of Iran’s nuclear program is ‘diminishing.’”

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Countdown to Doomsday: Ending the Iranian Nuclear Threat

The next IAEA report on Iran's nuclear program is due in the coming week. Iran continues to push forward its program despite a series of tepid sanctions and after years of fruitless negotiations with the EU-3 - France, Germany and England. At this point, Iran has 3,000 centrifuges operational with plans to bring many more on-line. It takes 3,000 centrifuges running for one year to produce enough plutonium to create one atomic bomb. It is likely that Iran is within twenty-four months of having a nuclear weapon. We are at the tipping point on Iran, if not already beyond it. Either we introduce economy crippling sanctions on Iran, or our only remaining option will be war.

It is clear that fact is recognized by the key players, both in the rest of the world and within the theocracy itself where there is ancedotal evidence of a split on their nuclear program. This evidence includes the resignation of the theocracy's chief nuclear negotiator, Larenjani, and recent accusations by Ahmedinejad that those inside the regime who question the nuclear program are traitors.

Russia, the country responsible for building Iran's nuclear program, is a wild card. But if the recent article by Amir Taheri is accurate, then Putin's meeting with Supreme Guide Ali al Khameini and President Ahmedinejad has resulted in a catharsis, with Putin now recognizing just how dangerous is a nuclear armed Iranian theocracy on Russia's southern flank. There are indications that Russia is considering changing its tack on Iran, which would of course be a major step forward.

All of that said, ultimately, the key to effective sanctions rests with Germany and France, both heavilly involved in the Iranian economy and both of whom have refused to impose serious sanctions against Iran to this point. The new regime in France has firmly stated that Iran cannot be allowed to continue its nuclear program. And Angela Merkel in Germany has agreed to review her country's economic ties to Iran. Both will have to overcome signficant resistance from entrenched corporate interests if effective sanctions are to be imposed.

If Germany and France agree to effective sanctions against Iran, then there is a possibility that war can be averted. That will be all the more true if Russia agrees to cooperate with the US and EU. But the window for the West to finally take effective action short of war is rapidly closing. The next round of sanctions likely be the last opportunity to solve the problem of a nuclear Iranian theocracy peacefully before their access to nuclear weapons becomes a fait accompli.

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