Replies

Experts Fear Iran Acquiring Atomic Arms

April 27, 2004
The Seattle Times
David Wood

WASHINGTON -- Already writhing with tension and terror, the Middle East is sliding toward a new crisis: As soon as this summer, Iran could be unstoppably on its way to producing nuclear material for its own bombs.

A nuclear-armed Iran would plunge the Middle East into a destabilizing new arms race, jeopardizing the West's access to Persian Gulf oil and threatening the conservative regimes of Gulf states such as Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, according to assessments by U.S. intelligence agencies and American and Israeli experts.

Unlike Saddam Hussein's Iraq, Iran has proven ties to international terror groups such as Hezbollah, and some analysts say a nuclear-armed Iran would be able to provide terrorists with "dirty" suitcase bombs that could be carried into Tel Aviv or New York.

Nuclear weapons also would give Tehran the clout to back up some of its radical ambitions, including the destruction of Israel, denial of U.S. military access to the region and the collapse of Western-oriented Arab regimes in Egypt and Pakistan.

With a hard-line Islamist regime in power in Tehran, U.S. experts are concerned the network of treaties and international sanctions intended to prevent nuclear-power programs from turning to bomb making aren't working.

Inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) were in Tehran earlier this month to check Iran's assertions that it has stopped work on building centrifuge facilities that can produce enriched uranium. That material can be refined into nuclear warheads.

The inspectors' visit came days after Iran said it would begin in June to build a 40-megawatt nuclear reactor. That would be its second facility capable of producing bomb material — in this case, enough for one bomb a year, experts said.

Once either facility is fully on line, Iran can manufacture its own enriched uranium in secret. That material can be processed into warheads or simply passed off to terrorists to use as "dirty" bombs, conventional explosives that spew deadly radioactive material into the air.

Iran had insisted that its nuclear program has always been for the peaceful production of power, but IAEA inspectors late last year found traces of bomb-grade uranium at its nuclear facilities. The discovery kicked off a series of declarations and inspections that have left the issue unresolved.

Meanwhile, Iran's February elections consolidated the power of the hard-line clerical wing, and it is now taking a harder line on nuclear matters, said Rose Gottemoeller, a former senior U.S. nuclear-proliferation official in the Clinton White House and Department of Energy. The question of nuclear weapons "is hanging very much in the balance," she said.

If Tehran continues to thumb its nose at nuclear-weapons prohibitions, the international community is likely to impose stiff sanctions to prevent it from selling its oil and natural gas.

"The perception is that Iran's revolutionary zeal is tempered, and that they're much more conservative now than in the early 1980s," when Iranian-backed terrorists attacked Americans and Israelis in the region, said Richard Russell, a former CIA analyst who teaches at the National Defense University's Near East-South Asia Center for Strategic Studies in Washington. "Who's to say they won't become emboldened with nuclear weapons?"

But the hand on the trigger might well be Israel, which may increasingly feel pressured to destroy Iran's nuclear-weapons facilities in a pre-emptive strike, one that analysts say would unleash a firestorm of anger in the region.

Israel launched such a pre-emptive strike in 1981, with eight F-16 jets striking a French-built nuclear reactor outside Baghdad. Then-Defense Minister Ariel Sharon, now prime minister, said the possession of nuclear weapons by a hostile Islamic neighbor "is not a question of balance of terror but a question of survival. We shall therefore have to prevent such a threat at its inception."

Iran today represents just such a threat, Israeli officials say.

"We believe the Iranians will continue developing nuclear military projects and in their hands such weapons pose, for the first time, an existential threat to Israel," Meir Dagan, head of the Mossad, Israel's secret service, told the Israeli parliament last fall.

Many observers believe an Israeli pre-emptive strike — after the manner of the pre-emptive U.S. war on Iraq, avowedly to destroy Saddam's weapons of mass destruction — would provoke a furious Arab backlash, jeopardizing the 110,000 U.S. troops in Iraq and derailing efforts to build democracy and stability in the Middle East.

Indeed, Arab leaders are "already alarmed at what they see as an American precedent for waging pre-emptive or preventive war," Russell said.

The United States would not impose punitive sanctions on Israel, as it did after Israel's strike into Iraq in 1981, "because the United States is also committed to pre-emption," Shlomo Brom, a retired Israeli general and strategic planner, said in an e-mail interview

Although Israel's 1981 raid on Iraq produced an international uproar, "the political price it had to pay was eventually insignificant," Brom said, compared with the risk of having a nuclear-armed Iraq in the neighborhood.

Could Israel do it? A cold-eyed analysis prepared by Brom suggests it would be difficult but not impossible.

Israeli jets, in sustained sorties to Iranian targets 900 to 1,100 miles away, would have to blast through Jordanian and Iraqi airspace or go the long way around the Arabian peninsula.

The F-16C/D and F-15I strike jets can barely make the distance one way and would burn more fuel flying at wave-skimming altitude to avoid radar. They would have to be refueled twice during the operation, raising the risk that Israel's lumbering Boeing 707 tankers would be shot down.

"Iranian nuclear installations are dispersed (and) well defended. ... Operational difficulties may lead to high (Israeli) casualty rate," Brom wrote in his assessment, adding, "an Iranian violent reaction is almost a certainty."

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/nationworld/2001913658_irannukes27.html