Reuters news
written by Tabassum Zakaria and Mark Hosenball
Friday March 23, 2012
* U.S. and allies agree Iran does not have atomic bomb
* U.S. says no new secret facility detected
* Electronic intercepts key to confidence in assessment
TIME FRAME
The United States and Israel are on the same page in judging how long it would take Iran to have a nuclear weapon that could strike a target: about a year to produce a bomb and then another one to two years to put it on a missile.
Both countries believe Iran has not made a decision to build a bomb, so even if Tehran decided to move forward, it would be unlikely to have a working nuclear device this year, let alone a missile to deliver it.
"I think they are years away from having a nuclear weapon," a U.S. administration official said.
Three main pieces are needed for a nuclear arsenal: highly enriched uranium to fuel a bomb, a nuclear warhead to detonate it, and a missile or other platform to deliver it. For Iran's program, the West has the most information about the first.
Iran has a declared nuclear program for medical research and producing energy, is a member of the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and allows U.N. nuclear inspectors into its facilities.
The inspections are conducted by the International Atomic Energy Agency, and its reports provide some of the best snapshots of where Iran's program stands.
Iran conducts uranium enrichment at the Natanz plant in central Iran and at a site at Fordow buried deep in a mountainous region near the holy city of Qom. Both sites were built secretly and made public by others.
Natanz was unveiled in 2002 by an Iranian opposition group, the Mujahedin-e Khalq. Obama and other world leaders announced the existence of the Fordow site in 2009.
Natanz houses about 8,800 centrifuge machines spinning to increase the concentration of U-235, the type of uranium that yields fissile material. Fordow is built to contain about 3,000 centrifuge machines, but the most recent IAEA report says about 700 are operational.
Most of Iran's stockpile is 3.5 percent low enriched uranium. When Tehran declared in February 2010 that it would begin enriching uranium up to 20 percent purity, that sharply increased the anxiety of Israel and others.
Nuclear experts say that enriching uranium from the naturally occurring 0.7 percent concentration of U-235 to the low-level 3.5 percent accomplishes about 70 percent of the enrichment work toward weapons-grade uranium. At 20 percent concentration, about nine-tenths of the work has been completed. For Iran, getting to 90 percent would require changing some of the plumbing in the centrifuges, experts said.
"From 20 to 90 is exponentially easier," a U.S. intelligence official said.
An IAEA report last month said that Iran has produced nearly 110 kilograms (240 pounds) of uranium enriched to 20 percent. That is less than the roughly 250 kilograms (550 pounds) that nuclear experts say would be required, when purified further, for one nuclear weapon.
Iran's enrichment program was set back by the Stuxnet computer virus, which many security experts suspect was created by Israeli intelligence, possibly with U.S. assistance. It wormed its way into Iranian centrifuge machinery as early as 2009. The Institute for Science and International Security estimated that Stuxnet damaged about 1,000 centrifuges at Natanz and stalled its enrichment capability from growing for about a year.
But it isn't clear how lasting an impact Stuxnet has had. Reuters reported last month that U.S. and European officials and private experts believe Iranian engineers have neutralized and purged the virus.
EYES IN THE SKY
U.S. officials and experts are confident that Iran would be detected if it jumped to a higher level of enrichment.
The IAEA monitors Iran's enrichment facilities closely, watching with cameras and taking measurements during inspections. Seals would have to be broken if containers that collect the enriched material were moved or tampered with.
U.S. and European intelligence agencies are also keeping tabs through satellites, sensors and other methods. They watched for years as a hole was dug into a mountainside near Qom and determined - it is unclear precisely how - late in the Bush administration that Fordow was likely a secret uranium enrichment site.
Obama was briefed on Qom when he was president-elect and was the one to publicly announce it to the world in September 2009.
"They had a deep understanding of the facility, which allowed them to blow the whistle on Tehran with confidence," a U.S. official said.
Rumors periodically pop up of other secret enrichment sites, but so far they have not been substantiated. "Most of the people who make the argument that they might have a covert facility or a series of covert facilities are doing that to justify bombing them sooner rather than later," said Colin Kahl, a former defense official focused on the Middle East.
"We are very confident that there is no secret site now," a U.S. administration official said. But given Iran's history of secretly building facilities, the official predicted Tehran would eventually construct another covert plant.
THE UNKNOWN
One of the biggest question marks is how far Iran advanced in designing a nuclear device - a task considered to be less complicated than producing highly enriched uranium.
The more primitive the device, the more enriched uranium is required. Making it small enough to fit on the tip of a missile would be another challenge.
The IAEA has information that Iran built a large containment chamber to conduct high-explosives tests at the Parchin military complex southeast of Tehran. Conventional weapons are tested at that base, and the U.S. government appears convinced that any nuclear-related tests occurred prior to the 2003 halt.
But Iran denied the IAEA access to the Parchin site in February, raising more suspicion, and the nuclear agency seems less confident that weapons work has halted altogether.
IAEA chief Yukiya Amano said recently, "We have information that some activity is ongoing there."
In its November 2011 report, the IAEA said it had "serious concerns regarding possible military dimensions to Iran's nuclear programme."
It cited Iran's efforts to procure nuclear-related and dual-use equipment, acquisition of nuclear-weapons development information and work on developing a nuclear weapon design in the program that was stopped in late 2003.
"There are also indications that some activities relevant to the development of a nuclear explosive device continued after 2003, and that some may still be ongoing," the IAEA said.
While Iran does not yet have a nuclear warhead that can fit on a missile, it does have the missiles.
Iran has the largest inventory of ballistic missiles in the Middle East, and many of those projectiles could be repurposed to deliver a nuclear device, intelligence director Clapper said in congressional testimony.
Western experts also point to Iran's test firing of a rocket that can launch satellites into space as an example of a growing capability that could potentially be used for nuclear weapons.
"The nuclear threat is growing. They are getting relatively close to the place where they can make the decision to assemble all three parts of their program -- enrichment, missile, weaponization," House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Rogers said in an interview.
Khamenei "hasn't said 'put it together' yet," said Rogers, a Republican. "Have they decided to sprint to making the device that blows up? Probably not. But are they walking to a device that blows up? Yes."
The debate over air strikes, supercharged by Israel's anxiety and U.S. election-year politics, has raised the specter of the Iraq war. The White House justified that conflict on the grounds of weapons of mass destruction, as well as significant ties between Iraq and al Qaeda. Both proved to be mirages.
"There are lots of disturbing similarities. One has to note the differences, too," said Paul Pillar, a former top CIA analyst.
"The huge difference being we don't have an administration in office that is the one hankering for the war. This administration is not hankering for a war," said Pillar.
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