Iran's Nuclear Masters
Tehran has kept its core team of weaponization researchers intact.
May 27, 2014 2:09 p.m. ET
The International Atomic Energy Agency and
Iran last week issued a joint statement in which Tehran pledged to
apprise the Agency of "the initiation of high explosives, including the
conduct of large scale high explosives experimentation in Iran." In a
word: weaponization, the most secretive dimension of the Iranian nuclear
program. Tehran's willingness to broach the topic will be hailed by
supporters of the current talks as a sign that they're yielding results.
Yet Iran has thus far dismissed as
"fabrications" evidence of its weaponization work compiled by the IAEA.
We'll believe honest disclosures of prior weaponization activity when we
see them. More to the point, we've obtained a plausible new report from
the Mujahedeen-e Khalq, an Iranian opposition group, suggesting that
Tehran has kept active and intact its core team of weaponization
researchers.
Opinion Video, see on the original page, klick the headline above.
Editorial Writer Sohrab Ahmari says leaked documents
suggest Tehran has kept its core team of weaponization researchers
intact. Photo credit: Getty Images.
The Islamic Republic's attempts to
develop a nuclear explosive device date to the late 1980s, when the
regime established a Defense Ministry-linked physics research center in
Tehran, according to Western intelligence agencies. By the next decade,
according to the IAEA, the regime would consolidate its weaponization
researchers under an initiative called the "AMAD Plan," headed by
Mohsen Fakhrizadeh,
a Ph.D. nuclear engineer and senior member of the Islamic
Revolutionary Guard Corps.
The AMAD
Plan was charged with procuring dual-use technologies, developing
nuclear detonators and conducting high-explosive experiments associated
with compressing fissile material, according to Western intelligence
agencies. The AMAD Plan's most intense period of activity was in
2002-03, according to the IAEA, when current President
Hasan Rouhani
headed Iran's Supreme National Security Council before becoming
its chief nuclear negotiator.
Feeling
the heat from the MEK's disclosure of two nuclear facilities in 2002 and
the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq, the mullahs apparently halted the AMAD
Plan's activities in late 2003. But Mr. Fakhrizadeh and his scientists
didn't stop their weaponization work. As former United Nations weapons
inspector
David Albright
told us, "Fakhrizadeh continued to run the program in the
military industry, where you could work on nuclear weapons." Much of the
work, including theoretical explosive modeling, was shifted to Defense
Ministry-linked universities, such as Malek Ashtar University of
Technology in Tehran.
An Iranian opposition group says this is Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, the father of Iran's nuclear-weaponization program.
National Council of Resistance of Iran
Mr. Fakhrizadeh has continued to
oversee these disparate and highly compartmentalized activities, now
under the auspices of Iran's new Organization of Defensive Innovation
and Research, known by its Persian acronym, SPND. The MEK first
disclosed the SPND's existence in 2011. Now the opposition group has
obtained what it says are key new biographical details and the first
photograph of the 56-year-old Mr. Fakhrizadeh, whom Iran has refused to
make available to the IAEA for long-sought interviews.
The
MEK has also compiled a list of what it says are 100 SPND researchers.
Far from disbanding the SPND, the MEK alleges, the Tehran regime has
kept its nucleus of researchers intact. Possibly to avoid detection by
the IAEA, the MEK says, the regime recently relocated the SPND's
headquarters from Mojdeh Avenue in Tehran to Pasdaran Avenue. "The new
site," the MEK adds, "is located in between several centers and offices
affiliated to the Defense Ministry . . . , the Union of IRGC, the sports
organization of the Defense Ministry . . . and Chamran Hospital."
To
further mask the illicit nature of the relocation from the IAEA, the
MEK says, "parts of Malek Ashtar University's logistical activities were
transferred to the former site of SPND. The objective was to avoid
closing [the former] center, and in the event of inspections, to claim
that the site has always had the current formation." Don't expect the
regime to fess up to much of this by the August 25 deadline set in its
joint communique with the IAEA.
The fact
that the IAEA and the Western powers are now turning to the
weaponization question is a sign of how far the Iranian nuclear-weapons
program has progressed. As the Nonproliferation Policy Education
Center's
Henry Sokolski,
a former nonproliferation director at the Pentagon, told us: "A
concern about weaponization followed by testing and use is the moral
hazard when you don't pay attention to fissile-material production."
In
other words, having ceded a right to enrich and permitted the Islamic
Republic to develop an advanced enrichment capability, the West is now
left with preventing weaponization as the final barrier against a
nuclear-capable Iran. The diplomacy of Mr. Rouhani and his Foreign
Minister,
Javad Zarif,
is intended to soothe jittery Western nerves on weaponization.
That
palliative effect will be reinforced by the IAEA's latest quarterly
report, also released last week, in which the Agency reported that Iran
has sharply reduced its stock of 20% uranium and hasn't enriched above
5% since the November interim agreement took effect. The report also
highlights the Islamic Republic's new willingness to address at a
technical level the "possible military dimensions to Iran's nuclear
program," including Tehran's development of exploding bridge-wire
detonators and high-explosives testing.
But
if past is precedent and the MEK's new disclosures are to be believed,
Mr. Fakhrizadeh will continue to do his work as he has to this day. The
snake may shed its skin but not its temper, runs an old Persian proverb.
Inga kommentarer:
Skicka en kommentar