Foreign Policy In Focus

The killing of the third Iranian scientist thought to be part of Iran's nuclear program since 2009, in this case Darioush Rezaie, is most likely the work of either the CIA and Mossad. (Another suspicious incident occurred not long ago when a civilian aircraft crashed in Russia killing everyone on board, including several Russian nuclear scientists who worked in Iran for a time.)

While it's true that U.S. forces recently struck deep into Pakistan to attack bin Laden's compound, in Rezaie's case a Western security agency probably used a proxy. Likely candidates are Iranian opposition groups – and terrorists in their own right -- the Mujahedin-e Khalk (MEK) or Jundallah.

What's especially intriguing, though, is how Iran responds to these events. At Reuters, Andrew Hammond reports:

When news of the shooting first came out, semi-official news agency Mehr published information on Rezaie's background which indicated involvement in Iranian nuclear activities. … But the report was then immediately withdrawn by Mehr and Iran's intelligence minister Heydar Moslehi … denied Rezaie had any links to the nuclear energy program.

Then when parliament speaker Ali Larijani blamed the United States and Israel in a speech broadcast live on state television Sunday, Moslehi said it was too early to tell. "We have not found any trace of foreign spy services involvement in Rezaie's assassination case yet," … Analysts believe that Iran might wish to play down … the incident [as it is] embarrassing for its security agencies and could become an issue in domestic politics.

Afshon Ostovar, an Iran analyst based in Washington, accepts that

"…Rezaie was assassinated because of his relationship to Iran's nuclear program…" [But after] the initial confusion, Ostovar said he detected "a PR campaign to both downplay the impact of his death on Iran's nuclear program and to discredit any sense of legitimacy of the assassination."

How different from the United States, which, if a foreign nation engineered an attack on its soil, would be reeling around as if mortally wounded. Besides figuring out yet more domestic security restrictions, the United States might take the attack as license to finally bomb one, some or all of Iran's nuclear facilities. A smaller power just tries to save some face, roll with the punches, and soldier on. In Iran's case, presumably it expects to have the last laugh anyway when it develops nuclear capabilities.

Israeli President Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Ehud Barak are known to be champing at the bit to bomb Iran's nuclear enrichment facilities. Even though, as the New York Times reported:

. . . former intelligence chief, Meir Dagan. . . . made headlines a few weeks ago when he asserted . . . that a military attack on Iran would be “a stupid idea.” This week Mr. Dagan . . . said that attacking Iran “would mean regional war, and in that case you would have given Iran the best possible reason to continue the nuclear program.”

Israel of course enjoys a non-nuclear program with everything from tactical (battlefield) nuclear weapons to thermonuclear (hydrogen) bombs. To the contrary, it insists, enabled in its charade by the United States. In Iran's case, the International Atomic Energy Agency has yet to find damning evidence of a nuclear-weapons program. In fact, some of the "evidence," such as what's called the alleged studies documents, seemed manufactured and/or planted. Still, those of us most opposed to using force against Iran would make more credible advocates for a negotiated solution if we accepted that Iran most likely seeks weaponless, or "virtual," deterrence (no weapons, but the full-blown capacity to manufacture them).

In Israel's case, though, it's nuclear denial is full of holes large enough to drive a truck through. As far back as 1986, former Israeli nuclear technician Mordecai Vanunu blew the whistle on Israel's program to the British press, for which he served 18 years in Israeli prison.

Iran now has its own Mordecai Vanunu, however much he doesn't realize it. A couple of months ago, Iran watchers were agog when an article appeared on a website run by Iran's Revolutionary Guards (IRGC) that envisioned the day when Iran becomes a nuclear-weapons power. The piece, as Julian Borger reports at the Guardian, begins:

The day after Iran's first nuclear test is a normal day. The day after Islamic Republic of Iran's first nuclear test will be an ordinary day for us Iranians but in the eyes of some of us there will be a new sparkle.

Borger writes:

This strange, hypothetical, article . . . hammers home again and again the message that an Iranian nuclear test will not lead to disaster. On the contrary, life will go as before except that Iranians will feel better about themselves.

Why would the IRGC sanction such a statement? Borger again.

This has the look of a kite being flown, but for whom? It could be intended to get Iranians used to the idea of a nuclear test. . . . It could be a gesture of defiance to the world by hardline elements. . . . The article comes during a period when Tehran's official stance is particularly . . . assertive, announcing today that it will triple its production of 20% enriched uranium and shift it to the underground Fordow site, near Qom.

Borger then quotes Meir Javedanfar, an Iranian-Israeli expert on the Tehran regime, about the article.

It's breaking a major taboo. . . . if this report is followed by others similar to it, then it would signify a major change in the way Iran refers to its nuclear program. 

But such a campaign would likely backfire as it

. . . would be a significant boost for western efforts to isolate Iran [which, along with Iran's] deteriorating economic situation could be more damaging to the regime's top priority, which is its survival, than a military attack by the West.

In fact, if the IRGC author had been more truthful, he would have written:

The day after Iran's first nuclear test will be an ordinary day for us Iranians -- until Israel rains down holy hell on our heads.

Iran needs to tread carefully. You would think it would have learned a lesson from archrival Saddam Hussein, who, in a clumsy form of regional deterrence, behaved as if Iraq possessed nuclear weapons. By foiling United Nations inspectors at every turn, he helped provide fodder for the United States to win support for an attack on the premise that Iraq was a rogue nuclear state.

Iran denies nuclear-weapons aspirations but, for a whole host of reasons from deterrence to status to using the program as a bargaining chip, seems to want the region and the West to think it might one day possess them. In the interim, it could well wind up attacked like Iraq's Osirak reactor was by Israel in 1981. When Iran inevitably retaliates, it would no doubt suffer a devastating second wave of attacks from the United States, which would pitch in when Israel got in over its head. Prevaricating about nukes is a dangerous game to play.

Donald Rumsfeld's new book Known and Unknown dredged up bad memories of the false pretexts the United States employed to invade and occupy Iraq. Among those that Colin Powell presented to the U.N. Security Council were Curveball's claim, which he recently admitted was a lie, that he worked on an Iraqi WMD program.

Then there were documents forged to show that Saddam Hussein had attempted to purchase "yellowcake" uranium from Niger. And who can forget the aluminum tubes, likely missile parts, passed off as  uranium centrifuge components. Speaking of Curveball, to use another sports cliché, far from a slam dunk, they were all airballs.

Yet the same method is being reprised to attribute WMDs to Iran as was used with Iraq. Though this time, the goal isn't necessarily to grease the skids for a U.S. attack on Iran. Since that's unlikely, the idea is to accustom the United States to the idea that it needs to come to Israel's rescue when it attacks Iran and inevitably finds itself in over its head.

This unsavory process has been chronicled by investigative historian slash journalist Gareth Porter with far more depth than by anyone else. The product of his reporting on the subject over the years appeared in the winter 2010 issue of Middle East Policy (the Middle East Policy Council's publication) in the form of an article titled "The Iran Nuclear 'Alleged Studies' Documents: The Evidence of Fraud."

The issues are technical, but what makes them even more daunting to follow are the machinations of those perpetrating the fraud. Since, in a demonstration of shortsightedness on the part of the publication considering how important it is, the article is behind a subscription wall, we'll excerpt liberally. 

You're likely not familiar with the term "alleged studies" as it's used in this context. They're more popularly known, in the aggregate, as the laptop of death. (For instance, sese this Arms Control Wonk post). They have even been called the laptop of mass destruction, as in Asia Times Online's headline to a 2008 article by Porter. In the MEP piece he begins:

For the past few years, a political consensus has formed in the United States that Iran is covertly pursuing a nuclear-weapons program under the cloak of a civilian nuclear-power program. That conclusion has been based largely on a set of supposedly purloined top-secret Iranian military documents describing just such a covert program during 2002-03. The documents have often been referred to as the "laptop documents," but they include documents in both electronic and paper form and were called the "alleged studies" documents by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).

They consist of

a pair of "flow sheets" showing a process for uranium conversion, a set of experiments . . . similar to that used on early designs for the U.S. atomic bomb, and studies on the redesign of the . . . nose cone, of the Shahab-3 missile to accommodate what appears to be a nuclear weapon.

While

. . . news media have portrayed the alleged-studies documents as credible evidence of a covert Iranian nuclear-weapons program [some] senior officials of the IAEA believed from the first, however, that the documents were "fabricated by a Western intelligence organization"

But, after former director Mohamed ElBaradei (and likely candidate for the Egyptian presidency) -- considered a moderating influence on Western hostility toward Iran -- left the agency

the IAEA said the material in the documents "is broadly consistent and credible in terms of the technical detail, the time frame in which the activities were conducted, and the people and organizations involved."

Okay, if that's what they believed. The problem is that post-Baradei

. . . the IAEA has effectively shifted the normal burden of proof in regard to the intelligence documents. Instead of requiring the IAEA and those who provided the documents to give evidence of their authenticity, [recently retired director of the IAEA's Safeguards Department Olli] Heinonen has demanded that the Iranians prove they are fabrications.

This is reminiscent of the "you can't prove a negative" argument that those who attempted to slow the rush to war with Iraq invoked. In other words if you're trying to prove something, it's obviously contrary to the applicable principles of philosophy and science to begin with the assumption that said something exists and that what needs to be proved instead is its nonexistence.

The documents on missile re-design demonstrate how the fraud is being perpetrated. They

. . . had the most impact on media coverage. [They consist of] a series of technical drawings or schematics -- all in Farsi -- of as many as 18 different ways of fitting the unidentified payload into the missile-reentry vehicle or warhead. . . . But when IAEA analysts were allowed to study the documents, they found that images of the the warhead had the familiar "dunce cap" shape of the original North Korean No Dong missile, which Iran had acquired in the mid-1990s.

"That was odd," writes Porter. He explains.

[When] Iran had flight-tested a new missile in mid-2004, the warhead had not had a dunce-cap shape but a new . . . "baby bottle" shape, which was more aerodynamic than the one on the original Shahab-3 missile. The warhead schematics in the alleged-studies documents thus depicted a reentry vehicle design that the analysts knew had already been abandoned by the Iranian military in favor of a new, improved one.

When I asked Heinonen . . . how he could consider it plausible that Iran's purported secret nuclear weapons research program would redesign the warhead of a missile that the Iranian military had already decided to replace with an improved model, he suggested that the group that had done the schematics had no relationship with the regular Iranian missile program.

We're all familiar with the phenomenon of firewalls between security agencies or branches of the military, but that's ridiculous. The explanation?

Heinonen [suggested that] missile engineers . . . were ordered to redesign the older Shahab-3 model before the decision was made by the missile program to switch to a newer missile and warhead design, and that it couldn't change its work plan once it was decided. . . . Heinonen's explanation assumes that the Iranian military ordered an engineer to organize a team to redesign the warhead on its secret intermediate-range ballistic missile to accommodate a nuclear weapon but kept them in the dark about its plans to replace the Shahab-3 in favor of a completely new and improved model.

You can be forgiven if you find that far-fetched. Especially since

. . . the reason for the shift to the new missile . . . was that the Shahab-3 [which dates from the ] early to mid-1990s, had a range of only 800 to 1,000 km [compared to the new missile which has a range of] 1,500 to 1,600 kilometers, bringing Israel within the reach of an Iranian missile for the first time.

In other words, what would the Iranian military want with an underpowered missile? Porter then points out what should be obvious -- and, in the process, demonstrates that the "alleged studies" were only looked over by those "allegedly studying."

The implausibility of the suggestion that a group organized to redesign the . . .warhead would not have been working with the new warhead underlines the tortuous thinking that must be used to avoid an obvious conclusion: the warhead schematics are fraudulent.

Before we get to who's behind the alleged studies, we'll excerpt Porter's summary of the fraud.

The authors of the laptop documents left a trail of indicators that reveal their fraudulent character. Because of their ignorance of some key facts about the Iranian nuclear program and their effort to ensure that the documents would have the desired political effect, they made a series of errors. This investigation of all the available data related to the laptop documents found eight indicators of fraud.

Among them, as noted above (emphasis added)

The warhead schematics shown in the documents were based on a design that had already been abandoned by the Iranian military in favor of a new and improved design.

Besides

The premise . . . that the military would have taken responsibility for work on uranium conversion -- is highly implausible. The work on a different technology had already been done by civilians under the AEOI [Atomic Energy Organization of Iran] over a period of more than a decade.

Also

The idea that Kimia Maadan [a private company] that had done nothing beyond completing a flow sheet outlining a process for uranium conversion would have been authorized to immediately begin making concrete plans for equipping such a facility without going through a lengthy stage of testing the technology depicted in the flow sheet. . . . is highly implausible.

Especially damning:

The fact that the IAEA does not know whether the original laptop documents had official stamps and security classification markings . . . . can be regarded as prima facie evidence of fraud.

As for who

According to the story, the files were smuggled out of Iran by the wife of an Iranian who had been recruited by Germany's Federal Intelligence Service. . . . But there is evidence that the laptop documents were brought to the U.S. consulate in Turkey by someone affiliated with . . . the Mujahideen-e-Khalq (MEK) . . . a terrorist organization that had killed both Iranian and U.S. civilians in the past.

Israeli authors Yossi Melman and Meir Javadanfar reported, "A way to 'launder' information from Western intelligence to the IAEA was found so that agencies and their sources could be protected. Information is 'filtered' to the IAEA via Iranian opposition groups [such as MEK]. [Its] involvement . . in the laptop episode and Israel’s past use of the [MEK] for this purpose point to Israel as the original source of the documents.

Returning to Iraq, rote, dogged repetition in the service of war-mongering carried the day. One must pay grudging tribute to Israel as well. Its campaign against Iran, equal to that against Iraq in implausibility and even more slipshod, has been successful in turning public sentiment against Iran, if not yet in convincing American authorities of the need for hostilities.

Meanwhile, we all owe Gareth Porter a debt of gratitude for ripping the curtain on the pettiness of this deception. Shame on us if we allow such wisps carry us away on the winds of war. 

Why is the New York Times claiming the laws of physics are different in Iran then they are anywhere else? Well, the tip off to that answer is the word “Iran.”

First, a few basics:

The thing about physics is that it is black and white: things happen or they don’t. Want to live forever? The Second Law of Thermodynamics says, nope, can’t do that (unless you can get rid of entropy, and you can’t). Want to rocket off to the nearest star a la Star Trek? Well, okay, but it is going to take a really, really long time to get there because you can’t go faster than the speed of light (and inertia would kill you long before you got close to 186,000 miles per second). 

Back to the Times. 

For the past several weeks the Times has been claiming that Iran is very close to producing weapons-ready nuclear fuel. On Jan. 23, Steven Erlanger, in an article entitled “Talks on Iran’s Nuclear Program Close With No Progress,” wrote that Iran is stepping up its production of enhanced uranium and has “enriched about 90 pounds of it to 19.75 percent, which is more than halfway to the level required for a bomb.” 

Not close. Again, a little physics.

Uranium occurs naturally as U-238. In order to make a bomb you have to turn U-238 into U-235 or Plutonium 239. “Enrichment” is used for a lot of things besides obliterating cities. Uranium enhanced to 3 percent can run a power plant. Uranium enhanced to 19.75 percent can be used for medical purposes, like zapping cancer. For a nuclear weapon, however, uranium must be enhanced to between 80 percent and 90 percent.

Virtually all nuclear warheads currently use uranium that is 90 percent enhanced, although it is possible to produce a weapon with as little as 80. To detonate a weapon using U-235, all you need to do is blast two pieces of sub-critical fuel into one another. Two sub-criticals equal one critical, you achieve “fission” and a really big “bang!” The so-called “nuclear gun” is virtually foolproof and was the design of the Hiroshima bomb. In fact scientists were so confident it would work that they never bothered to test it.

Plutonium is trickier. The “gun” method doesn’t work because of the unique properties of Pu-239. You have to wrap plutonium with an explosive, and then implode it. The result is called “fusion.” The Nagasaki bomb (Fat Man) was composed of both U-235 and Pu-239, and it was the device that was tested at White Sands New Mexico in 1945. Today almost all nuclear weapons in the world are fusion devices, because fusion is more efficient than fission. 

The Hiroshima bomb carried 64.1 kg of U-235 enhanced to 80 percent. The South Africans also produced at least six nuclear weapons that worked on the “gun” model, and those were enhanced to between 80 percent and 93 percent. The greater the enhancement, the less fuel you have to use. U-235 makes a perfectly serviceable nuke, but plutonium gives you more bang for the buck. The Department of Energy estimates that you can make a small nuclear weapon with a little as 4 kg of plutonium, and some scientists say you can make a nuke with as little as 1 kg of plutonium.

Keep in mind what they mean by “small.” The Hiroshima bomb—“Little Boy”—had an explosive force of between 12 and 15 kilotons of TNT. It killed over 70,000 people in the initial blast, and more than 30,000 in the weeks and years that followed. Its fireball reached 6,000 degrees centigrade at ground zero, and it utterly destroyed 62,000 buildings. Today “Little Boy” would be considered a tactical nuclear weapon.

Here is “big”:

• The W76 warhead: 100 kt
• The B61 warhead: 350 kt
• The W88 warhead: 475 kt
• The B53 warhead: 9,000 kt
• The B41warhead: 25 megatons
• The Tsar Bomba (Russian): 50 megatons.

What the laws of physics tell us is that 19.75 percent enhancement is not even a quarter of the way toward producing fuel that could be turned into a weapon. It is not nice stuff, mind you. Do not hug a container of 19.75 percent fuel. Radiation poisoning is really not the way you want to go.

The problem with the Times’s error (and it was repeated several times in other articles) is that it makes it sound like the Iranians are on the threshold of producing weapons-grade fuel. By virtually every account, they are not. Even Israeli military intelligence says Teheran is not currently working on producing a nuclear weapon, although it adds that Iran could produce the requisite fuel within two years if it wanted to.

According to Agence France Presse, Israeli Brigadier General Aviv Kochavi told the Knesset’s foreign affairs and defense committee that “it was unlikely that Iran, which currently enriches uranium to 20 percent, would start enriching it to the 90 percent level needed for a bomb, because it would be an open breach of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, exposing it to harsher sanctions or even a U.S. or Israeli military strike.” 

But the Times has Teheran more than halfway there—providing you ignore those annoying laws of physics. It is one thing to get someone’s name wrong, or misspell a word. Getting things about nuclear weapons wrong can have very dire consequences in the real world.

The Jerusalem Post reports that Israel has just acquired a new mid-air fuel tanker from the U.S. that would make an attack on Iran easier. The Israeli daily Ha'aretz says the Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and his defense secretary Ehud Barak are seriously considering a strike at Iran. And according to UPI, the new Israeli chief of staff, Lt. Gen. Yoav Galant, also favors attacking Iran. If Iran is “more than half way to the level required for a bomb,” why not? 

In the real world bad science has the potential to produce dangerous politics.

More of Conn Hallinan's work can be found at Dispatches From the Edge.