By William Tucker
Authors note: I wrote this article in early October 2009. My purpose in posting it here is to give some background information on the Iranian nuclear standoff. As things move to a crisis point I will post relevant information here.
The vast majority of information available to the public on the Iranian nuclear program has been speculative at best and contradictory at worst. Perhaps the most confusing document came out in late 2007 in which the U.S. intelligence community declared that Iran had halted work on a nuclear weapons program and instead was wholly focused on energy production. It was my contention at the time that this statement was not one made in fact, but rather published for reasons of political expediency. At the time the Bush administration was struggling to come up with a strategy for a deteriorating situation in Iraq and was looking to Iran for help stabilizing the situation. Though this attempt failed the ensuing troop surge managed to bring a tense stability to Iraq and by extension a means by which the U.S. could begin to draw down the troop presence. Because of a recent revelation by the Obama administration this previous analysis holds true.
In a recent address to the General Assembly of the United Nations, President Obama stated that U.S. intelligence had been monitoring the construction of another uranium enrichment site near the holy city of Qom, Iran. According to U.S. and Israeli intelligence sources, the existence of this nuclear facility was known as far back as 2006 – one year before the 2007 National Intelligence Estimate upon which my previous analysis was based. The construction of an enrichment facility on a military installation hardly fits into a civil nuclear program and is not an occurrence that one could easily over look when drafting an NIE. The bottom line is that the crisis over the Iranian nuclear weapons was not resolved, but simply put on hold because the U.S. needed Iranian cooperation in Iraq.
It is now two years later and the crisis has once again come to the forefront with all trends and indicators pointing towards conflict with Iran. Although the Iranians have agreed to allow inspections of the new facility by the IAEA, it is unlikely that anything substantial will result. In fact, the inspections are completely meaningless because uranium can go through the enrichment process at different facilities and leave the inspectors chasing ghosts and rumors. But a nuclear weapons program is far more complex than creating the needed nuclear fuel. The real aspects of the program lay within experimentation with the simultaneous detonation of precisely manufactured conventional explosives. These explosives, commonly known as a shaped charged, are arranged around the outside of the nuclear material in a pattern that resembles a soccer ball. Creating and manufacturing these materials are by far the most difficult aspect of any nuclear weapons program, not to mention the full scale assembly and production of a nuclear device.
Iran, with a little help from several Russian scientists (this information was recently leaked by Israeli intelligence – they know the Russians by name and claim they were sent by the Russian government), seems to have overcome these obstacles. The Associated Press recently disclosed information from a classified IAEA document which stated the following:
• The IAEA’s assessment that Iran worked on developing a chamber inside a ballistic missile capable of housing a warhead payload “that is quite likely to be nuclear.”
• That Iran engaged in “probable testing” of explosives commonly used to detonate a nuclear warhead — a method known as a “full-scale hemispherical explosively driven shock system.”
• An assessment that Iran worked on developing a system “for initiating a hemispherical high explosive charge” of the kind used to help spark a nuclear blast.
• The agency … assesses that Iran has sufficient information to be able to design and produce a workable implosion nuclear device (an atomic bomb) based on HEU (highly enriched uranium) as the fission fuel.
With this information it does indeed appear that Iran is pursuing a nuclear weapon, and this poses a serious problem – the west, a majority of Arab nations, and perhaps the country most threatened by a nuclear Iran, Israel, do not want this to happen. In the face of such opposition one would think Iran would abandon such a program to avoid isolation, but Tehran currently has Russian and Chinese backing – at least for now. Additionally, the Iranians, along with the Russians, view Obama as a weak president who will not use military force to destroy their nuclear facilities (please note that this is not a personal opinion, intelligence assessments from Iran and Russia make this claim). Tehran also believes that the Israelis do not have the military capability of striking and destroying their dispersed nuclear program. In essence, the Iranians believe, albeit wrongly, that they can pursue a nuclear weapons program unencumbered.
Israel has stated that they will not allow Iran to acquire nuclear weapons under any circumstances, but the red line that Iran would have to cross before the Israelis took action is unknown. Israel does have some military options to target the known fixed locations of the nuclear program, but none of these are very promising. Unfortunately, these options would only delay the Iranian program and not destroy it. Knowing full well the limitations of its military power it is unlikely that Israel will be dissuaded from taking action. Many attribute Israel’s heavy reliance on military power to memories of the holocaust, while this may be accurate up to a point it does little to explain the nature of the Israeli state. Israel is a small, densely populated country that lacks strategic depth. Any large sustained conventional attack against the country would be devastating meaning that escalation to a nuclear exchange with another country is unthinkable.
While we may not know at what point an attack against the Iranian nuclear sites will occur we can be sure that Iran will respond. The Iranian military is not very sophisticated nor is it able to project force beyond Iran’s borders, but Tehran has other tools at its disposal. First and foremost is the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) which is a special military force charged with protecting the revolution and supporting the clerical regime. Most notably however, is the training that the IRGC gives to terrorist groups worldwide. By training and funding global terrorism Iran is able to strike at its enemies worldwide as evidenced by attacks as far away as Europe and South America. Perhaps the most widely known of Iranian terrorist proxies is the Lebanese Hezbollah which participates in terrorist and conventional fighting against Israel. It is highly likely that Hezbollah would be used in the first response to an attack against Iranian nuclear facilities. Iran could also use its missile arsenal with conventional warheads to strike directly at Israel, but these missiles have been unreliable and may not be able to penetrate Israel’s missile defense system. In an act of defiance or desperation Iran could attempt to close the Strait of Hormuz; an act that would affect 40% of the world’s oil supply. While the Iranians believe that Obama is a weak president such an act in the middle of a tepid global economic recovery would force the U.S. to respond militarily to open the Strait, which could lead to a wider war. These are the current trends, but of course nothing is written in stone. Perhaps the Israeli diplomat Abba Eban said it best, “History teaches us that men and nations behave wisely once they have exhausted all other alternatives.”
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