Don't Bomb Iran

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  • US labs use British nuclear factory to build new bombs

    The US has been using Britain’s atomic weapons factory to carry out research into its own nuclear warhead programme, according to evidence seen by the Guardian. This has been suspected for some years.  The US weapons industry has long been prevented by Congress from researching a “replacement warhead”, and the UK denies it has such a programme. But the UK government has recently spent tens of billions mysteriously upgrading Britain’s factory at Aldermaston, and at Christmas it secretly sold it’s stake to US companies;  thus creating a Guantanamo for nukes, an offshore legal black hole where US companies can design the next generation of weapons without Congressional oversight and without sharing the technical secrets with foreign companies or parliaments.     US weapons labs last week unhappily revealed that Obama may end civilian control of bomb development after decades,  and move such work to the Pantagon –  a move seen to be an attempt to weaken the labs’ influence on policy.    Article 1 of the Non-Proliferation treaty prohibits ‘transfer’ of nuclear weapons between countries, but the US and UK have a secret agreement on nuclear technology sharing –  including recent warhead re-entry upgrades that gave British bombs the ability to destroy very hard targets in a first strike.  Koffi Annan describes such modernisation as a swindle incompatible with the NPT

    Guardian article below:

    US Using British atomic weapons factory for its nuclear programme

    Joint warhead research carried out at Aldermaston

    Work breaches nuclear treaty, campaigners warn

    Matthew Taylor and Richard Norton-Taylor

    The Guardian Monday 9 February 2009

    The US has been using Britain’s atomic weapons factory to carry out research into its own nuclear warhead programme, according to evidence seen by the Guardian.

    US defence officials said that “very valuable” warhead research has taken place at the Atomic Weapons Establishment at Aldermaston in Berkshire as part of an ongoing and secretive deal between the British and American governments.

    The Ministry of Defence admitted it is working with the US on the UK’s “existing nuclear warhead stockpile and the range of replacement options that might be available” but declined to give any further information.

    Last night, opposition MPs called for a full parliamentary inquiry into the extent of the collaboration at Aldermaston and campaign groups warned any such deal was in breach of international law. They added that it also undermined Britain’s claim to have an independent nuclear weapons programme and meant British taxpayers were effectively subsidising America’s nuclear programme.

    The US president, Barack Obama, while on the campaign trail said he wanted to eliminate nuclear weapons and that one of his first actions on taking office would be to “stop the development of new nuclear weapons”. But the Pentagon is at odds with the president. The defence secretary, Robert Gates, and other senior officials argue that the US’s existing arsenal needs to be upgraded and that would not constitute “new” weapons.

    Kate Hudson, of CND, said: “Any work preparing the way for new warheads cuts right across the UK’s commitment to disarm, which it signed up to in the nuclear non-proliferation treaty. That this work may be contributing to both future US and British warheads is nothing short of scandalous.”

    Nick Harvey, defence spokesman for the Liberal Democrats, said parliament and the country would react with “outrage” at the prospect of British taxpayers funding a new US nuclear weapon.

    “All this backroom dealing and smoke and mirrors policy is totally unacceptable, the government must open the Aldermaston accounts to full parliamentary scrutiny,” he added.

    The extent of US involvement at Aldermaston came to light in an interview with John Harvey, policy and planning director at the US National Nuclear Security Administration, carried out last year by the thinktanks Chatham House and the Centre for Strategic Studies.

    Referring to “dual axis hydrodynamic” experiments which, with the help of computer modelling, replicate the conditions inside a warhead at the moment it starts to explode, Harvey said: “There are some capabilities that the UK has that we don’t have and that we borrow… that I believe we have been able to exploit that’s been very valuable to us.”

    It is unclear whether the experiments are still being carried out but, in the same interview, Harvey admitted that the US and UK had struck a new deal over the level of cooperation, including work on US plans for a new generation of nuclear warhead known as the Reliable Replacement Warhead (RRW). He said: “We have recently, I can’t tell you when, taken steps to amend the MDA [Mutual Defence Agreement], not only to extend it but to amend it to allow for a broader extent of cooperation than in the past, and this has to do with the RRW effort.”

    Campaigners said the comments represent the first direct evidence that the US is using UK facilities to develop its nuclear programme. Lawyers acting on their behalf said the increasing levels of cooperation and the extension the MDA breach the non-proliferation treaty, which states: “Each nuclear weapon state party to the treaty undertakes not to transfer to any recipient whatsoever nuclear weapons or other nuclear explosive devices indirectly or indirectly.”

    The MoD admitted the two countries are working together, “examining both the optimum life of the UK’s existing nuclear warhead stockpile and the range of replacement options that might be available to inform decisions on whether and how we may need to refurbish or replace the existing warhead likely to be necessary in the next parliament”.

    Congress has stopped funding research into RRW but campaigners believe the US military may have used facilities in the UK to get around the restrictions at home.

    “Billions of pounds have been poured into the Atomic Weapons Establishment over recent years to build new research facilities,” said Hudson. “If these are being used to support US programmes outside Congress’s controls on spending, it raises even more serious questions about why the British taxpayer is paying for a so-called ‘independent deterrent’.”

  • Israel broke international law in Syrian attack: El Baradei

    The Israeli attack on Syria in September 2007 broke international law says the chief of  the UN’s nuclear agency,  in an interview with Newsweek.  He complained that instead of  giving the IAEA evidence of an alleged Syrian nuclear reactor,  Israel “violated the rules of international law on the use of unilateral force”, adding that the IAEA still does not have evidence of a Syrian reactor at the bombed site.  Reports have surfaced that the US helped Israel with the attack

    Newsweek:  ‘You Cannot Treat Iran Like a Donkey’

    Mohamed ElBaradei, director of the IAEA, says there is now a chance for real dialogue between Tehran and the West.

    Lally Weymouth

    NEWSWEEK

    From the magazine issue dated Feb 9, 2009

    Also in Davos, Mohamed ElBaradei, the controversial director of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), sat down with NEWSWEEK’s Lally Weymouth to defend his record. Several Bush administration officials as well as some nonproliferation experts claim ElBaradei soft-pedaled criticisms of Iran’s nuclear program in order to avoid justifying a U.S. military attack on that country. ElBaradei disagrees. Excerpts:

    Weymouth: In retrospect, do you think you allowed Iran to push the limits?
    ElBaradei:     This is a complete misunderstanding. We have done as much as we can do in Iran to make sure that we understand the history and the present status of their [nuclear] program, to try to push them as far as we can, within our authority, to come clean. The idea people have that we are God, that we are able to cross borders, open doors … We don’t have that [kind of] authority.

    Iran has a technical aspect and a political aspect. The technical aspect is our part of the job. The political aspect is the dialogue to build confidence and trust. I have said for the past six years that the policy of building trust between the West—the United States in particular—and Iran has failed completely. We haven’t moved one iota.

    What do you mean exactly?
    You’re not going to have trust unless you have a direct dialogue. President Obama right now is saying he’s ready to have a direct dialogue without preconditions, based on mutual respect. I say this is absolutely overdue.

    You cannot … treat Iran like a donkey, with carrots and sticks. This is a competition for power in the Middle East.

    Iran versus the West?
    Well, it’s a competition between Iran and the West … Iran wants to have its role as a regional security power recognized

    … They see that if you have the technology that can allow you to develop a nuclear weapon in a short period of time, it gives you power, prestige and security … They heard from the previous administration talk about allocating funds for regime change, about an Axis of Evil, and if you were in their place, you would do everything you could to protect yourself.

    Do you think there’s a chance dialogue will work?
    You have to try. It might not work, but I know the majority of the Iranian people want to have a normal relationship with the U.S., particularly the young people. They want to be part of the international community. If you don’t talk, what do you get?

    You were elected IAEA director with the support of the United States, and later Washington treated you quite badly.
    It was during my third re-election when former U.S. ambassador to the U.N. John Bolton initiated a campaign to block my re-election. They did not get one single country to stand against me, and in the end I was elected by consensus with U.S. support. You can disagree with the head of the international organization, but we are not there to implement the policies of one country. If an organization like IAEA is regarded as a broker for one country, it will be killed.

    Experts say you’ve been quite tough on Iran since the National Intelligence Estimatein 2007.
    We haven’t changed. We have always been tough. What they don’t like is, they say I speak outside of the box. In many cases, privately and in public, I have been telling them, you need to support me with your policy, and your policy is not working. Either you want a leader for an international institution or you want some technocrat. But if you have a technocrat, you will go nowhere.

    People say you weren’t tough enough on Syria for building a nuclear reactor.
    I have been very harsh on Israel because they violated the rules of international law on the use of unilateral force, and they did not provide us with the information before the bombing [with] which we could have established whether Syria was building a nuclear reactor … Now we are doing our best to try to see what Syria was doing, but it’s like Iran. I cannot jump the gun and say Syria was building a nuclear facility because what we are doing now is trying to verify what was there.

    Why don’t you criticize Syria and North Korea for building this facility?
    Because we don’t have the evidence. If I had had the evidence before the bombing, I could have done it in 24 hours.

    URL: http://www.newsweek.com/id/182525

  • White House again says it rejected Israeli attack on Iran

    The White House has rejected support for an Israeli air attack on Iran, according to a major article in the Bush-friendly  NY Times.  A few weeks ago, the same White House said it rejected an attack on Gaza in Time magazine, but Bush has now stunned allies in the UN Security Council (and even Condi Rice) with his strong support for the Gaza attack.   So you have to ask: is this all simply White House lies, and the Bush-friendly media is just trying to distance an enthusiastic White House from an imminent  Iran attack?

    The long (and inaccurate) NYT article is below.

    New York Times January 11, 2009

    U.S. Rejected Aid for Israeli Raid on Iranian Nuclear Site

    By DAVID E. SANGER
    WASHINGTON — President Bush deflected a secret request by Israel last
    year for specialized bunker-busting bombs it wanted for an attack on
    Iran’s main nuclear complex and told the Israelis that he had authorized
    new covert action intended to sabotage Iran’s suspected effort to
    develop nuclear weapons, according to senior American and foreign
    officials.

    White House officials never conclusively determined whether Israel had
    decided to go ahead with the strike before the United States protested,
    or whether Prime Minister Ehud Olmert of Israel was trying to goad the
    White House into more decisive action before Mr. Bush left office. But
    the Bush administration was particularly alarmed by an Israeli request
    to fly over Iraq to reach Iran’s major nuclear complex at Natanz, where
    the country’s only known uranium enrichment plant is located.

    The White House denied that request outright, American officials said,
    and the Israelis backed off their plans, at least temporarily. But the
    tense exchanges also prompted the White House to step up
    intelligence-sharing with Israel and brief Israeli officials on new
    American efforts to subtly sabotage Iran’s nuclear infrastructure, a
    major covert program that Mr. Bush is about to hand off to
    President-elect Barack Obama.

    This account of the expanded American covert program and the Bush
    administration’s efforts to dissuade Israel from an aerial attack on
    Iran emerged in interviews over the past 15 months with current and
    former American officials, outside experts, international nuclear
    inspectors and European and Israeli officials. None would speak on the
    record because of the great secrecy surrounding the intelligence
    developed on Iran.

    Several details of the covert effort have been omitted from this
    account, at the request of senior United States intelligence and
    administration officials, to avoid harming continuing operations.

    The interviews also suggest that while Mr. Bush was extensively briefed
    on options for an overt American attack on Iran’s facilities, he never
    instructed the Pentagon to move beyond contingency planning, even during
    the final year of his presidency, contrary to what some critics have
    suggested.

    The interviews also indicate that Mr. Bush was convinced by top
    administration officials, led by Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates, that
    any overt attack on Iran would probably prove ineffective, lead to the
    expulsion of international inspectors and drive Iran’s nuclear effort
    further out of view. Mr. Bush and his aides also discussed the
    possibility that an airstrike could ignite a broad Middle East war in
    which America’s 140,000 troops in Iraq would inevitably become involved.

    Instead, Mr. Bush embraced more intensive covert operations actions
    aimed at Iran, the interviews show, having concluded that the sanctions
    imposed by the United States and its allies were failing to slow the
    uranium enrichment efforts. Those covert operations, and the question of
    whether Israel will settle for something less than a conventional attack
    on Iran, pose immediate and wrenching decisions for Mr. Obama.

    The covert American program, started in early 2008, includes renewed
    American efforts to penetrate Iran’s nuclear supply chain abroad, along
    with new efforts, some of them experimental, to undermine electrical
    systems, computer systems and other networks on which Iran relies. It is
    aimed at delaying the day that Iran can produce the weapons-grade fuel
    and designs it needs to produce a workable nuclear weapon.

    Knowledge of the program has been closely held, yet inside the Bush
    administration some officials are skeptical about its chances of
    success, arguing that past efforts to undermine Iran’s nuclear program
    have been detected by the Iranians and have only delayed, not derailed,
    their drive to unlock the secrets of uranium enrichment.

    Late last year, international inspectors estimated that Iran had 3,800
    centrifuges spinning, but American intelligence officials now estimate
    that the figure is 4,000 to 5,000, enough to produce about one weapon’s
    worth of uranium every eight months or so.

    While declining to be specific, one American official dismissed the
    latest covert operations against Iran as “science experiments.” One
    senior intelligence official argued that as Mr. Bush prepared to leave
    office, the Iranians were already so close to achieving a weapons
    capacity that they were unlikely to be stopped.

    Others disagreed, making the point that the Israelis would not have been
    dissuaded from conducting an attack if they believed that the American
    effort was unlikely to prove effective.

    Since his election on Nov. 4, Mr. Obama has been extensively briefed on
    the American actions in Iran, though his transition aides have refused
    to comment on the issue.

    Early in his presidency, Mr. Obama must decide whether the covert
    actions begun by Mr. Bush are worth the risks of disrupting what he has
    pledged will be a more active diplomatic effort to engage with Iran.

    Either course could carry risks for Mr. Obama. An inherited intelligence
    or military mission that went wrong could backfire, as happened to
    President Kennedy with the Bay of Pigs operation in Cuba. But a decision
    to pull back on operations aimed at Iran could leave Mr. Obama
    vulnerable to charges that he is allowing Iran to speed ahead toward a
    nuclear capacity, one that could change the contours of power in the
    Middle East.

    An Intelligence Conflict

    Israel’s effort to obtain the weapons, refueling capacity and permission
    to fly over Iraq for an attack on Iran grew out of its disbelief and
    anger at an American intelligence assessment completed in late 2007 that
    concluded that Iran had effectively suspended its development of nuclear
    weapons four years earlier.

    That conclusion also stunned Mr. Bush’s national security team — and
    Mr. Bush himself, who was deeply suspicious of the conclusion, according
    to officials who discussed it with him.

    The assessment, a National Intelligence Estimate, was based on a trove
    of Iranian reports obtained by penetrating Iran’s computer networks.

    Those reports indicated that Iranian engineers had been ordered to halt
    development of a nuclear warhead in 2003, even while they continued to
    speed ahead in enriching uranium, the most difficult obstacle to
    building a weapon.

    The “key judgments” of the National Intelligence Estimate, which were
    publicly released, emphasized the suspension of the weapons work.

    The public version made only glancing reference to evidence described at
    great length in the 140-page classified version of the assessment: the
    suspicion that Iran had 10 or 15 other nuclear-related facilities, never
    opened to international inspectors, where enrichment activity, weapons
    work or the manufacturing of centrifuges might be taking place.

    The Israelis responded angrily and rebutted the American report,
    providing American intelligence officials and Adm. Mike Mullen, the
    chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, with evidence that they said
    indicated that the Iranians were still working on a weapon.

    While the Americans were not convinced that the Iranian weapons
    development was continuing, the Israelis were not the only ones highly
    critical of the United States report. Secretary Gates, a former director
    of the Central Intelligence Agency, said the report had presented the
    evidence poorly, underemphasizing the importance of Iran’s enrichment
    activity and overemphasizing the suspension of a weapons-design effort
    that could easily be turned back on.

    In an interview, Mr. Gates said that in his whole career he had never
    seen “an N.I.E. that had such an impact on U.S. diplomacy,” because
    “people figured, well, the military option is now off the table.”

    Prime Minister Olmert came to the same conclusion. He had previously
    expected, according to several Americans and Israeli officials, that Mr.
    Bush would deal with Iran’s nuclear program before he left office.
    “Now,” said one American official who bore the brunt of Israel’s
    reaction, “they didn’t believe he would.”

    Attack Planning

    Early in 2008, the Israeli government signaled that it might be
    preparing to take matters into its own hands. In a series of meetings,
    Israeli officials asked Washington for a new generation of powerful
    bunker-busters, far more capable of blowing up a deep underground plant
    than anything in Israel’s arsenal of conventional weapons. They asked
    for refueling equipment that would allow their aircraft to reach Iran
    and return to Israel. And they asked for the right to fly over Iraq.

    Mr. Bush deflected the first two requests, pushing the issue off, but
    “we said ‘hell no’ to the overflights,” one of his top aides said. At
    the White House and the Pentagon, there was widespread concern that a
    political uproar in Iraq about the use of its American-controlled
    airspace could result in the expulsion of American forces from the
    country.

    The Israeli ambassador to the United States, Sallai Meridor, declined
    several requests over the past four weeks to be interviewed about
    Israel’s efforts to obtain the weapons from Washington, saying through
    aides that he was too busy.

    Last June, the Israelis conducted an exercise over the Mediterranean Sea
    that appeared to be a dry run for an attack on the enrichment plant at
    Natanz. When the exercise was analyzed at the Pentagon, officials
    concluded that the distances flown almost exactly equaled the distance
    between Israel and the Iranian nuclear site.

    “This really spooked a lot of people,” one White House official said.
    White House officials discussed the possibility that the Israelis would
    fly over Iraq without American permission. In that case, would the
    American military be ordered to shoot them down? If the United States
    did not interfere to stop an Israeli attack, would the Bush
    administration be accused of being complicit in it?

    Admiral Mullen, traveling to Israel in early July on a previously
    scheduled trip, questioned Israeli officials about their intentions. His
    Israeli counterpart, Lt. Gen. Gabi Ashkenazi, argued that an aerial
    attack could set Iran’s program back by two or three years, according to
    officials familiar with the exchange. The American estimates at the time
    were far more conservative.

    Yet by the time Admiral Mullen made his visit, Israeli officials appear
    to have concluded that without American help, they were not yet capable
    of hitting the site effectively enough to strike a decisive blow against
    the Iranian program.

    The United States did give Israel one item on its shopping list:
    high-powered radar, called the X-Band, to detect any Iranian missile
    launchings. It was the only element in the Israeli request that could be
    used solely for defense, not offense.

    Mr. Gates’s spokesman, Geoff Morrell, said last week that Mr. Gates —
    whom Mr. Obama is retaining as defense secretary — believed that “a
    potential strike on the Iranian facilities is not something that we or
    anyone else should be pursuing at this time.”

    A New Covert Push

    Throughout 2008, the Bush administration insisted that it had a plan to
    deal with the Iranians: applying overwhelming financial pressure that
    would persuade Tehran to abandon its nuclear program, as foreign
    enterprises like the French company Total pulled out of Iranian oil
    projects, European banks cut financing, and trade credits were squeezed.

    But the Iranians were making uranium faster than the sanctions were
    making progress. As Mr. Bush realized that the sanctions he had pressed
    for were inadequate and his military options untenable, he turned to the
    C.I.A. His hope, several people involved in the program said, was to
    create some leverage against the Iranians, by setting back their nuclear
    program while sanctions continued and, more recently, oil prices dropped
    precipitously.

    There were two specific objectives: to slow progress at Natanz and other
    known and suspected nuclear facilities, and keep the pressure on a
    little-known Iranian professor named Mohsen Fakrizadeh, a scientist
    described in classified portions of American intelligence reports as
    deeply involved in an effort to design a nuclear warhead for Iran.

    Past American-led efforts aimed at Natanz had yielded little result.
    Several years ago, foreign intelligence services tinkered with
    individual power units that Iran bought in Turkey to drive its
    centrifuges, the floor-to-ceiling silvery tubes that spin at the speed
    of sound, enriching uranium for use in power stations or, with
    additional enrichment, nuclear weapons.

    A number of centrifuges blew up, prompting public declarations of
    sabotage by Iranian officials. An engineer in Switzerland, who worked
    with the Pakistani nuclear black-marketeer Abdul Qadeer Khan, had been
    “turned” by American intelligence officials and helped them slip faulty
    technology into parts bought by the Iranians.

    What Mr. Bush authorized, and informed a narrow group of Congressional
    leaders about, was a far broader effort, aimed at the entire industrial
    infrastructure that supports the Iranian nuclear program. Some of the
    efforts focused on ways to destabilize the centrifuges. The details are
    closely held, for obvious reasons, by American officials. One official,
    however, said, “It was not until the last year that they got really
    imaginative about what one could do to screw up the system.”

    Then, he cautioned, “none of these are game-changers,” meaning that the
    efforts would not necessarily cripple the Iranian program. Others in the
    administration strongly disagree.

    In the end, success or failure may come down to how much pressure can be
    brought to bear on Mr. Fakrizadeh, whom the 2007 National Intelligence
    Estimate identifies, in its classified sections, as the manager of
    Project 110 and Project 111. According to a presentation by the chief
    inspector of the International Atomic Energy Agency, those were the
    names for two Iranian efforts that appeared to be dedicated to designing
    a warhead and making it work with an Iranian missile. Iranian officials
    say the projects are a fiction, made up by the United States.

    While the international agency readily concedes that the evidence about
    the two projects remains murky, one of the documents it briefly
    displayed at a meeting of the agency’s member countries in Vienna last
    year, from Mr. Fakrizadeh’s projects, showed the chronology of a missile
    launching, ending with a warhead exploding about 650 yards above ground
    — approximately the altitude from which the bomb dropped on Hiroshima
    was detonated.

    The exact status of Mr. Fakrizadeh’s projects today is unclear. While
    the National Intelligence Estimate reported that activity on Projects
    110 and 111 had been halted, the fear among intelligence agencies is
    that if the weapons design projects are turned back on, will they know?

    David E. Sanger is the chief Washington correspondent for The New York
    Times. Reporting for this article was developed in the course of
    research for “The Inheritance: The World Obama Confronts and the
    Challenges to American Power,” to be published Tuesday by Harmony Books.

  • Hidden travels of the atomic bomb

    The atomic bomb was only developed once, and then its secrets were stolen, shared or sold  by the eight other nuclear powers – no state has ever developed its own bomb.  So says a new book by two Los Alamos and Livermore heavyweights who say that China hosted  a Pakistan bomb test 1990 (under Benazir Bhutto), gave France access to their test site,  and gave a way a simple bomb design. They also confirm that Israel and South Africa cooperated on a neutron weapon test in 1979, as well as exchanging tritium for uranium.  The authors argue that bombs are so hard to make that proliferation is not inevitable, contrary to the argument used by many anti-disarmament ‘experts’.

    The following review is from the New York Times

    Hidden Travels of the Atomic Bomb

    By WILLIAM J. BROAD
    Published: December 8, 2008

    In 1945, after the atomic destruction of two Japanese cities, J. Robert Oppenheimer expressed foreboding about the spread of nuclear arms.

    “They are not too hard to make,” he told his colleagues on the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos, N.M. “They will be universal if people wish to make them universal.”

    That sensibility, born where the atomic bomb itself was born, grew into a theory of technological inevitability. Because the laws of physics are universal, the theory went, it was just a matter of time before other bright minds and determined states joined the club. A corollary was that trying to stop proliferation was quite difficult if not futile.

    But nothing, it seems, could be further from the truth. In the six decades since Oppenheimer’s warning, the nuclear club has grown to only nine members. What accounts for the slow spread? Can anything be done to reduce it further? Is there a chance for an atomic future that is brighter than the one Oppenheimer foresaw?

    Two new books by three atomic insiders hold out hope. The authors shatter myths, throw light on the hidden dynamics of nuclear proliferation and suggest new ways to reduce the threat.

    Neither book endorses Oppenheimer’s view that bombs are relatively easy to make. Both document national paths to acquiring nuclear weapons that have been rocky and dependent on the willingness of spies and politicians to divulge state secrets.

    Thomas C. Reed, a veteran of the Livermore weapons laboratory in California and a former secretary of the Air Force, and Danny B. Stillman, former director of intelligence at Los Alamos, have teamed up in “The Nuclear Express: A Political History of the Bomb and its Proliferation” to show the importance of moles, scientists with divided loyalties and — most important — the subtle and not so subtle interests of nuclear states.

    “Since the birth of the nuclear age,” they write, “no nation has developed a nuclear weapon on its own, although many claim otherwise.”

    Among other things, the book details how secretive aid from France and China helped spawn five more nuclear states.

    It also names many conflicted scientists, including luminaries like Isidor I. Rabi. The Nobel laureate worked on the Manhattan Project in World War II and later sat on the board of governors of the Weizmann Institute of Science, a birthplace of Israel’s nuclear arms.

    Secret cooperation extended to the secluded sites where nations tested their handiwork in thundering blasts. The book says, for instance, that China opened its sprawling desert test site to Pakistan, letting its client test a first bomb there on May 26, 1990.

    That alone rewrites atomic history. It casts new light on the reign of Benazir Bhutto as prime minister of Pakistan and helps explain how the country was able to respond so quickly in May 1998 when India conducted five nuclear tests.

    “It took only two weeks and three days for the Pakistanis to field and fire a nuclear device of their own,” the book notes.

    In another disclosure, the book says China “secretly extended the hospitality of the Lop Nur nuclear test site to the French.”

    The authors build their narrative on deep knowledge of the arms and intelligence worlds, including those abroad. Mr. Stillman has toured heavily guarded nuclear sites in China and Russia, and both men have developed close ties with foreign peers.

    In their acknowledgments, they thank American cold warriors like Edward Teller as well as two former C.I.A. directors, saying the intelligence experts “guided our searches.”

    Robert S. Norris, an atomic historian and author of “Racing for the Bomb,” an account of the Manhattan Project, praised the book for “remarkable disclosures of how nuclear knowledge was shared overtly and covertly with friends and foes.”

    The book is technical in places, as when detailing the exotica of nuclear arms. But it reads like a labor of love built on two lifetimes of scientific adventure. It is due out in January from Zenith Press.

    Its wide perspective reveals how states quietly shared complex machinery and secrets with one another.

    All paths stem from the United States, directly or indirectly. One began with Russian spies that deeply penetrated the Manhattan Project. Stalin was so enamored of the intelligence haul, Mr. Reed and Mr. Stillman note, that his first atom bomb was an exact replica of the weapon the United States had dropped on Nagasaki.

    Moscow freely shared its atomic thefts with Mao Zedong, China’s leader. The book says that Klaus Fuchs, a Soviet spy in the Manhattan Project who was eventually caught and, in 1959, released from jail, did likewise. Upon gaining his freedom, the authors say, Fuchs gave the mastermind of Mao’s weapons program a detailed tutorial on the Nagasaki bomb. A half-decade later, China surprised the world with its first blast.

    The book, in a main disclosure, discusses how China in 1982 made a policy decision to flood the developing world with atomic know-how. Its identified clients include Algeria, Pakistan and North Korea.

    Alarmingly, the authors say one of China’s bombs was created as an “export design” that nearly “anybody could build.” The blueprint for the simple plan has traveled from Pakistan to Libya and, the authors say, Iran. That path is widely assumed among intelligence officials, but Tehran has repeatedly denied the charge.

    The book sees a quiet repercussion of China’s proliferation policy in the Algerian desert. Built in secrecy, the reactor there now makes enough plutonium each year to fuel one atom bomb and is ringed by antiaircraft missiles, the book says.

    China’s deck also held a wild card: its aid to Pakistan helped A.Q. Khan, a rogue Pakistani metallurgist who sold nuclear gear on the global black market. The authors compare Dr. Khan to “a used-car dealer” happy to sell his complex machinery to suckers who had no idea how hard it was to make fuel for a bomb.

    Why did Beijing spread its atomic knowledge so freely? The authors speculate that it either wanted to strengthen the enemies of China’s enemies (for instance, Pakistan as a counterweight to India) or, more chillingly, to encourage nuclear wars or terror in foreign lands from which Beijing would emerge as the “last man standing.”

    A lesser pathway involves France. The book says it drew on Manhattan Project veterans and shared intimate details of its bomb program with Israel, with whom it had substantial commercial ties. By 1959, the book says, dozens of Israeli scientists “were observing and participating in” the French program of weapons design.

    The book adds that in early 1960, when France detonated its first bomb, doing so in the Algerian desert, “two nations went nuclear.” And it describes how the United States turned a blind eye to Israel’s own atomic developments. It adds that, in the autumn of 1966, Israel conducted a special, non-nuclear test “2,600 feet under the Negev desert.” The next year it built its first bomb.

    Israel, in turn, shared its atomic secrets with South Africa. The book discloses that the two states exchanged some key ingredients for the making of atom bombs: tritium to South Africa, uranium to Israel. And the authors agree with military experts who hold that Israel and South Africa in 1979 jointly detonated a nuclear device in the South Atlantic near Prince Edward Island, more than one thousand miles south of Cape Town. Israel needed the test, it says, to develop a neutron bomb.

    The authors charge that South Africa at one point targeted Luanda, the capital of neighboring Angola, “for a nuclear strike if peace talks failed.”

    South Africa dismantled six nuclear arms in 1990 but retains much expertise. Today, the authors write, “South African technical mercenaries may be more dangerous than the underemployed scientists of the former Soviet Union” because they have no real home in Africa.

    “The Bomb: A New History,” due out in January from Ecco Books, an imprint of HarperCollins, plows similar ground less deeply, but looks more widely at proliferation curbs and diplomacy. It is by Stephen M. Younger, the former head of nuclear arms at Los Alamos and former director of the Defense Threat Reduction Agency at the Pentagon.

    Dr. Younger disparages what he calls myths suggesting that “all the secrets of nuclear weapons design are available on the Internet.” He writes that France, despite secretive aid, struggled initially to make crude bombs — a point he saw with his own eyes during a tour of a secretive French atomic museum that is closed to the public. That trouble, he says, “suggests we should doubt assertions that the information required to make a nuclear weapon is freely available.”

    The two books draw on atomic history to suggest a mix of old and new ways to defuse the proliferation threat. Both see past restraints as fraying and the task as increasingly urgent.

    Mr. Reed and Mr. Stillman see politics — not spies or military ambitions — as the primary force in the development and spread of nuclear arms. States repeatedly stole and leaked secrets because they saw such action as in their geopolitical interest.

    Beijing continues to be a major threat, they argue. While urging global responses like better intelligence, better inspections and better safeguarding of nuclear materials, they also see generational change in China as a great hope in plugging the atomic leaks.

    “We must continue to support human rights within Chinese society, not just as an American export, but because it is the dream of the Tiananmen Square generation,” they write. “In time those youngsters could well prevail, and the world will be a less contentious place.”

    Dr. Younger notes how political restraints and global treaties worked for decades to curb atomic proliferation, as did American assurances to its allies. “It is a tribute to American diplomacy,” he writes, “that so many countries that might otherwise have gone nuclear were convinced to remain under the nuclear umbrella of the United States.”

    And he, too, emphasizes the importance of political sticks and carrots to halting and perhaps reversing the spread of nuclear arms. Iran, he says, is not fated to go nuclear.

    “Sweden, Switzerland, Argentina and Brazil all flirted with nuclear programs, and all decided to abandon them,” he notes. “Nuclear proliferation is not unidirectional — given the right conditions and incentives, it is possible for a nation to give up its nuclear aspirations.”

    The take-home message of both books is quite the reverse of Oppenheimer’s grim forecast. But both caution that the situation has reached a delicate stage — with a second age of nuclear proliferation close at hand — and that missteps now could hurt terribly in the future.

    Mr. Reed and Mr. Stillman take their title, “The Nuclear Express,” from a 1940 radio dispatch by Edward R. Murrow , who spoke from London as the clouds of war gathered over Europe. He told of people feeling like the express train of civilization was going out of control.

    The authors warn of a similar danger today and suggest that only close attention to the atomic past, as well as determined global action, can avoid “the greatest train wreck” in history.

  • Olmert: no US pressure against Iran attack

    Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said Tuesday Israel was free to take any action it deemed necessary against Iran’s nuclear program, saying there were no U.S. restraints,  contradicting a Time magazine story the previous day. “I can’t recall that anyone in the (U.S.) administration… advised me or any of my official representatives not to take any action that we will deem necessary for the fundamental security of the state of Israel, and that includes Iran,” Olmert said.

    Reuters Story:

    Olmert says no U.S. pressure on Israel over Iran

    Jeffrey Heller
    Reuters North American News Service
    Nov 25, 2008 11:57 EST
    WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said Tuesday Israel was free to take any action it deemed necessary against Iran’s nuclear program, saying there were no U.S. restraints.
    But the outgoing Israeli leader, who held farewell talks with U.S. President George W. Bush Monday, stopped short, in a briefing to reporters, of making any threat to strike Iran.

    “I can’t recall that anyone in the (U.S.) administration, including in the last couple of days, advised me or any of my official representatives not to take any action that we will deem necessary for the fundamental security of the state of Israel, and that includes Iran,” Olmert said.

    Olmert, caretaker prime minister until a new government is formed after Israel’s Feb. 10 election, was replying to a question on whether Washington was pressuring Israel not to launch an invasion of the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip or to refrain from attacking Iran.

    Israel and the West believe Iran is enriching uranium with the aim of building nuclear weapons. Iran says its atomic programme is aimed at generating electricity.

    While urging stronger international sanctions on Tehran, Olmert has said Israel was keeping all options open in dealing with Iranian nuclear activities he has described as a threat to the existence of the Jewish state.

    Israel is widely believed to have the Middle East’s only atomic arsenal.

    Some diplomats and analysts say the global financial crisis had eclipsed Western jitters over Iran’s nuclear programme and may have put paid to the possibility of the United States or Israel resorting to preemptive military strikes.

    To bomb Iranian sites, diplomats and analysts said, would risk triggering an even more intolerable tumult should Tehran choke off oil exports.

    A U.S. diplomat who has had extensive dealings with Iran told Reuters in October that Washington had “made it clear that an offensive option against Iran is not something we want contemplated at this time.” The diplomat spoke on condition of anonymity.

    Last August, Israel’s Haaretz newspaper said in an unsourced report that Washington had turned down Israeli requests for military hardware to help it prepare for a possible attack on Iranian nuclear facilities.

    Interviewed on Israeli Army Radio at the time, Defence Minister Ehud Barak declined to discuss the report, saying “it would not be right to talk about these things.” (Additional reporting by Dan Williams in Jerusalem, Editing by Jackie Frank)

  • US pressures Olmert against Iran, Gaza attacks – Time

    U.S. officials have asked Israel to refrain from launching any major military action in the region while Bush is president, Israeli sources told TIME magazine.  The next day, Prime Minister Olmert said the US has never pressed Israel not to attack Iran.

    TIME Monday, Nov. 24, 2008

    US Puts Pressure on Israel to Refrain from Attacks

    By Tim McGirk / Jerusalem

    U.S. officials have asked Israel to refrain from launching any major military action in the region during the waning days of the Bush presidency, Israeli sources have told TIME. Previously, some Israeli military officials had hinted to the media that if Israel were to carry out its threats to strike at Iranian nuclear installations, it might do so before Barack Obama enters the White House in January. But now a Defense Ministry official says, “We have been warned off.”

    The call for restraint was relayed to Israeli officials by senior U.S. counterparts, TIME’s sources say, and it is likely to be reinforced during Monday’s valedictory meeting in Washington between Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and President George W. Bush.

  • Main evidence against Iran may be forged – IAEA questions ‘smoking laptop

    A ‘stolen laptop’ that contains the primary ‘evidence’ that Iran has a bomb program may be a forgery, new evidence reveals.  As with Iraq, the IAEA has investigated and dismissed almost all allegations about iran’s bomb.  Remaining questions are mostly to do with documents on the ‘stolen laptop’ that the US says it found somehwer and gave to the IAEA on condition that Iran should not be allowed to see the documents.  Iran has long said the laptop documents are forgeries, though better forgeries than the crude ‘evidence’ the US produced to ‘prove’ that Saddam bought uranium from Niger.   With no guarantee the laptop is authentic, the IAEA has been in two minds, but now evidence is emerging that the laptop is a fake.

    Documents linking Iran to nuclear weapons push may have been fabricated

    11/10/2008 @ 10:30 am

    Filed by Gareth Porter

    The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has obtained evidence suggesting that documents which have been described as technical studies for a secret Iranian nuclear weapons-related research program may have been fabricated.

    The documents in question were acquired by U.S. intelligence in 2004 from a still unknown source — most of them in the form of electronic files allegedly stolen from a laptop computer belonging to an Iranian researcher. The US has based much of its push for sanctions against Iran on these documents.

    The new evidence of possible fraud has increased pressure within the IAEA secretariat to distance the agency from the laptop documents, according to a Vienna-based diplomatic source close to the IAEA, who spoke to RAW STORY on condition of anonymity.

    The laptop documents include what the IAEA has described in a published report as technical drawings of efforts to redesign the nosecone of the Iranian Shahab-3 ballistic missile “to accommodate a nuclear warhead.” The documents are also said to include studies on the use of a high explosive detonation system, drawings of a shaft apparently to be used for nuclear tests, and studies on a bench-scale uranium conversion facility.

    These technical papers, along with some correspondence related to the alleged secret Iranian program — referred to by the IAEA as “alleged studies” — have been the primary basis during 2008 for the insistence by the US-led international coalition pushing for sanctions against Iran that the Iranian case must be kept going in the United Nations Security Council.

    Handwritten Notes

    At the center of the internal IAEA struggle is an Iranian firm named Kimia Maadan, which is portrayed in the documents as responsible for studies on a uranium conversion facility, called the “green salt” project, as part of the alleged nuclear weapons program under the Iranian Ministry of Defense.

    According to a February 2006 Washington Post article, the United States and its allies believe that Kimia Maadan is a front for the Iranian military.

    One of the communications included in the laptop documents – a letter allegedly sent to Kimia Maadan from an unnamed Iranian engineering firm in May 2003 – is at the center of the authenticity argument.

    This letter is described in the May 26, 2008 IAEA report as “a one page annotated letter of May 2003 in Farsi.” According to a US source who has been briefed on the matter, the letter has handwritten notes on it which refer to studies on the redesign of a missile reentry vehicle.

    Last January, however, Iran turned over to the IAEA a copy of the same May 2003 letter with no handwritten notes on it. This was confirmed by the director of the IAEA Safeguards Department, Olli Heinonen, during a February briefing for member states. Heinonen referred to “correspondence” related to Kimia Maadan that is “identical to that provided by Iran, with the addition of handwritten notes.”

    Notes on the Heinonen briefing, compiled by unnamed diplomats who attended it, were posted on the website of the Washington-based Institute for Science and International Security.

    The copy of the letter without the handwritten notes was part of a larger collection of documentation concerning Kimia Maadan provided to IAEA by Iran in response to a request for an explanation of that firm’s role in the management of the Iranian Gchine uranium mine.

    After the IAEA received the copy of the letter without notes from Iran, some officials began pushing for an acknowledgment by the Agency that there were serious questions about the whether the laptop documents were fabricated, according to the Vienna-based source close to the IAEA.

    “There was an effort to point out that the Agency isn’t in a position to authenticate the documents,” said the source.

    Heinonen and other IAEA Safeguards Department officials have continued, however, to defend the credibility of the document in question.

    According to an American source briefed on the dispute, the defenders of the authenticity of the version of the letter with the handwritten notes say that the appearance of the clean copy can be attributed to Kimia Maadan making multiple copies of the original which have been circulated to various staff members.

    Only an Ore-processing Plant

    Further evidence damaging to the credibility of the letter and the handwritten notes was provided to the atomic energy watchdog last January by the Iranian government. According to Iran, Kimia Maadan was not working for the Defense Ministry but for the civilian Atomic Energy Organization of Iran (AEOI).

    The new Iranian documentation, described in the February 22, 2008 IAEA report, proved to IAEA’s satisfaction that the Kimia Maadan Company had been created in May 2000 solely to carry out a project to design, procure and install equipment for an ore processing plant.

    The documents also showed that the core staff of Kimia Maadan was able to undertake the work on ore processing only because the nuclear agency had provided it with the technical drawings and reports as the basis for the contract.

    “Information and explanations provided by Iran were supported by the documentation, the content of which is consistent with the information already available to the agency,” the IAEA concluded.

    Marie Harff, a spokesperson for the CIA, declined to comment.

    Additional Doubts About the Letter

    Other questions surround the letter with the handwritten notes. The subject of the letter was Kimia Maadan’s inquiry to the engineering firm about procurement of a programmable logic control (PLC) system, according to the IAEA’s May 26 report.

    A PLC system is one of many types of technology that the United States has long sought to deny to the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran. Iran had informed the IAEA even before 2006 that Kimia Maadan had assisted the AEOI in getting around that denial strategy by procuring various technologies for the planned uranium conversion facility at Esfahan.

    Given that Kimia Maadan’s role in procurement for the conversion facility was both unrelated to its technical work for the AEOI and part of a covert effort to get around U.S. restrictions, it seems unlikely that they would have made multiple copies of the letter. Even if multiple copies were made, the firm would certainly have taken normal security precautions for a document of that type, marking each copy with a number or name.

    A security procedure of that kind would have identified any missing copies. However, this was not the case with the 2003 letter. The United States, as its reason for refusing to provide a copy of the document to Iran, has argued that it would allow Iranian security personnel to identify the person who wrote the notes from their handwriting, according to the US source who has been briefed on the matter.

    Another problem with the handwritten letter is the absence of any logical link between the subject of the letter and the alleged work on redesign of the missile. PLC systems, which are used for automation of industrial processes, such as control of machinery on factory assembly lines, would have been irrelevant to the technical studies on redesigning the Shahab-3 missile.

    Other Documents Also Under Suspicion

    Other documents from the laptop collection, allegedly showing that Kimia Maadan was working closely with the team trying to redesigning the Shahab-3 missile, have also come under suspicion of fraud.

    The IAEA’s May 2008 report describes a flowsheet under Kimia Maadan’s name, showing a “process for bench scale conversion of uranium oxide” to UF4 (uranium tetraflouride), also known as “green salt.” The project number shown in the disputed documents for the “green salt” subproject is 5.13.

    However, Heinonen stated that the number given to the Gchine subproject was 5.15. According to the documents obtained by the IAEA from Iran last January, this was the number of the uranium ore processing project that was assigned in 1999 by the civilian AEOI, not by the Iranian Defense Ministry. This would mean that the author of the document used the project number 5.13 for the “green salt” subproject based on their knowledge of the AEOI numbering system and not on a military designation.

    In his February 25 briefing, Heinonen additionally referred to an alleged letter sent by Kimia Maadan – as manager of three subprojects – to the “missile re-entry vehicle” project, asking for a “technical opinion” on the plans for equipment for a proposed “green salt” conversion facility.

    However, it is difficult to understand why the team working on redesigning the missile would be asked for a “technical opinion” on equipment for a uranium conversion facility.

    A spokesperson for the State Department’s Office of Arms Control and International Security, which is responsible for IAEA affairs, said in an e-mail that specialists in the office “aren’t able to comment” on the subject of the intelligence documents now being considered by the IAEA.

    The IAEA also declined to comment.

    Toward a Showdown on the Contradictions

    As the contradictions between the new Iranian evidence and the laptop documents relating to Kimia Maadan became apparent, some IAEA officials argued that the Agency should distance itself from what they now suspect are forgeries. Despite that argument, the May 2008 report contained no reference to the issue.

    The next IAEA report, due out in mid-November, will include the first response by the Agency to a confidential 117-page Iranian critique of the laptop documents, according to the Vienna-based source.

    In the past, IAEA Director General Mohamed ElBaradei has shown an ability to face off with the United States when evidence has been called into doubt. The infamous “Niger forgeries” – documents that purported to show an agreement between Niger and Iraq for the purchase of uranium oxide – were used by the White House as part of its case for war against Iraq.

    In response, ElBaradei sent a letter to the White House and the National Security Council in December 2002, over three months before the US launched the Iraq War, warning that he believed the documents were forgeries and should not be cited as evidence of Iraqi intention to obtain nuclear weapons.

    When ElBaradei received no response from the Bush administration, he went public to debunk the Niger forgeries. In a speech at the United Nations in March 2003, he declared that the IAEA, after “thorough analysis,” had concluded that the documents alleging the purchase of uranium by Iraqi from Niger “are in fact not authentic.”

    The anomalies that have been revealed by the Iranian documents obtained from Iran last January may not be as obvious as the ones that made it clear the Niger documents were fabrications. Nevertheless, they appear to be red flags for IAEA analysts concerned with the issue.

    Suspicion has surrounded the “alleged studies” documents from the beginning, because the United States has refused to say who brought the collection to US intelligence four years ago.

    Gareth Porter is an investigative journalist and historian who has authored numerous foreign policy analyses and is the author of the book, Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam. In a 2006 article in the American Prospect, he revealed Iran’s spurned diplomatic outreach to the Bush Administration in 2003.

  • Women or machines may be solution to ‘manning bulge’ problems on Trident submarines

    Spending years underwater waiting to blow up a few hundred thousand people is not a very fun job,  so it is hard find crew for nuclear missile submarines.  The British Navy always has trouble getting men for this job (which of course is Necessary to Keep Us Free), but it will need even more crew when it starts to replace its old Trident boomers with a new generation of submarines – running two sets of boats concurrently will need more crew and will thus cause a ‘manning bulge’ .  0ne of the solutions being considered is to let women go to sea  with 50 or more Hiroshimas for the first time. (Another option is to use machines instead of women).   The  UK’s chief auditor has reported in his National Audit Office report on Trident replacement (pg 16 below) that there  are other ‘risk areas’ in the project such  as:
    the warhead: which might need to be replaced, but the UK and US are working on this,  and sorry, no cost figures are available at present.   (Such cooperation might well breach Article 1 of the Non-Proliferation Treaty, which criminalises  giving  nuclear weapons to other countries;  but that is not the Auditor’s problem)

    the submarine cost: well, we don’t know: the company has made an offer:  Somewhere between 12 and  20 billion pounds, (that’s a Lot of Money, so as the government auditor, we might look into it sometime in the future).  The auditor acknowledges a major problem: negotiating a good price is hard  when one company has a monopoly on building such submarines, and that company can  tell you when to throw away your old submarines, can charge what it likes, deliver when it likes, and blackmails you with the argument that  it has to build new submarines  now or else it’s submarine-building-experts will retire without teaching new engineers the tricks (unfinished…)….

    some quotes from the report:

    1.16  There are currently shortages of various trades … within the submarine branch of the Royal Navy. This problem is exacerbated by the introduction of the future class of submarines, since more crews will be required to manage the so-called ‘manning bulge’- the transition phase in which crews will be required to operate both Vanguard and the future class [of submarines] concurrently.

    1.17  Possible mitigation actions such as automating processes to reduce crew numbers and introducing female personnel are likely to have a major impact on both operating procedures and submarine design and therefore need to be taken while there is still scope for their incorporation in the latter. The Royal Navy is currently undertaking two studies to determine the likely impact of this issue. The Royal Navy’s Second Sea Lord is responsible for all naval crewing issues and is the owner of this risk, but the Senior Responsible Owner for the deterrent will have a key role in ensuring that the Royal Navy’s work is incorporated into the future deterrent timetable in a timely way.

  • AP wrong: says Iran admitted having nuclear weapons programme in 2002

    Iran “admitted in 2002 that it had run a secret atomic weapons program for nearly two decades” Associated Press misinformed the world in a major story titled “Iran ends nuclear cooperation with UN nuclear arms probe”. There was no such admission nor evidence for such a claim. So after complaints AP later refined its secret weapons allegation to one of a secret nuclear program “in violation of its commitments”, which is also wrong, as Iran has been openly building a nuclear programme for years with IAEA and Western help – hardly secret – and it was under no IAEA “commitment” to announce its uranium enrichment plans before starting the program (ref?) . One wonders what else of this story to believe.

    Iran ends cooperation with UN nuclear arms probe

    Iran indicates end of cooperation with UN probe for secret nuclear weapons programs

    GEORGE JAHN
    AP News

    Jul 24, 2008 12:30 EST

    Iran signaled Thursday that it will no longer cooperate with U.N. experts probing for signs of clandestine nuclear weapons work, confirming the investigation is at a dead end a year after it began.

    The announcement from Iranian Vice President Gholam Reza Aghazadeh compounded skepticism about denting Tehran’s nuclear defiance, just five days after Tehran stonewalled demands from six world powers that it halt activities capable of producing the fissile core of warheads.

    Besides demanding a suspension of uranium enrichment — a process that can create both fuel for nuclear reactors and payloads for atomic bombs — the six powers have been pressing Tehran to cooperate with the International Atomic Energy Agency’s probe.

    Iran, which is obligated as a signer of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty not to develop nuclear arms, raised suspicions about its intentions when it admitted in 2002 that it had run a secret atomic weapons program for nearly two decades in violation of its commitment.

    The Tehran regime insists it halted such work and is now only trying to produce fuel for nuclear reactors to generate electricity. It agreed on a “work plan” with the Vienna-based IAEA a year ago for U.N. inspectors to look into allegations Iran is still doing weapons work.

    At the time, IAEA chief Mohamed ElBaradei hailed it as “a significant step forward” that would fill in the missing pieces of Tehran’s nuclear jigsaw puzzle — if honored by Iran. He brushed aside suggestions Iran was using the deal as a smoke screen to deflect attention from its continued defiance of a U.N. Security Council demand for a halt to uranium enrichment.

    The investigation ran into trouble just months after being launched. Deadline after deadline was extended because of Iranian foot-dragging. The probe, originally meant to be completed late last year, spilled into the first months of 2008, and beyond.

    Iran remains defiant. It dismisses as fabricated the evidence supplied by the U.S. and other members of the IAEA’s governing board purportedly backing allegations that Iranians continue to work on nuclear weapons.

    Officials say that among the evidence given to the IAEA are what seem to be Iranian draft plans to refit missiles with nuclear warheads; explosives tests that could be used to develop a nuclear detonator; and a drawing showing how to mold uranium metal into the shape of warheads. There are also questions about links between Iran’s military and civilian nuclear facilities.

    On Thursday, Aghazadeh appeared to signal that his country was no longer prepared even to discuss the issue with the IAEA.

    Investigating such allegations “is outside the domain of the agency,” he said after meeting with ElBaradei. Any further queries on the issue “will be dealt with in another way,” he said, without going into detail.

    Britain, one of those suspicious of Iran’s nuclear activities, was critical.

    “We are concerned by reports that Iran is refusing to cooperate with the IAEA on allegations over nuclear weapons,” the British Foreign Office said in a statement. “The IAEA has raised serious concerns over Iran’s activities with a possible military dimension. If Iran is serious about restoring international confidence in its intentions, it must address these issues.”

    The IAEA asked in vain for explanations from Iran, and its last report in May said Iran might be withholding information on whether it tried to make nuclear arms. Reflecting ElBaradei’s frustration, the report used language described by one senior U.N. official as unique in its direct criticism of Tehran.

    Aghazadeh’s comments Thursday appeared to jibe with those of diplomats familiar with the probe who told The Associated Press that the IAEA had run into a dead end.

    A senior diplomat on Thursday attributed Tehran’s intransigence in part to anger over a multimedia presentation by IAEA Deputy Director-General Olli Heinonen to the agency’s 35 board members based on intelligence about the alleged weapons work. The diplomat, like others, agreed to discuss the matter only if not quoted by name because his information was confidential.

    Tehran dismisses the suspicions of the U.S. and allies, and Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on Wednesday again vowed that his country would not “retreat one iota” from pursuing uranium enrichment.

    On Saturday, a U.S. diplomat had participated in talks with Iran held in Geneva, raising expectations that a compromise might be reached under which Iran would agree to temporarily stop expansion of enrichment activities. In exchange, the six world powers — the U.S., Germany, Britain, France, Russia and China — would hold off on adopting new U.N. sanctions against Iran.

    But participants at Geneva said Iranian negotiators skirted the freeze issue despite the presence of U.S. Undersecretary of State William Burns.

    Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice on Monday accused Iran of not being serious at the Geneva talks. She warned that all six nations were serious about a two-week deadline for Iran to agree to freeze suspect activities and start negotiations or else be hit with a fourth set of U.N. penalties.

    Aghazadeh, who is also head of Iran’s atomic agency, played down the international complaints, but he also evaded a direct answer on whether Tehran would give any ground on an enrichment freeze.

    “Both sides are carefully studying the concerns and expectations of both sides,” he told reporters.

    ___

    Associated Press writer David Stringer in London contributed to this report.

  • Iran attack likely in 4-7 months, or we’ll nuke them later says Israeli academic

    “Israel will almost surely attack Iran’s nuclear sites in the next four to seven months” says hawkish Israeli academic Benny Morris in “Using Bombs to Stave Off War“, NYT, hoping the attack will at least delay that country’s nuclear program” otherwise a subsequent pre-emptive Israeli nuclear strike will be necessary.  Note that he thus admits Israel has the bomb (normally forbidden talk in Israel), claims every intelligence agency believes Iran has a bomb program (he forgets that all the US ones dont believe this), and talks of destroying not only the supposed Iranian weapons program but its nuclear program (code for the Bushehr power reactor due to power up this year).

    Using Bombs to Stave Off War

    New York Times July 18, 2008
    Op-Ed Contributor

    By BENNY MORRIS

    Li-On, Israel

    ISRAEL will almost surely attack Iran’s nuclear sites in the next four to seven months — and the leaders in Washington and even Tehran should hope that the attack will be successful enough to cause at least a significant delay in the Iranian production schedule, if not complete destruction, of that country’s nuclear program. Because if the attack fails, the Middle East will almost certainly face a nuclear war — either through a subsequent pre-emptive Israeli nuclear strike or a nuclear exchange shortly after Iran gets the bomb.

    It is in the interest of neither Iran nor the United States (nor, for that matter, the rest of the world) that Iran be savaged by a nuclear strike, or that both Israel and Iran suffer such a fate. We know what would ensue: a traumatic destabilization of the Middle East with resounding political and military consequences around the globe, serious injury to the West’s oil supply and radioactive pollution of the earth’s atmosphere and water.

    But should Israel’s conventional assault fail to significantly harm or stall the Iranian program, a ratcheting up of the Iranian-Israeli conflict to a nuclear level will most likely follow. Every intelligence agency in the world believes the Iranian program is geared toward making weapons, not to the peaceful applications of nuclear power. And, despite the current talk of additional economic sanctions, everyone knows that such measures have so far led nowhere and are unlikely to be applied with sufficient scope to cause Iran real pain, given Russia’s and China’s continued recalcitrance and Western Europe’s (and America’s) ambivalence in behavior, if not in rhetoric. Western intelligence agencies agree that Iran will reach the “point of no return” in acquiring the capacity to produce nuclear weapons in one to four years.

    Which leaves the world with only one option if it wishes to halt Iran’s march toward nuclear weaponry: the military option, meaning an aerial assault by either the United States or Israel. Clearly, America has the conventional military capacity to do the job, which would involve a protracted air assault against Iran’s air defenses followed by strikes on the nuclear sites themselves. But, as a result of the Iraq imbroglio, and what is rapidly turning into the Afghan imbroglio, the American public has little enthusiasm for wars in the Islamic lands. This curtails the White House’s ability to begin yet another major military campaign in pursuit of a goal that is not seen as a vital national interest by many Americans.

    Which leaves only Israel — the country threatened almost daily with destruction by Iran’s leaders. Thus the recent reports about Israeli plans and preparations to attack Iran (the period from Nov. 5 to Jan. 19 seems the best bet, as it gives the West half a year to try the diplomatic route but ensures that Israel will have support from a lame-duck White House).

    The problem is that Israel’s military capacities are far smaller than America’s and, given the distances involved, the fact that the Iranian sites are widely dispersed and underground, and Israel’s inadequate intelligence, it is unlikely that the Israeli conventional forces, even if allowed the use of Jordanian and Iraqi airspace (and perhaps, pending American approval, even Iraqi air strips) can destroy or perhaps significantly delay the Iranian nuclear project.

    Nonetheless, Israel, believing that its very existence is at stake — and this is a feeling shared by most Israelis across the political spectrum — will certainly make the effort. Israel’s leaders, from Prime Minister Ehud Olmert down, have all explicitly stated that an Iranian bomb means Israel’s destruction; Iran will not be allowed to get the bomb.

    The best outcome will be that an Israeli conventional strike, whether failed or not — and, given the Tehran regime’s totalitarian grip, it may not be immediately clear how much damage the Israeli assault has caused — would persuade the Iranians to halt their nuclear program, or at least persuade the Western powers to significantly increase the diplomatic and economic pressure on Iran.

    But the more likely result is that the international community will continue to do nothing effective and that Iran will speed up its efforts to produce the bomb that can destroy Israel. The Iranians will also likely retaliate by attacking Israel’s cities with ballistic missiles (possibly topped with chemical or biological warheads); by prodding its local clients, Hezbollah and Hamas, to unleash their own armories against Israel; and by activating international Muslim terrorist networks against Israeli and Jewish — and possibly American — targets worldwide (though the Iranians may at the last moment be wary of provoking American military involvement).

    Such a situation would confront Israeli leaders with two agonizing, dismal choices. One is to allow the Iranians to acquire the bomb and hope for the best — meaning a nuclear standoff, with the prospect of mutual assured destruction preventing the Iranians from actually using the weapon. The other would be to use the Iranian counterstrikes as an excuse to escalate and use the only means available that will actually destroy the Iranian nuclear project: Israel’s own nuclear arsenal.

    Given the fundamentalist, self-sacrificial mindset of the mullahs who run Iran, Israel knows that deterrence may not work as well as it did with the comparatively rational men who ran the Kremlin and White House during the cold war. They are likely to use any bomb they build, both because of ideology and because of fear of Israeli nuclear pre-emption. Thus an Israeli nuclear strike to prevent the Iranians from taking the final steps toward getting the bomb is probable. The alternative is letting Tehran have its bomb. In either case, a Middle Eastern nuclear holocaust would be in the cards.

    Iran’s leaders would do well to rethink their gamble and suspend their nuclear program. Bar this, the best they could hope for is that Israel’s conventional air assault will destroy their nuclear facilities. To be sure, this would mean thousands of Iranian casualties and international humiliation. But the alternative is an Iran turned into a nuclear wasteland. Some Iranians may believe that this is a worthwhile gamble if the prospect is Israel’s demise. But most Iranians probably don’t.

    Benny Morris, a professor of Middle Eastern history at Ben-Gurion University, is the author, most recently, of “1948: A History of the First Arab-Israeli War.”