Moving Beyond Nuclear Gridlock with Iran
Fox news, September 17, 2008
Alireza Jafarzadeh (Foreign Affairs Analyst)
"Gridlock” and “dead end.” That’s how the U.N. officials are
describing the current nuclear impasse between the
International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and ayatollahs’
regime in Iran. No big surprise. The Iranian regime
president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has said many times that
enrichment suspension is his regime’s “red line.”
On Monday, September 15, the Director General of the IAEA
released its report to the U.N. Security Council and the
IAEA Board of Governors on status of Tehran’s nuclear
compliance, or lack thereof, with four UNSC resolutions. The
report was damming; a “progress report without progress” as
one senior U.N. official put it.
The report definitively states that Tehran, in defiance of
the international will, has remained in breach of four UN
Security Council resolutions demanding to suspend its
uranium enrichment, the core component of the nuclear
weapons program.
The IAEA’s last report, released in May 2008, was alarming.
Still the September report includes chilling conclusions and
observations. It says that Tehran has substantially improved
the development and performance of the centrifuges at the
underground nuclear facility in Natanz, currently at
approximately 85 percent of their target capacity. Iran’s
nuclear program, controlled by the Islamic Revolutionary
Guards Corps (IRGC) and intimately supervised by the Supreme
Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has overcome many of the
technical problems. The hike in performance, however, must
also be attributed, according to the report’s findings, to
installation of new and more advanced cascades of
centrifuges.
Ayatollahs’ plan is to produce enough low enriched uranium
(LEU), right under the eyes of the IAEA and under the
pretext of a benign peaceful program, and then by injecting
it back into the centrifuge cascades, produce highly
enriched uranium (HEU), a weapons-usable material. It is
important to note that it takes much more time and resources
to produce low enriched uranium than it does to subsequently
further enrich it to weapons-usable grade. According to the
analysts from the British American Security Information
Council, only an additional cost and effort of 20 percent is
needed to produce HEU from LEU, compared to the cost and
effort involved in producing LEU from natural uranium.
According to the IAEA report, Iran is now in the possession
of about 480 kilograms of low enriched uranium (LEU).
Estimates differ over how much LEU is needed to produce
enough HEU for building a bomb. Its range is between 800 to
1700 kilograms of LEU needed to produce 20-25 kilograms of
weapons-usable uranium for a nuclear bomb. In light of the
expected increase in enrichment performance, Tehran could be
only 6 month away from having enough LEU that could be used
— once turned into HEU — for one nuclear bomb.
In another significant revelation, the report also indicated
that Tehran had used “foreign expertise” for experiments on
detonators used for implosion of a nuclear weapon. The
agency official did not disclose the source of “foreign
expertise” but excluded A.Q. Khan, Libya and North Korea as
culprits. Tehran has remained tight-lipped about the origin
of this assistance.
The six-page report, due to be discussed by the IAEA's board
of governors next week in Vienna, said that “in light of the
many years of clandestine nuclear activities” Iran “needs to
provide the Agency with substantive information to support
its statements and provide access to relevant documentation
and individuals in this regard." Unless Iran provides such
transparency, and implements the Additional Protocol, "the
Agency will not be able to provide credible assurance about
the absence of undeclared nuclear material and activities in
Iran.”
The report marks the predictable failure of the fanciful
intuitive put forward by the IAEA last summer to set a track
outside of the UN Security Council to deal with Tehran’s
dubious nuclear activities. The failed initiative merely
bestowed the ayatollahs much needed time to resolve the
technical issues, and install more and better centrifuges.
The report also reflects the utter failure of the diplomatic
track set in motion early this year designed to entice
ayatollahs into compliance in exchange for a package of very
substantial economic, political, and technological
incentives.
With the political turmoil ravaging the apex of ayatollahs’
regime from within, and the mounting popular discontent over
irremediable endemic political, economic, and social crisis,
Tehran will surely press on acquiring the nuclear weapon to
break out its impasse.
Under these circumstances, it would be naiveté of the worst
kind to fathom that Khamenei would do away with the nuclear
weapon program no matter the size of the incentives and
regardless of who will be in the White House come January.
It would be equally naïve to expect a breakthrough after
June 2009 presidential elections in Iran.
Meanwhile, on September 16, under Executive Order 13438, the
United States blacklisted Abdul-Reza Shahlai, a deputy
commander of the Qods Force — the terrorist arm of the
Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) — along with four
other individuals and two entities for “threatening the
peace and stability of Iraq and the Government of Iraq.”
The U.S. Treasury specifically singled out the Qods Force,
designated in fall 2007 as a Specially Designated Global
Terrorist for providing “lethal support in the form of
weapons, training, funding, and guidance to select groups of
Iraqi Shia militants.”
Confirming the long-held suspicions that the ayatollahs’
regime was behind the well-planned January 20, 2007 ambush
in Karbala where five U.S. soldiers were killed, the
Treasury statement said that Shahlai planned the attack. As
of May 2007, Shahlai served as the final approving and
coordinating authority for all Iran-based Lebanese Hizballah
training for JAM Special Groups to fight Coalition Forces in
Iraq.
The clerical regime intends to bolster itself by possessing
nuclear weapons capability and gaining a strategic foothold
in Iraq. Emboldened by a lack of firm multi-lateral response
to its continued defiance of the UNSC resolutions, and
America's weak response to fend off the Ayatollahs' drive to
eliminate its main opposition based in Camp Ashraf, Iraq,
Tehran has hastened its nuclear drive and intensified its
nefarious Iraq campaign.
If the mullahs are not stopped, the free world would be soon
looking at the calamitous specter of a nuclear-armed
state-sponsor of terror bent on using Iraq as a springboard
for its aggressive regional agenda. A growing number of
Members of Congress from both sides of the aisle believe
that sanctions should be coupled with political pressure.
They maintain that Washington should reach out to Iran’s
main democratic opposition. The continued blacklisting of
the opposition has only emboldened the real terrorists
ruling Iran in their nuclear drive and violent intervention
in Iraq.
Alireza Jafarzadeh is a FOX News Channel Foreign Affairs
Analyst and the author of "The
Iran Threat: President Ahmadinejad and the Coming Nuclear
Crisis" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007).
Jafarzadeh has revealed Iran's terrorist network in Iraq and
its terror training camps since 2003. He first disclosed the
existence of the Natanz uranium enrichment facility and the
Arak heavy water facility in August 2002.
