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Hot Air » Blog Archive » Nuke expert: Obama?s two-week inspection deadline gives Iran time to hide the evidence

Allowing access within two weeks of the announcement would in effect give Tehran almost a month after its Sept. 21 acknowledgment of the plant’s existence to obscure evidence, they said.

David Albright, a former international weapons inspector and president of the Washington-based Institute for Science and International Security, said it would probably take Iran some time to conceal activities. But, “if you have a month, you have the time,” he said.

A European official who declined to be identified because of the sensitivity of the issue said the six world powers “did well” to win Iran’s agreement to permit access. But the official acknowledged that swifter access would have been better…

But Albright said faster is better. “It’s not good that the inspection has taken so long,” he said.

“There is no reason it could not have happened yesterday,” he said. “It should have.”

He’s assuming Iran will have a month because he’s using Sept. 21, the date they finally told the IAEA that the Qom facility exists, as his starting point. But in fact, assuming they intend to let inspectors into the plant — which is still uncertain, believe it or not — they probably started moving equipment out of there before then. Remember, the strong suspicion among diplomats is that Iran only disclosed the Qom site because they were tipped off that the west knew about it and was about to reveal it; the “voluntary” disclosure was Tehran’s way of making it look as though they were being good, honest international citizens. In all likelihood there was some (short) interim period between the time they learned that the west was onto them and their decision to disclose on Sept. 21, and that interim could have been used to hide evidence. That was the risk the west ran by sitting on their intelligence about the building, which leaves The One now forced to issue tough-sounding deadlines that really don’t mean much since (a) the smoking gun is probably already gone and (b) a truly tough deadline, demanding inspections immediately in order to seize whatever smoking gun might still be there, would provoke an international crisis if Iran said no, and the west simply isn’t prepared to deal with that. In fact, read this dishy Telegraph piece about the argument between Obama, Brown, and Sarkozy about when to spill the beans on Qom. The Europeans wanted it done in dramatic fashion at the Security Council meeting that Obama chaired, but The One didn’t want his special moment on disarmament interrupted so they waited until the next morning to do it at a presser. And really, why not? It’s already too late. What’s another day?

So where are we at now? Same place we’ve always been: Wondering if Iran’s simply jerking us around to buy time.

For the administration, though, the problem is that no one is certain that the Iranian government will actually do what Western officials say that it has now agreed to do. In fact, on Friday, less than 24 hours after the talks in Geneva broke up, Iranian officials did not sound as if they thought they had promised anything.

“No, no!” Mehdi Saffare, Iran’s ambassador to Britain and a member of the Iranian delegation to the negotiations, said, according to the Associated Press. He said that the idea of sending Iran’s enriched uranium out of the county had “not been discussed yet.”

This is not the first time that Western officials have left discussions with their Iranian counterparts thinking they had a deal, only to see it melt away. In 2007, European diplomats said they thought they had wrung a concession from Iran on the same issue, enriching uranium outside the country for use in Iranian reactors, only to have Iran’s supreme religious leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, reject the idea as an infringement of Iran’s sovereignty.

“That’s the big ‘if,’ isn’t it?” a senior Obama administration official said. “Will they do it? No one wants to do a premature victory lap.”

By all means, let’s hold off on that, um, “victory lap” for the time being. Your must-read of the day is this Jackson Diehl commentary on what will be, in short order, the new international reality on Iran: Trying to “contain” an Islamic fundamentalist regime that has nuclear weapons. We all know the talks are going to go nowhere, so much so that Congress is already working on authorizing sanctions so that Obama can put them into practice at a moment’s notice. Which is to say, we’re really just buying time too at this point. The reckoning will come next year.

Report Says Iran Has Data to Make a Nuclear Bomb – NYTimes.com

Senior staff members of the United Nations nuclear agency have concluded in a confidential analysis that Iran has acquired “sufficient information to be able to design and produce a workable” atom bomb.

The report by experts in the International Atomic Energy Agency stresses in its introduction that its conclusions are tentative and subject to further confirmation of the evidence, which it says came from intelligence agencies and its own investigations.

But the report’s conclusions, described by senior European officials, go well beyond the public positions taken by several governments, including the United States.

Two years ago, American intelligence agencies published a detailed report concluding that Tehran halted its efforts to design a nuclear weapon in 2003. But in recent months, Britain has joined France, Germany and Israel in disputing that conclusion, saying the work has been resumed.

A senior American official said last week that the United States was now re-evaluating its 2007 conclusions.

The atomic agency’s report also presents evidence that beyond improving upon bomb-making information gathered from rogue nuclear experts around the world, Iran has done extensive research and testing on how to fashion the components of a weapon. It does not say how far that work has progressed.

The report, titled “Possible Military Dimensions of Iran’s Nuclear Program,” was produced in consultation with a range of nuclear weapons experts inside and outside the agency. It draws a picture of a complex program, run by Iran’s Ministry of Defense, “aimed at the development of a nuclear payload to be delivered using the Shahab 3 missile system,” Iran’s medium-range missile, which can strike the Middle East and parts of Europe. The program, according to the report, apparently began in early 2002.

If Iran is designing a warhead, that would represent only part of the complex process of making nuclear arms. Experts say Iran has already mastered the hardest part, enriching the uranium that can be used as nuclear fuel.

While the analysis represents the judgment of the nuclear agency’s senior staff, a struggle has erupted in recent months over whether to make it public. The dispute pits the agency’s departing director, Mohamed ElBaradei, against his own staff and against foreign governments eager to intensify pressure on Iran.

Dr. ElBaradei has long been reluctant to adopt a confrontational strategy with Iran, an approach he considers counterproductive. Responding to calls for the report’s release, he has raised doubts about its completeness and reliability.

Last month, the agency issued an unusual statement cautioning it “has no concrete proof” that Iran ever sought to make nuclear arms, much less to perfect a warhead. On Saturday in India, Dr. ElBaradei was quoted as saying that “a major question” about the authenticity of the evidence kept his agency from “making any judgment at all” on whether Iran had ever sought to design a nuclear warhead.

Even so, the emerging sense in the intelligence world that Iran has solved the major nuclear design problems poses a new diplomatic challenge for President Obama and his allies as they confront Iran.

American officials say that in the direct negotiations with Iran that began last week, it will be vital to get the country to open all of its suspected sites to international inspectors. That is a long list, topped by the underground nuclear enrichment center under construction near Qum, that was revealed 10 days ago.

Iran has acknowledged that the underground facility is intended as a nuclear enrichment center, but says the fuel it makes will be used solely to produce nuclear power and medical isotopes. It was kept heavily protected, Iranian officials said, to ward off potential attacks.

Iran said last week that it would allow inspectors to visit the site this month. In the past three years, amid mounting evidence of a possible military dimension to its nuclear program, Iran has denied the agency wide access to installations, documents and personnel.

In recent weeks, there have been leaks about the internal report, perhaps intended to press Dr. ElBaradei into releasing it.

The report’s existence has been rumored for months, and The Associated Press, saying it had seen a copy, reported fragments of it in September. On Friday, more detailed excerpts appeared on the Web site of the Institute for Science and International Security, run by David Albright, a nuclear expert.

In recent interviews, a senior European official familiar with the contents of the full report described it to The New York Times. He confirmed that Mr. Albright’s excerpts were authentic. The excerpts were drawn from a 67-page version of the report written earlier this year and since revised and lengthened, the official said; its main conclusions remain unchanged.

“This is a running summary of where we are,” the official said.

“But there is some loose language,” he added, and it was “not ready for publication as an official document.”

Most dramatically, the report says the agency “assesses that Iran has sufficient information to be able to design and produce a workable implosion nuclear device” based on highly enriched uranium.

Weapons based on the principle of implosion are considered advanced models compared with the simple gun-type bomb that the United States dropped on Hiroshima. They use a blast wave from a sphere of conventional explosives to compress a ball of bomb fuel into a supercritical mass, starting the atomic chain reaction and progressing to the fiery blast. Implosion designs, compact by nature, are considered necessary for making nuclear warheads small and powerful enough to fit atop a missile.

The excerpts of the analysis also suggest the Iranians have done a wide array of research and testing to perfect nuclear arms, like making high-voltage detonators, firing test explosives and designing warheads.

The evidence underlying these conclusions is not new: Some of it was reported in a confidential presentation to many nations in early 2008 by the agency’s chief inspector, Ollie Heinonen.

Iran maintains that its scientists have never conducted research on how to make a warhead. Iranian officials say any documents to the contrary are fraudulent.

But in August, a public report to the board of the I.A.E.A. by its staff concluded that the evidence of Iran’s alleged military activity was probably genuine.

It said “the information contained in that documentation appears to have been derived from multiple sources over different periods of time, appears to be generally consistent, and is sufficiently comprehensive and detailed that it needs to be addressed by Iran with a view to removing the doubts” about the nature of its nuclear program.

The agency’s tentative analysis also says that Iran “most likely” obtained the needed information for designing and building an implosion bomb “from external sources” and then adapted the information to its own needs.

It said nothing specific about the “external sources,” but many intelligence agencies assume that Iran obtained a bomb design from A. Q. Khan, the rogue Pakistani black marketer who sold it machines to enrich uranium. That information may have been supplemented by a Russian nuclear weapons scientist who visited Iran often, investigators say.

The I.A.E.A.’s internal report concluded that the staff believed “that non-nuclear experiments conducted in Iran would give confidence that the implosion system would function correctly.”

News Analysis – U.S. Wonders if Iran Is Playing for Time or Is Serious on Deal – NYTimes.com

WASHINGTON — President Obama got what he said he wanted when United States negotiators met with their Iranian counterparts this week in Geneva: direct engagement, without preconditions, with Iran.

But the trick now for Mr. Obama, administration officials concede, will be to avoid getting tripped up. In other words, is the Iranian government serious this time?

The clearest risk is that the Iranians may play for time, as they have often been accused of doing in the past, making promises and encouraging more meetings, while waiting for political currents to change or the closed ranks among the Western allies to break.

After Tehran agreed to send most of its openly declared enriched uranium outside Iran to be turned into fuel, Obama administration officials were clearly walking a fine line on Thursday between celebrating what could be a possible breakthrough in international efforts to rein in Iran’s nuclear ambitions and sounding appropriately skeptical that the administration was not going to be played by Tehran.

“Taking the step of transferring its low-enriched uranium to a third country would be a step towards building confidence that Iran’s program is in fact peaceful,” Mr. Obama said Thursday. But, perhaps aware of the country’s history of appearing to make concessions and then backing off, he quickly added: “We’re not interested in talking for the sake of talking. If Iran does not take steps in the near future to live up to its obligations, then the United States will not continue to negotiate indefinitely, and we are prepared to move towards increased pressure.”

It was, in many ways, the exact opposite of what a White House usually does after major international talks. Instead of painting lukewarm concessions as major breakthroughs and going on and on about “warm substantive” meetings, officials were treating a potentially major breakthrough as if it were a suspicious package.

If Iran has really agreed to send most of its openly declared enriched uranium out of the country to be turned into fuel, that is a significant concession, experts said, and much more than the Bush administration ever got over the years of its nonengagement dance with Iran.

“This is actually quite important if it takes place,” said Ray Takeyh, a former Iran adviser to the Obama administration. “If you establish an arrangement whereby Iran’s fuel is exported abroad, then that relieves some degree of your proliferation concern.”

For the administration, though, the problem is that no one is certain that the Iranian government will actually do what Western officials say that it has now agreed to do. In fact, on Friday, less than 24 hours after the talks in Geneva broke up, Iranian officials did not sound as if they thought they had promised anything.

“No, no!” Mehdi Saffare, Iran’s ambassador to Britain and a member of the Iranian delegation to the negotiations, said, according to the Associated Press. He said that the idea of sending Iran’s enriched uranium out of the county had “not been discussed yet.”

This is not the first time that Western officials have left discussions with their Iranian counterparts thinking they had a deal, only to see it melt away. In 2007, European diplomats said they thought they had wrung a concession from Iran on the same issue, enriching uranium outside the country for use in Iranian reactors, only to have Iran’s supreme religious leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, reject the idea as an infringement of Iran’s sovereignty.

“That’s the big ‘if,’ isn’t it?” a senior Obama administration official said. “Will they do it? No one wants to do a premature victory lap.” He spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly about the issue.

There are some circumstances that would seem to favor Mr. Obama, analysts said. Fresh from the turmoil in Iran after the disputed presidential election in June that secured a second term for the hard-line president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the Iranian government is “fighting on three fronts,” said Abbas Milani, director of the Iranian studies program at Stanford University. “They’re fighting with the people of Iran, they’re fighting within themselves, and they’re fighting with the international community. They’ve just decided that they can’t fight a three-front war, so they’re trying to lower the tension on the fight with the international community, at least.”

In recent weeks, Mr. Obama has also secured — at least for now — some support from Russia, which emerged after Mr. Obama decided to replace the missile defense program in Eastern Europe favored by President George W. Bush with a version less threatening to Moscow. President Dmitri A. Medvedev of Russia signaled for the first time that Russia would be amenable to longstanding American requests to toughen sanctions against Iran if the nuclear talks failed.

Still, the administration’s caution is warranted, said Mr. Takeyh, the former adviser on Iran, especially since some Iranian officials in Tehran denied on Friday that they had assured the United States and other major powers in Geneva that they would open a recently disclosed uranium enrichment plant near Qum to international inspectors within two weeks.

This was in addition to the dispute over whether Iran had agreed to send much of its low-enriched uranium, known in the field as L.E.U., to be turned into fuel in other counties.

“You don’t want to go out and celebrate an achievement and then watch the Iranians backtrack,” Mr. Takeyh said. “You have to actually get that L.E.U. on a plane.”

Jamal Dajani: Israel vs. Iran: The Writing Is on the Wall

Iran has agreed to allow international nuclear inspectors to view its recently revealed uranium enrichment plant near the city of Qom, and President Obama has called talks between U.S. diplomats and their Iranian counterparts about the country’s nuclear program a “constructive beginning.”

However, recent events and heated rhetoric concerning Iran’s nuclear program are reminiscent of the final days that lead to the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003 when then U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell presented the United Nations Security Council on February 5th of that year with what he called “solid” evidence that showed Iraq had still not complied with resolutions calling for it to disarm and was maintaining a secret WMD program. It seems that history is repeating itself.

Unlike what happened to Iraq in 2003, an invasion of Iran is not on the horizon; however, the prospect of targeting its nuclear facilities is more real than ever. More so than during the Bush Administration. The reason is simple: no amount of pressure or sanctions will force Iran to abandon what it perceives as its “unalienable right” to pursue its nuclear ambitions.

In an article in June, I outlined the drive behind Iran’s nuclear ambition, and this has not changed. But most importantly the Obama Administration, although pursuing diplomatic means, seems to be convinced that the Iranians are conducting a clandestine nuclear program parallel to the public one. The aim of this, though of course not admitted by the Iranians, is clearly the acquisition of nuclear weapons. This position is shared by Israel, which will most likely get the green light to attack Iran’s nuclear facilities by spring of 2010 when all negotiations with Iran will have hit a dead end.

Since April of this year, the Israeli military has been preparing itself to launch a massive aerial assault on Iran’s nuclear facilities. The United States and Israel have recently conducted their most complex military exercise ever, jointly testing three ballistic missile defense systems. Among the steps taken to ready Israeli forces for what would be a risky raid requiring pinpoint aerial strikes are the acquisition of three Airborne Warning and Control (AWAC) aircraft and regional missions to simulate the attack.

The Israeli Air Force has recently been conducting training exercises involving F15 and F16 jets, helicopters and refueling tankers flying to distances of more than 870 miles: the distance between Israel and Iran. Among recent preparations by the air force was the Israeli attack of a weapons convoy in Sudan allegedly bound for militants in the Gaza Strip.

A recent article in the British Daily Express reported that Israeli fighter jets have been allowed to use Saudi airspace to launch go-it-alone air strikes on Iranian nuclear installations. The issue has been discussed in a closed-door meeting in London, where British Intelligence Chief Sir John Scarlett, his Israeli counterpart Meir Dagan, and a Saudi official were present. According to the report, Scarlett has been told that Saudi airspace would be at Israel’s disposal should Tel Aviv decide to move forward with his military plans against Iran. The Saudis have denied such claims; however, for the past few weeks Saudi-sponsored media has been raising concern over the prospect of a nuclear-armed Iran. No mention of Israel’s 200 plus nuclear warheads.

A survey just released by the American Jewish Committee reports that for the first time ever, a majority of American Jews support using military force to prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons. Fifty-six percent of American Jews think U.S. should strike Iran, while sixty-six percent of Israeli Jews back such an attack.

How many Americans support an attack on Iran?

Fifty-seven percent of American voters say Israel would be justified in attacking Iran’s nuclear facilities, given that Iran has publicly threatened to annihilate Israel, according to a McLaughlin poll conducted on May 8-9.

I am not being an alarmist, but the writing is on the wall.

Iran: We reached no deal to ship nuclear fuel

‘Obama won’t press Israel to reveal nuclear arsenal’ – Haaretz – Israel News
U.S. President Barack Obama will not pressure Israel to disclose its nuclear arsenal to international inspection, as reported on Friday by The Washington Times.

The 40-year-old covert agreement between the U.S. and Israel has allegedly permitted Israel to maintain an active nuclear facility without inspection that contains several hundred nuclear bombs.

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The joint understanding was apparently reached during Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s visit to the White House in May this year.

The report also said that the senior officials who had confirmed these findings spoke on the condition that they would not be named.

Israel was nervous Obama would retract U.S. understanding of the secret treaty signed in September 1969 in a summit between former U.S. President Richard Nixon and the then Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir, the report added.

To date there is no official documentation of such an agreement nor has it ever been acknowledged by any U.S. or Israeli government.

The report follows a United Nations nuclear assembly resolution which urged Israel earlier this month to put all its atomic sites under the world body’s inspection and join the Non-Proliferation Treaty.

Israel deplored the measure for singling it out while many of its neighbors remained hostile to its existence, and said it would not cooperate with it.

The non-binding resolution, which passed for the first time in 18 years of attempts thanks to more developing nation votes, voiced concern about “Israeli nuclear capabilities” and urged the International Atomic Energy Agency to tackle the issue.

Israel is one of only three countries worldwide along with India and Pakistan outside the nuclear NPT and is widely assumed to have the Middle East’s only nuclear arsenal, though it has never confirmed or denied this.

UN Security Council members Russia and China also backed the resolution, which passed by 49 votes to 45 against in a floor vote at the IAEA’s annual member states conference.

The vote split along Western and developing nation lines. There were 16 abstentions.

“Israel will not cooperate in any matter with this resolution which is only aiming at reinforcing political hostilities and lines of division in the Middle East region,” chief Israeli delegate David Danieli told the chamber.

Western states said it was unfair and counterproductive to isolate one member state. They said an IAEA resolution passed on Thursday, urging all Middle East nations to foreswear atomic bombs, included Israel and made Friday’s proposal unnecessary.

Arab nations said Israel had brought the resolution on itself by having never signed the 40-year-old NPT.

Before the vote, U.S. Ambassador Glyn Davies said the resolution was “redundant … Such an approach is highly politicized and does not address the complexities at play regarding crucial nuclear-related issues in the Middle East.”

Calling the resolution “unbalanced”, Canada tried to block a vote on the floor with a “no-action motion”. But the procedural maneuver lost by an eight-vote margin. The same motion prevailed in 2007 and 2008.

A senior diplomat from the non-aligned movement of developing nations said times had changed.

“People and countries are bolder now, willing to call a spade a spade. You cannot hide or ignore the truth, the double standards, of Israel’s nuclear capability forever,” he said.

Jackson Diehl – The Coming Failure on Iran – washingtonpost.com

The Obama administration’s positive tone following its first diplomatic encounter with Iran covers a deep and growing gloom in Washington and European capitals. Seven hours of palaver in Geneva haven’t altered an emerging conclusion: None of the steps the West is considering to stop the Iranian nuclear program is likely to work.

Not talks. Not sanctions, even of the “crippling” variety the Obama administration has spoken of. Not military strikes. And probably not support for regime change through the still-vibrant opposition.

For obvious reasons, senior officials won’t state this broad conclusion out loud. But it’s not hard to find pessimistic public statements about three of the four options. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has called the prospects for diplomacy “very doubtful.” Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates has said military action will do no more than “buy time.” Swedish Foreign Minister Carl Bildt, echoing private statements I’ve heard from the Obama administration, told me last week that a strategy of backing the Iranian opposition “would take too long” and might well produce a government with the same nuclear policy.

As for sanctions, Western officials rarely disparage them in public. They don’t want to help spoilers in Russia and China who want to block U.N. action against Iran for their own reasons. But many are doubtful about them, and with good reason. Despite hints of cooperation by Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, the White House is pessimistic that Russia or China will agree to the sort of escalation in sanctions that would command Iran’s attention, such as a ban on gasoline supplies or arms sales or new investments in oil and gas production.

The history of sanctions in the region also is not good: More than a decade of punishment, including regular airstrikes, had no positive impact on Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. Iran’s current rulers, many of whom came of age in the Revolutionary Guards during the Iran-Iraq war, sound convincing when they say they are ready for the country to suffer more austerity for the cause of Iranian greatness.

What of Thursday’s talks in Geneva? Iran agreed to international inspections of its new nuclear facility and to ship out of the country some of the uranium it has enriched. Yet those modest concessions may complicate the negotiations and the prospects for sanctions. The headlines about them already obscured the fact that Tehran’s negotiator declined to respond to the central Western demand: that Iran freeze its uranium enrichment work. Iran has rejected that idea repeatedly, and there is no reason to believe the hard-liners in power will change their position.

In the meantime, talks about the details of inspections and the uranium shipments could easily become protracted, buying the regime valuable time. (On Friday the Associated Press quoted a member of the Iranian delegation as saying it had not, in fact, agreed to the uranium deal.) Meanwhile, Tehran’s tactical retreat has provided Russia and China with an excuse to veto new sanctions — something they would have been hard-pressed to do had Iran struck an entirely defiant tone in Geneva.

The Obama administration and its allies have said repeatedly that they will pursue diplomacy until the end of the year and then seek sanctions if diplomacy hasn’t worked. That sets up a foreseeable and very unpleasant crossroads. “If by early next year we are getting nothing through diplomacy and sanctions,” says scholar Kenneth Pollack of the Brookings Institution’s Saban Center, “the entire policy is going to be revealed as a charade.”

What then? Pollack, a former Clinton administration official, says there is one obvious Plan B: “containment,” a policy that got its name during the Cold War. The point would be to limit Iran’s ability to produce nuclear weapons or exercise its influence through the region by every means possible short of war — and to be prepared to sustain the effort over years, maybe decades. It’s an option that has been lurking at the back of the debate about Iran for years. “In their heart of hearts I think the Obama administration knows that this is where this is going,” Pollack says.

I suspect he’s right. I also don’t expect Obama and his aides to begin talking about a policy shift anytime soon. For the next few months we’ll keep hearing about negotiations, sanctions and possibly Israeli military action as ways to stop an Iranian bomb. By far the best chance for a breakthrough, as I see it, lies in a victory by the Iranian opposition over the current regime. If that doesn’t happen, it may soon get harder to disguise the hollowness of Western policy.