Posted on 07/20/2007 8:17:13 PM PDT by nuconvert
The Riddle of Iran
July 19, 2007
The Economist
Nuclear Proliferation
Iran's leaders think a nuclear weapon could rejuvenate their tired revolution. How can they be stopped?
“The Iranian regime is basically a messianic apocalyptic cult.” So says Israel's once and perhaps future prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu. If he is right the world is teetering on the edge of a terrifying crisis.
While the world has been distracted by Iraq, Afghanistan and much else, Iran has been moving relentlessly closer to the point where it could build an atomic bomb. It has converted yellowcake into uranium hexafluoride gas. Now it is spinning the gas through thousands of centrifuges it has installed at the underground enrichment plant it built secretly in Natanz, south of Tehran. A common guess is that if it can run 3,000 centrifuges at high speed for a year, it will end up with enough fuel for its first bomb.
According to the International Atomic Energy Agency, the UN's nuclear watchdog, Iran could have 3,000 centrifuges hooked up by the end of this month. The Iranians say their next aim is to scale up to 54,000 centrifuges. Figuring out how to put the fuel into a usable weapon will also take time—perhaps a year or more. But for would-be bomb-builders, making the fuel is by far the hardest part. The upshot, say Israel and some American experts, is that Iran may have a bomb by the end of 2009. Mohammed ElBaradei, the IAEA's director-general, is more cautious. But even he says that if Iran really wants a bomb it could now build one within three to eight years.
Choose your unhappy ending What Iran is doing at Natanz is entirely illegal. It has signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and says its nuclear aims are peaceful. But having spent decades deceiving nuclear inspectors, it is disbelieved even by its friends. A year ago this month Russia and China therefore joined the rest of the UN Security Council in ordering Iran to stop. It carried on regardless. The Security Council followed up with two resolutions, in December 2006 and March this year, repeating its demands and applying sanctions. The centrifuges spin defiantly on.
So what next? This story could have at least three unhappy endings. In one, Iran ends up with nuclear weapons, bringing new instability and a hair-trigger face-off with nuclear Israel into one of the world's least-safe neighbourhoods. In another, America or Israel take pre-emptive military action and manage to stop it, even though such an attack would almost certainly have very dangerous consequences of its own. In the third ending, Iran is attacked, and enraged, and retaliates—and still ends up with a bomb anyway.
It is vital to understand that this third finale is not a nightmare dreamt up by editorial writers. After the false intelligence that led America into Iraq, and the mayhem that followed, it may seem hard to believe that America or Israel are pondering an attack on a much bigger Muslim country. But they are—and they are not mad. This time, after all, there is no question of false intelligence: the world's fears are based on capabilities that Iran itself boasts about openly. Nor would there be another invasion: this would be an attack from the air, aimed at disabling or destroying Iran's nuclear sites. From a technical point of view, launching such an attack is well within America's capabilities (America has lately reinforced its carrier fleet in the Persian Gulf) and perhaps within Israel's, too.
Yet such an attack would nonetheless be a huge gamble. Even if it delayed or stopped Iran's nuclear programme, it would knock new holes in America's relations with the Muslim world. And if only for the sake of their domestic political survival, Iran's leaders would almost certainly hit back. Iran could fire hundreds of missiles at Israel, attack American forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, organise terrorist attacks in the West or choke off tanker traffic through the Strait of Hormuz, the world's oil windpipe. How could any Western leader in his right mind risk initiating such a sequence of events?
The succinct answer of Senator John McCain is that although attacking Iran would be bad, an Iran with nuclear weapons would be worse. He is not alone: most of America's presidential candidates would consider military force.
Cult or calculator? If Iran really is no more than the “messianic cult” of Mr Netanyahu's imagination, it would be worth running almost any risk to stop it acquiring nuclear weapons. But as our special report argues, Iran is not that easy to read.
Iran is a self-proclaimed theocracy. Yet it has conducted foreign relations since the revolution of 1979 in a way that seems perfectly rational even if it is not pleasant. Its president, the Holocaust-questioning Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, is widely reported to have threatened to “wipe Israel off the map”. But in fact he may never have uttered those precise words, and there is both ambiguity and calculation behind the bluster. Look closer and Mr Ahmadinejad is vague about whether he means that Iran should destroy Israel or just that he hopes for Israel's disappearance. Knowing that a nuclear attack on Israel or America would result in its own prompt annihilation, Iran could probably be deterred, just as other nuclear powers have been. Didn't Nikita Khrushchev promise to “bury” the West?
Since Israel has memories of a real Holocaust, it may not set much store by that “probably”. This newspaper continues to believe that even for Israel containment of a nuclear Iran would be less awful than a risky pre-emptive attack that would probably cause mayhem, strengthen the regime and merely delay the day Iran gets a bomb. Yet the whole world still has a huge interest in preventing that day from coming. Even if Iran never used its bomb, mere possession of it might encourage it to adopt a more aggressive foreign policy than the one it is already pursuing in Iraq, Lebanon and the Palestinian territories. And once Iran went nuclear other countries in the region—such as Saudi Arabia, Egypt and perhaps Turkey—would probably feel compelled to follow suit, thereby entangling the Middle East in a cat's cradle of nuclear tripwires.
Is there a way to avoid all of the unhappy endings by finding a peaceful way to stop Iran going nuclear? The Europeans hoped they had stumbled on such a solution last year, when they at last talked Russia and China into imposing sanctions and George Bush into dangling the prospect of normal relations with Iran once enrichment stopped. But the mild sanctions imposed so far are not working, and now the technological clock in Natanz is outrunning the diplomatic clock at the United Nations. Iran may soon work out how to spin its centrifuges at full speed for long periods; and once it learns how to do that the odds of stopping it from building a bomb will rapidly lengthen. This suggests that a third sanctions resolution, with sharper teeth, needs to be enacted without delay.
Iran is obstinate, paranoid and ambitious. But it is also vulnerable. A young population with no memory of the revolution is desperate for jobs its leaders have failed to provide. Sanctions that cut off equipment for its decrepit oilfields or struck hard at the financial interests of the regime and its protectors in the Revolutionary Guards would have an immediate impact on its own assessment of the cost of its nuclear programme. That on its own is unlikely to change the regime's mind. If at the same time Iran was offered a dignified ladder to climb down—above all a credible promise of an historic reconciliation with the United States—the troubled leadership of a tired revolution might just grab it. But time is short.
we must be the only 2 clowns that follow this cr.p
We’re not alone. And I’d say anyone NOT following what’s going on in Iran is the clown.
The Bush administration has been very much focused on it. The Europeans as usual are unable to find a spine and have their heads stuck up their backsides.
The Economist never fails to disappoint. It represents a basically London-centric pro-European viewpoint, and from the tone of this article, takes the aloof and condescending position that Iran's nuclear weapons are America's (and not Europe's) problem to handle if something really is to be done about them.
“... Iran’s nuclear weapons are America’s (and not Europe’s) problem to handle if something really is to be done about them.”
That seems pretty accurate to me, since everyone knows the europeans won’t do anything.
There can only be a military solution, just as there was for the Axis.
“Sanctions that cut off equipment for its decrepit oilfields or struck hard at the financial interests of the regime and its protectors in the Revolutionary Guards would have an immediate impact on its own assessment of the cost of its nuclear programme.”
Nonsense
1st - huge EMP detonation above Iran, but calibrated such that there is little or no overlap to other countries.
2nd - bunker-busters everywhere they are needed for their nuclear stuff.
3rd - small neutrons over large garrisons and forward deployments of their troops.
4th - begin sustained shock and awe campaign upon all of their missile sites, air farce, and stockpiles.
5th - Offer to begin sincere negotiations when # 4 is nearly completed. If they decline, start on their armor, artillery, and all of their military logistics.
Note...steps 1 through 3 should begin without warning and take no longer than 3-4 hours. Step five should occur within the next 24-36 hours. If these 5 steps fail, then we should undertake the Economists nonsensical plan :)
You are not alone. Immediately after 9-11, I said we should disable Iran’s nuclear capability and wipe out their mullahs— and then take out Saddam...
No... there’s more folks watching it. I just wish congress would.
I follow this. I have no problem with Israel and/or United States wasting the Ayatollahs nuclear program.
Very good order of battle
Me either and I think (or at least HOPE) Bush will do it before leaving office... My gut feeling says we dont need that many carrier groups there for Iraq. I think I read today he has 18 months left in the White house to Git-r-done.
"...we must be the only 2 clowns that follow this cr.p..."
Three of us!
Iran has had at least 3000 cascades operating since Sept, '06. They tore-up over half of their first 1000 units learning how to follow directions, and put the current 3000 into operation.
They've been bringing the 54,000 units online since Dec '06, but intel is thin on successes.
Their plans were for another 100,000 units, but IIRC, those were intercepted.
Odds are that Iran had enough fissile material for their first A-Bomb around the end of April, '07.
We'll know for sure when Israel decides to nuke them. GWBush seems too busy promoting illegal aliens now to be bothered with our National Defence.
And speaking of De Fence, we should keep reminding our so-called elected reps that 'no-fence = no-votes' next election. ................. FRegards
Sanctions with teeth will never happen as Iran is Europe’s main source of oil.
As far as Iran goes, either something will happen or something won’t. Euro zone yapping about it is not important.
Putin was correct, of course, when he pointed out that international politics is oil and nuclear weapons.
If anyone is interested in a stable-ish international political structure what looks practical is Pournelle’s CoDominium. A high price to pay to keep a few Democrat Party voting machine cities untoasted though.
They might not need a whole lot of fissile "uranium" 235 for weapons making, right? Only need enough low level [as low as 6-8%] U235, first, to power reactors, which can then produce plutonium. Then, they could use or need additional, but this time highly enriched, "weapons grade" uranium, for the tampers, if one is aiming at having bigger warheads, like in the megaton range...
I gather also, one may not even need highly enriched uranium [60% or more 235 isotope] to create a bomb, at all. One can use the plutonium that can be produced in a reactor.
Some warhead configurations can use metals other than uranium as a tamper, resulting in different results. One metal, cadmium, can be very, very bad, indeed, while gold can be relatively "clean".
According to some reports, the Iranians already have a few nuclear warheads, which they bought from Kazakhstan, quite a few years ago. Those old warheads were likely not *good to go*, back when obtained, and much less likely to be in usable condition now [without replacement of the fissionable materials] but they could have served as models one could reverse engineer.
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