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As pressure mounts for new sanctions against Iran, experts say its alleged nuclear weapons programme is struggling to find scientists and technicians and faces sabotage by Western and Israeli agents.

Despite already being the subject of economic sanctions and facing the threat of more concerted international action, Iran is pushing ahead with attempts to enrich large quantities of uranium to make nuclear fuel.

Having said it plans to refine its three or four percent enriched uranium to the 20 percent level that could be used in a research reactor, Tehran is on the threshold of perfecting the 90 percent strength needed for a bomb.

“It’s going slower … than they anticipated. But they are moving in that direction,” US Defence Secretary Robert Gates said on Sunday in an interview with the NBC network.

Once 90 percent enrichment is achieved, it will only remain for Iran to assemble a missile with separate stages, something intelligence agents think Iran has made considerable progress towards over the past three years.

China was continuing Tuesday to resist Western calls for new economic sanctions, disappointing Washington by calling for “dialogue and negotiation” just ahead of a 47-nation summit on world nuclear proliferation.

But in the meantime, Iran has already run into technical difficulties, some related to its limited engineering capacity, others deliberately engineered by Western intelligence in a bid to sabotage the programme.

“The Iranians are still enriching uranium, but they’ve run into some problems,” a senior European official told AFP, speaking on condition of anonymity to confirm details of a covert international operation.

According to Western experts, Iran’s array of centrifuges has allowed it to produce around two tonnes of weakly enriched uranium, but only at the cost of working its out-of-date equipment almost to breaking point.

In a race to beat imminent sanctions and the possible threat of Israeli or US air strikes, Iranian scientists rely on so-called “dual use” imported civilian equipment to maintain their creaking production line.

This is where Western spy networks come in.

Having identified much of Iran’s international network of buyers and front organisations, legally and illegally gathering the tools Tehran needs, Western agents are able to almost-literally throw a spanner in the works.

“For example, if a certain kind of lubricant is needed for such-and-such a task, it’s delivered to them. Then, six months later, it starts to corrode the material it has been applied to,” one specialist told AFP.

Jean-Pierre Maulny, an analyst at the Institute of International and Strategic Relations in Paris, confirmed the practice, which he said was possible thanks to what is known as the “Wassenaar Arrangement”.

Set up in Vienna in 1995 and with 35 members, the Wassenaar group shares information on what other countries are seeking to import in terms of weapons and civilian equipment with possible military applications.

Once a picture is built up of a possible rogue state’s intentions, other agencies — such as national intelligence services — can act.

Where are Iran’s centrifuges built? Where are those that were to be installed in its recently revealed second enrichment centre outside Qom? Are there other secret sites in Iran? What can be done about them?

Spy agencies want answers to all these questions, and their task could be made easier by the other weak link in Tehran’s enrichment chain: its expert personnel, from skilled welders to top-flight nuclear scientists.

In January, Massoud Ali Mohammadi, 50-year-old Iranian nuclear physicist, was killed by a remote-controlled bomb hidden on a motorcycle parked near his Tehran home.

Iran has blamed the attack on either the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) or Israel’s Mossad.

Another Iranian physicist, Shahram Amiri, disappeared in June last year on pilgrimage to Saudi Arabia. US media report that he willingly defected to the CIA. Iran claims he was kidnapped.

Either way, he is no longer available to help build an Iranian bomb.

DEBKAfile, Political Analysis, Espionage, Terrorism, Security.

Tags: Barack Obama Iran nuclear

Iran threatens US with nuclear terror

This warning, along with an announcement that Iran would join the world’s nuclear club within a month, raised the pitch of Iranian anti-US rhetoric to a new high Tuesday, April 13, as 47 world leaders gathered in Washington for President Barack Obama’s Nuclear Security Summit. The statement published by Kayhan said: “If the US strikes Iran with nuclear weapons, there are elements which will respond with nuclear blasts in the centers of America’s main cities.” For the first time, debkafile‘s military sources report, Tehran indicated the possibility of passing nuclear devices to terrorists capable of striking inside the United States.

Without specifying whether those elements would be Iranian or others, Tehran aimed at the heart of the Nuclear Security Summit by threatening US cities with nuclear terror.

debkafile‘s Iranians sources report that Tehran is playing brinkmanship to demonstrate that the Washington summit, from which Iran and North Korea were excluded, failed before it began, because terrorist elements capable of striking inside the US had already acquired nuclear devices for that purpose.
Although Iran has yet to attain operational nuclear arms, our military sources believe it does possess the makings of primitive nuclear devices or “dirty bombs.”

In an interview ahead of the summit, President Obama warned: “If there was ever a detonation in New York City, or London, or Johannesburg, the ramifications… would be devastating.”
In another shot at the summit, Behzad Soltani, deputy director of Iran’s Atomic Commission, announced Tuesday: “Iran will join the world nuclear club within a month in a bid to deter possible attacks on the country.” He added: “No country would even think about attacking Iran once it is in the club.”

The Iranian official’s boast was run by the Fars news agency, published by Iran’s Revolutionary Guards Corps.

Behzadi further pointed to the construction of 360 MW nuclear power plant and a 40 MW research reactor in Iran’s central city of Arak, claiming the projects were 70 percent complete.
This plant is generally believed to have been built to enable Iran to produce weapons-grade plutonium as an alternative weapons fuel to highly-enriched uranium and material for radioactive weapons.
Sunday, April 11, debkafile reported that Iran is making much better progress than Western and Israeli intelligence estimates have held toward completing the Arak heavy water reactor.

Along with the strides made in its nuclear manufacturing capacity, Tehran’s anti-US rhetoric has grown more strident in the past week. Thursday, April 8, Iran’s Armed Forces Chief of Staff Maj.Gen. Hassan Firouzabadi said if the United States made any military moves on the Islamic Republic “none of the American troops in the region would go back home alive.”
debkafile‘s military sources report the presence of app. 220,000 US soldiers in the countries around Iran, including Gulf bases and waters, Iraq and Afghanistan. The Iranian general was reacting to US defense secretary Robert Gates’ warning that Washington’s policy decision to limit the use of nuclear arms if attacked did not apply to Iran and North Korea.

Israel accuses both Syria and Iran of supplying arms to the Shiite Muslim Hezbollah

JERUSALEM — Israeli President Shimon Peres on Tuesday accused Syria of supplying Scud missiles to the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah while publicly talking peace.

“Syria claims it wants peace while at the same time it delivers Scuds to Hezbollah whose only goal is to threaten the state of Israel,” Peres told public radio.

According to Arab media and specialised think-tanks, Syria has been sending some of its arsenal of Scud missiles to Lebanon, an allegation denied by Damascus.

“Syria believes it need do nothing more than let itself be courted by the world, while saying one thing and doing the opposite,” Peres, whose post is largely ceremonial, said amid Israeli media reports of rising tensions.

He made the comments just hours before flying to Paris, where he is expected to discuss the issue with French President Nicolas Sarkozy.

Israel’s Deputy Defence Minister Matan Vilnai declined to go into details of the alleged Scud shipments but said that “Hezbollah’s firing capacity has significantly improved.”

Israel accuses both Syria and Iran of supplying arms to the Shiite Muslim Hezbollah, whose deadly attack on an army patrol just inside Israel triggered a devastating in the summer of 2006.

In February, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu accused Lebanon of allowing Hezbollah to develop its stockpile of weapons.

Israel estimates Hezbollah’s arsenal at some 40,000 rockets, a significant rise from the group’s 14,000 rockets in 2006, when the 34-day conflict killed 1,200 Lebanese, mostly civilians, and more than 160 Israelis, mostly soldiers.

It says the stockpile includes rockets with a range of more than 300 kilometres (116 miles), capable of reaching major Israeli population centres.

Vilnai said that Israel would again conduct military exercises this year to prepare for possible rocket attacks by Hezbollah.

Hezbollah is blacklisted by Washington as a terrorist organisation, although it is part of a Lebanese coalition government formed in November by US- and Saudi-backed Prime Minister Saad Hariri.

Israel remains technically at war with Syria and Lebanon.

via AFP: Israel accuses Syria of arming Hezbollah.

Sarkozy warns of Israel-Iran war.

Sarkozy warns of Israel-Iran war

By JPOST.COM STAFF
13/04/2010 07:15

French leader: We must act on Iran to avoid “disaster” of IAF strike.

As the Nuclear Security Summit opened in Washington on Monday night, French President Nicolas Sarkozy warned that if the world doesn’t act to prevent Iran from attaining nuclear arms, it could be responsible for a war between Israel and the Islamic republic.

“I would not want the world to wake up to a conflict between Israel and Iran, quite simply because the international community has been incapable of acting,” the French president told CBS News.

He said that an IAF strike against Iran’s nuclear facilities would be disastrous.

“It would be a disaster. I don’t even want to think about that possibility,” he said. “And the best way to avoid this disaster scenario is to take measures in order to get Israel to understand that we are determined to ensure its security. And Israel, furthermore, must equally make the necessary effort in order to bring about a fair and lasting peace with their Palestinian neighbors.”

Sarkozy reiterated that a nuclear armed Iran would be “dangerous and unacceptable,” particularly in light of “the many statements made by Iranian leaders against the democracy that is Israel.”

He said that patience with Iran had it limits, and so time had come to vote for sanctions against the leaders “who are leading the country to the wall.”

Sarkozy added that while a unified Security Council decision would be best, it must not come at the expense of a resolution that is so toothless that it would achieve nothing.

The French president said that his country could not agree give up its nuclear weapons, since it would jeopardize the nation’s security.

Sarkozy stressed that France was the only country in the world that had actually declared how many nuclear warheads it possessed – which, he emphasized, had been dropped to 300 – and that it had stopped nuclear testing. But he said France could do no more than that at present.

“I feel that if I were to go any further, I could in fact jeopardize the security of my country, and as head of state, I am the guarantor and guarantee of that security,” he said.

The French president went on to say that while everyone would applaud a “virtual world” with no nuclear weapons, that was currently no more than “an awesome dream.”

“I have inherited the legacy of the efforts made by my predecessors to build up arms as a nuclear power, and I could not give up nuclear weapons, insofar as I wasn’t sure that the world was a stable and safe place,” he said. “I will not give up that nuclear weapon because it underpins my country’s security. I will not do so on a unilateral basis in a world as dangerous as the one in which we live in today.”

Iran, Israel and the Bomb – WSJ.com.

As far as grand summitry goes, an American President hasn’t hosted something like the current two-day talk-in on nuclear security in Washington since—well, as the Obama Administration described it, not since the San Francisco Conference of 1945. That meeting created the United Nations and helped establish the postwar world order. The agenda for the party that started yesterday is far more modest, but also hard to dislike.

President Obama invited the leaders of 46 countries to brainstorm ways to secure weapons-grade plutonium and uranium and ensure that terrorist groups don’t get their hands on a bomb. At the end of the Cold War, the U.S. tracked and locked down nuclear material in the former Soviet Union with admirable success through the Nunn-Lugar program. In our current post-9/11 era, al Qaeda and like-minded Islamists badly want a bomb, and this Washington gabfest can usefully focus minds and highlight best practices for governments willing to stop global proliferation.

Any achievements will be modest. Ukraine yesterday agreed to eliminate its stockpile of highly enriched uranium, nearly 16 years after giving up the nuclear arsenal it inherited from the Soviet Union. Kiev isn’t a proliferator of nuclear weapons, and while welcome, this deal won’t make anyone in the free world sleep better at night.

In his remarks on Sunday, President Obama declared that: “The single biggest threat to U.S. security, both short-term, medium-term and long-term, would be the possibility of a terrorist organization obtaining a nuclear weapon. This is something that could change the security landscape in this country and around the world for years to come.”

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Associated Press

President Barack Obama talks with Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan

That’s true enough, which only underscores what isn’t on the table this week. Namely, proliferation by Iran and North Korea. U.S. officials say they avoided these touchy subjects to ensure that all countries came on board. China might be annoyed by raising such state-sponsored proliferation, goes the argument, and in any case that’s being pursued at the U.N.

Really? Nuclear material in the hands of well-run democracies that play by international rules isn’t likely to fall into the hands of terrorists. However, were Iran to develop an atomic bomb and the means to deliver a warhead, the danger automatically rises that the world’s leading sponsor of terrorism might share it with its friends in Hezbollah or Hamas. Or imagine a North Korea hard up for cash and willing to sell a device to al Qaeda.

The restrictions on sensitive topics evidently doesn’t apply to Israel. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu cancelled plans to attend after Turkey and Egypt declared their intention to turn the spotlight on Israel’s presumed nuclear arsenal. Who wants to travel across the ocean to listen to insults?

Turkey’s Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan recently declared the Jewish state “the principal threat to peace in the region today.” But Israel’s nukes aren’t prompting him or the Saudis or Egyptians to kick-start their atomic programs; an Israeli bomb poses no threat to them. An Iranian bomb would.

In our view, “the single biggest threat to American security” would be to allow Iran to defy years of effort by the world’s leading nations and become a nuclear power. That would unleash a new age of proliferation that would swamp this week’s attempts at controlling nuclear materials. Prevent an Iranian breakout, and the risk of an al Qaeda nuclear attack falls sharply. High-profile nuclear summitry has its uses, but it won’t mean much if Mr. Obama dodges the hard decisions necessary to stop the world’s most dangerous proliferators.

U.S. official: China agrees to support new Iran nuclear sanctions – Haaretz – Israel News.

		U.S. President Obama and China’s President Hu Jintao, left, on Monday. (AP)

China shares U.S. concerns about Iran’s nuclear program and agreed to direct its officials to work on a UN sanctions resolution against Tehran, a U.S. official said after talks between U.S. President Barack Obama and Chinese President Hu Jintao.

Jeffrey Bader, Obama’s top China adviser, said Obama and Hu, meeting on the sidelines of a nuclear security summit, talked at length about Iran and discussed nuclear non-proliferation.

Obama stressed to Hu the need to act urgently against Iran’s nuclear program, and Hu agreed that Beijing would help craft a UN resolution, Bader said.

The White House had hoped the one-on-one meeting would help determine whether China was serious about moving forward with the United States, Britain, France, Russia and Germany in forging a new round of UN sanctions on Iran.

“The resolution will make clear to Iran the cost of pursuing a nuclear program that violates Iran’s obligations and responsibilities,” Bader told reporters after the meeting. “The Chinese are actively at the table in New York.”

Bader said the two presidents agreed that their delegations should work on a Security Council resolution on a new round of Iran sanctions “and that’s what we’re doing.”

Obama deputy national security adviser Ben Rhodes said the United States still expects a UN resolution by this spring.

Bader said Obama’s meeting with Hu “was a sign of international unity” on Iran. Western powers want to deter Iran from what they see as a drive to develop nuclear weapons, while Tehran insists its program has only peaceful, civilian purposes.

China, which holds veto power in the Security Council, had recently shown an increased willingness to pressure Iran while signaling it remained reluctant to take some of the toughest measures proposed by Washington and other Western powers.

Following the meeting, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Ma Zhaoxu said that President Hu had told Obama in “positive and constructive” talks on Monday that Beijing wanted to resolve bilateral economic friction through consultations.

China and the United States also “share the same overall goal on the Iranian nuclear issue,” Ma said in a written statement after the two leaders met on the sidelines of a nuclear security summit in Washington. Ma provided no details on the talks and repeated China’s standard call for “dialogue and negotiations” with Iran.

Speaking to reporters afterwards, Obama made no mention of his talks with Hu but said he expects the 47-nation summit to make progress toward locking down loose nuclear material.

“It’s impressive. I think it’s an indication of how deeply concerned everybody should be with the possibilities of nuclear traffic, and I think at the end of this we’re going to see some very specific, concrete actions that each nation is that will make the world a little bit safer,” Obama said.

Speaking to ABC’s Good Morning America earlier Monday, Russian President Dimitry Medvedev said that while he supported sanctions on Iran’s nuclear program he felt those sanctions should not harm the Iranian people.

On the subject of imitating new sanctions against Iran geared at forcing it to abandon its nuclear program, the Russian president said that “it’s not whether it’s a good thought or bad thought, I’m talking about something else.”

“The sanctions is a tricky thing which works seldomly. You yourself were busy with politics, and you know that sanctions is not without conditions,” Medvedev said, adding but sometimes you have to do that.”

“What kind of sanctions? We have spoken about that with President Obama yesterday. Sanctions should be effective and they should be smart,” the Russian President said.

“They should not lead to humanitarian catastrophe, and the whole Iranian community would start to hate the whole world. And we’re worried that there are a significant number of people which have radical opinions. Do we want that radical thought to be sent to the whole world?,” Medvedev said.

However, the Russian president did not rule sanctions altogether, saying that they “should be smart.”

“They should force or obligate the Iranian leadership to think about what’s next. What could sanctions be? It could be trade, arms trade. It could be other sanctions,” Medvedev said, adding that “sanctions should let the country understand that all who impose sanctions have the same opinion.”

Medvedev said that any new sanctions “should not be paralyzing. They should not cause suffering. Aren’t we in the 21st century? That’s why if we’re going to develop our cooperation in this direction we have a chance to succeed. Better would be to go without sanctions and achieve things politically.

Earlier Monday, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad condemned Obama’s nuclear summit, calling it humiliating to humanity.