Every once in a great while, an article appears in our major media sources that just confounds me. No, I don’t mean one of the typical examples of hackery we have come to expect from Adam Nagourney at the NY TIMES, or Joe Klein at TIME. We see so much misinformation and repetition of Republican (Rovian?) talking points in the TIMES, TIME, WAPO, etc., that another example, no matter how outrageous, is hardly a surprise these days.
No, what I’m talking about is an article that actually makes sense about its topic, in this case, the danger posed by Iran. One that speaks calmly and rationally, in this time of fear mongering. An article that actually analyses what we do know about Iran’s nuclear program without breaking into hyperbole every other sentence. In short, the type of piece that the NY TIMES used to be known for.
The article in question is this one in the International edition of the TIMES. It’s an interview of David Albright, “president of the Institute for Science and International Security and a former weapons inspector for the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) . . .”, by Bernard Gwertzman, a “consulting editor for the Council on Foreign Relations website, cfr.org.” (Yeah, I know, “big” surprise that the interview wasn’t conducted by one of the usual Times reporters, isn’t it?)
For more on what Dr. Albright has to say about the real threat Iran poses to us, turn the page . . .
What are Iran’s options prior to the Security Council referral from the IAEA in March?
There’s a one-month delay in the Security Council taking up the issue actively, to see if Iran will accept the conditions laid out in the Board of Governors resolution, which are mainly to stop enrichment, or enrichment-related activities, and to give up building a heavy water reactor. The IAEA would then either do inspections based on the so-called additional protocol or go beyond the additional protocol to resolve the outstanding questions.
So it’s really a time to see what Iran does. And I think part of the whole approach has been to give Iran an opportunity to back down. And I think if Iran doesn’t back down — for example if it really goes forward and says no longer will the “additional protocol” be in play in Iran — then I think what you will have is the Security Council fairly quickly issuing a statement from the chairman that would basically reiterate what the IAEA Board of Governors said, and that it would signify a broadening of the efforts to get Iran to change its mind.
What the heck is this “additional protocol” Albright is talking about?
Well, the “additional protocol” came about because of the failure of the international inspectors to detect Iraq’s secret nuclear-weapons program back in the late 1980s and early 1990s. […] And so the “additional protocol” was aimed to fix this specific problem, that the IAEA was not very good at finding undeclared nuclear activities or facilities.
This was custom-made to deal with Iran. Iran was operating undeclared facilities and with the “additional protocol,” signed by Iran with the IAEA in 2003, the IAEA had authority to conduct more rigorous, short-notice inspections at undeclared nuclear facilities to ferret out secret nuclear activities. The IAEA was quickly able to uncover a series of secret facilities, […] and reach a point where it forced Iran to really reveal most of its nuclear program. Unfortunately, there were some parts of the Iranian program that are suspected to exist that the “additional protocol” isn’t enough to deal with, and that’s why this resolution actually calls for the IAEA to have expanded authority beyond the “additional protocol.”
So what did the IAEA discover under the additional protocol with Iran?
[M]ilitary procurement of equipment that looks like it could be for centrifuges. And the Iranians say “no, it’s not anything to do with nuclear activities but you can’t see it.” The IAEA feels it needs to see it because it does look like it’s equipment imported for a centrifuge program by a military-related organization. They don’t have the authority under the “additional protocol” to probe as deeply into nuclear weapons efforts that could involve the missile program. Documents were brought out of Iran and given to intelligence agencies that have information that seem to be modifying the reentry vehicle of a missile so that it looks like it could hold a nuclear weapon. Again, under the “additional protocol” there isn’t much the IAEA can do. So it needs more authority to ask for interviews with certain people who the Iranians say are not in the nuclear program. And [the IAEA] needs broader declarations from Iran.
What threat does Iran’s resumption of uranium enrichment pose at this time?
It doesn’t mean much of anything. They’re just continuing what they’ve been doing. […] [W]hat they did is they started their program to learn how to use centrifuges to enrich uranium, largely a developmental program now, and they need to run centrifuges alone and they need to run what’s called a “cascade” [a series of centrifuges]. They have a pilot cascade that is built but has not been operated with uranium. This is at the pilot plant in Natanz. And so they’ve been doing all the preparatory work to start up the activities that they stopped in the fall of 2003. And so now they call it full-scale enrichment but it’s really no different.
How quickly can they use their current centrifuges to make enough material for a bomb?
Each centrifuge doesn’t really do that much. It just doesn’t enrich that much and it can’t process that much uranium in a year. So you start connecting them together, both to increase the amount of enrichment, and to increase the amount of uranium that you can push through and to come out as enriched uranium. So if Iran right now wants to run a 164-machine cascade, they won’t really make much material.
In the end centrifuges are rather precious to the Iranians. And so you don’t want to break too many of them. If they wanted to make enough enriched uranium for a bomb program, they could get by with 1,500 centrifuges operated in cascades, and that would give them enough highly enriched uranium for about one bomb a year. If they wanted to make enough to fuel the Bushehr reactor [being built for Iran by the Russians], they would need about 50,000 operating centrifuges, of enriched uranium.
Is Iran building a bomb (i.e., does it have a bomb program now)?
Frankly, I don’t know. I don’t think the Iranian leadership has really decided. I mean what you’d expect if there was a bomb program — and we’ve seen this in South Africa, we saw it in Iraq in the 1980s — that you have a decision made by a leader or leadership, and then the scientific infrastructure, the engineering infrastructure in the nuclear and the military fields goes about making the material for bombs, making a weaponized device militarily sound, fitting into a delivery system, or at least trying.
So you get this whole range of activities, you get budgets, you get major resources committed. No one can find evidence of that in Iran that’s compelling.
Why did (and does) Iran persist with it’s nuclear program after Saddam’s was destroyed?
[…] (Iran has) invested a lot in the infrastructure, and they’re gaining prestige from doing what they’re doing. And some of the Iranian leadership’s statements reflect that. I think that they’re so invested in the nuclear infrastructure, they think they’re going to get benefits from it. They also think that it could deter an American attack, and I think that they’re really determined, at least to get a nuclear-weapons capability. Whether they’ve made the decision to get the bomb or not, I personally think that there isn’t a firm decision, I also think they’ve made a decision that they want this enrichment capability, and it’s going to take the international community quite a bit of effort to get Iran to reconsider.
What should the Us be doing to negotiate an end to Iran’s nuclear program?
In the case of North Korea, [Bush] finally said to North Korea, “Look, if you give up your nuclear weapons, we’re not going to attack you and we’ll give you security guarantees.” And the United States is not going to stop trying to transform the regime and it shouldn’t, but it’s not going to have an active program to overthrow the regime. It needs to do the same thing with Iran. Iran needs to believe that if it gives up its nuclear programs, it’s not going to be vulnerable to an attack by the United States. And in the case of Iran, the United States has not wanted to make a security guarantee. I think it makes the whole situation more difficult to manage.
Are the Bush administration’s dream of regime change in Iran realistic?
I think the Iranian people are very proud. The regime is very good at manipulating the media to distort what’s going on and gain more support from the Iranian population. I think that if the confrontation heightens, the regime is perfectly capable of suppressing dissent more. I’m not optimistic that a transformation like the United States wants is going to take place soon, and yet I think we can get rid of the Iranian nuclear-weapons capability. It may require the United States to give a security guarantee to Iran.
No doubt no one in the Bush adminsitration is listening to experts like Dr. Albright. However, I have some hope that diplomatic pressure from Europe, Russia and China can have the effect of forestalling an attack against Iran and force Bush to the negotiating table. The kicker is that Iran’s leadership needs to be convinced as well. Right now, with the bellicose signals both sides are sending out, I’m not optimistic, but I’d love to be proven wrong.
