Memorandum submitted by Mark Fitzpatrick,
Senior Fellow for Non-Proliferation International Institute for
Strategic Studies
ASSESSING IRAN'S NUCLEAR PROGRAMME
LATEST US INTELLIGENCE
REPORT
For the last few years, the US and UK intelligence
agencies have consistently assessed that the beginning to the
end of the next decade is the earliest Iran could have a nuclear
weapons capability. The new US National Intelligence Estimate
(NIE) released 3 December judged that late 2009 is the earliest
Iran would be technically capable of producing enough HEU for
a weapon but that this is very unlikely and that the more likely
timeframe remains 2010-15 or later. Most significantly, the new
NIE assessed that Iran in 2003 halted those aspects of its nuclear
programme devoted to weapons development, but for some agencies
intelligence gaps reduce the confidence that Iran's entire nuclear
weapons program has been halted.
The new report will be widely read as supporting
Iran's claim that whatever violations it committed in the past,
that was then and now is now. Iran's newfound cooperation with
the IAEA to address questions about its past nuclear activities
reinforces Tehran's contention that it has since turned a new
leaf. Iran's cooperation with the inspectors is still very unsatisfactory,
however. It is reactive rather than proactive and with decreasing
transparency about current activities, as reported in November
by IAEA Director General Mohamed ElBaradei. The new US report
makes clear that at a minimum, Iran is keeping open the option
to develop nuclear weapons. The uranium enrichment programme gives
it this future option. Producing fissile material—either
highly enriched uranium or weapons-usable plutonium—is the
hardest part of developing a nuclear bomb. The weapons design
and weaponization work that the NIE report judges Iran halted
in 2003 can be saved for a rainy day, to be picked up again at
some future date if Iran again changes its decision. Meanwhile,
if its uranium enrichment programme continues unabated, Iran will
be in a better position to produce a bomb quickly if it so decides.
The new assessment thankfully deflates what
has been an unstinting escalation of tension over the nuclear
programme. However, it does not exonerate Iran. Tehran's sullied
record of NPT violations is too recent and its ongoing opacity
too blatant for the world to rest easy about its intentions. It
will take a sustained period of full cooperation with the IAEA
and behaviour above suspicion befitting Ceasar's wife before Iran
will be able to overcome the confidence deficient it created the
past two decades.
There is thus good reason for Iran to halt the
dual-use uranium enrichment work, just as it apparently halted
the single-use weaponization work in 2003. Suspending enrichment
activity remains the best way for Iran to rebuild international
confidence. The prestige value of mastering high tech processes
is the only real purpose to the enrichment program besides as
a future weapons option. Iran does not need to produce its own
enriched uranium for the Bushehr reactor. It can buy the fuel
from Russia or elsewhere, and rely on international arrangements
now in the works to guarantee fuel supply to any country that
meets its non-proliferation commitments.
The NIE report judges that Iran's decision makers
are rational and respond to international pressure, as they did
in 2003 when they apparently stopped the nuclear weapons programme.
That year, Iran came under its first serious threat of having
its nuclear case dragged to the Security Council. The EU3-led
engagement policy, much maligned by American hardliners, can take
credit for skilfully employing the threat of Security Council
sanctions as diplomatic leverage.
But the strongest international pressure Iran
faced in 2003 was the threat of war. Seeing the ease with which
US-led coalition forces invaded Iraq and rolled up Saddam's forces,
Iran's leaders were concerned that they might be next. The threat
of military action thus has a role in providing the muscle that
can make diplomacy work. Barring the discovery of inflammatory
new information that would discredit the new findings, the new
intelligence report ensures that President Bush would have no
empirical basis and no political support for ordering military
action against Iran's nuclear program.
IRAN'S
NUCLEAR PROGRAMME
Ignoring the repeated demands of the IAEA Board
of Governors and the UN Security Council to suspend all enrichment
and reprocessing-related activity, Iran worked throughout 2007
to put in place its immediate goal of installing 3,000 centrifuge
machines at the underground enrichment facility at Natanz. By
November, 18 cascades of 164 machines each, or 2,952 centrifuges
in total, were operating with uranium hexafluoride (UF6). A year
earlier, Iran had only two cascades (328 machines) in place.
One of the critical unknowns is the extent to
which Iran faces technological difficulties and manufacturing
bottlenecks. If 3,000 centrifuges were operating smoothly for
24 hours a day, seven days a week, Iran theoretically could produce
one bomb's worth (20-25 kg) of highly enriched uranium (HEU) in
nine to 11 months. As far as is known, the cascades have not been
working smoothly or continuously. The key variable in gauging
the timeline is how soon Iran could get the cascades functioning
smoothly to produce enriched uranium around-the-clock. In the
most plausible break-out scenario, Iran would produce a stockpile
of low-enriched uranium under IAEA verification, and only when
it had a sufficient quantity, in one or two years, expel the inspectors
and enrich this stockpile to weapons grade in five to eight weeks.
Producing fissile material is not all that is
necessary to produce a nuclear weapon. All the timeline estimates
assume that if Iran could master the enrichment technology they
could also in the same time acquire the technology to make a deliverable
weapon out of the HEU. There are few hard facts to suggest that
Iran has worked on weaponization. The most damning evidence came
from a computer hard drive turned over by an Iranian defector
in 2004 showing various stages of missile design plans for a nose
cone—or re-entry vehicle—that could accommodate a
spherical object with the characteristics of a nuclear implosion
weapon. The documents on the laptop also contained drawings of
spherical shapes and scientific notes describing what appeared
to be triggers for compressing HEU spheres into a critical mass
for an atomic explosion 600m above a target. Western intelligence
agencies have not found any evidence that these plans continued
after 2003. The other condemning evidence is the 15-page document
in Iran's possession which describes how to cast uranium metal
into hemispherical forms. Iran says this document was provided
unsolicited from the A.Q. Khan black-market network.
The cascades at Natanz have been operating simultaneously,
in parallel, in accordance with the normal configuration for producing
power- reactor fuel. IAEA inspectors believe the centrifuges are
spinning at the supersonic speed necessary for enrichment. The
inspectors cannot say this with certainty, however, because they
do not have visual access to the individual machines or to the
control room. The IAEA can only monitor the input of UF6 and take
swipe environmental samples in the cascade hall. The IAEA also
will be able to measure the output of enriched uranium when Iran
withdraws the product by emptying the cold traps at the end of
each cascade. A physical inventory scheduled from 16-19 December
will tell the IAEA more about how well the cascades are operating.
Technical difficulties?
Each time the IAEA inspectors visited Natanz
in the latter part of 2007 on the unannounced inspections that
they are allowed, the cascades were being fed UF6. The overall
amount of UF6 utilized in the cascades since February 2007, however,
was well below the expected usage rate for a set of cascades of
this size. The low rate of UF6 use leads analysts to conclude
that Iran was experiencing technical difficulties in running the
cascades. Running the machines continuously with maximum UF6 input
for weeks on end is a key technical hurdle that Iran apparently
has not yet overcome. An alternative explanation is that Iran
deliberately chose to slow the pace of work at Natanz, perhaps
in order to dampen international alarm about Iran reaching what
has been called (erroneously) the "point of no return".
For political reasons, Iran chose to install
the 18 cascades in the underground facility before even one cascade
in the above-ground pilot plant was operating smoothly. In normal
start-up procedures, Iran should have operated smaller cascades
continuously and pushed them to their breaking point to assess
stress levels before operating larger cascades. Initially, Iran
appeared to be planning to do this. When enrichment operations
resumed in 2006, however, normal start-up procedures were over-ruled
and Iran moved directly to installing and operating the full 3,000-machine
module in the underground facility. Iran wanted to put the centrifuge
cascades in place as quickly as possible in order to establish
a better bargaining position and to be able to portray technological
progress to its population. An alternative hypothesis cannot be
totally ruled out: that Iran might have learned more about centrifuge
operations at an unreported facility somewhere else, and hence
had the technical confidence to go ahead with the 3,000 machine
module. It must be noted, however, that no evidence has surfaced
pointing to a parallel, covert enrichment facility, and the latest
intelligence report concluded that covert enrichment work was
halted in 2003.
Some analysts have claimed that Iran's centrifuges
are subject to high failure rates, based on reports that in 2006,
40% of the centrifuges at the pilot plant were crashing. IAEA
inspectors believe the current failure rate is far below that,
but they do not know for certain because they do not have access
to monitor individual machines.
Technical difficulties have also been alleged
in the production of UF6 at the uranium-conversion facility at
Esfahan, where 266 tonnes had been produced as of 5 November.
The UF6 is contaminated to some extent with other heavy metals
present in the uranium ore. According to knowledgeable officials,
however, this does not present a problem for the time being. The
contamination, while not as significant as had been reported earlier,
will degrade centrifuge operations over time, reducing their lifespan
to a third of the normal 10 years. If commercial production is
not Iran's intention, however this would not matter.
Iran appears content to stop for now at the
18-cascade module, and to consolidate its gains. Additional bays
in the large underground facility have not been prepared for the
installation of any more cascades. This is consistent with Iran's
public statements, which for the past year and more have focused
on having the 3,000 centrifuges in place. This interim goal was
set originally for December 2006, but achievement was repeatedly
delayed. Although Iran still adheres to the goal of a 54,000-centrifuge
plant, little is said about when further progress would be made
toward that such industrial-scale production.
How many centrifuges could Iran install?
Another crucial unknown affecting Western policy
decisions is whether Iran could produce more than 3,000 centrifuges,
and if so, how many. IAEA Director General Mohamed ElBaradei contends
that it would be better to strike a deal to keep Natanz limited
to 3,000 centrifuges than to see Iran expand the facility by several
times its current size. He argues that it is already too late
to stop Iran from acquiring uranium-enrichment technology. In
his view, the international community should fall back to a second-best
position of trying to keep Iran's programme from growing larger.
Underlying this argument is an assessment that Iran could in fact
produce and install many more centrifuges if it chose to do so.
If he is wrong, and Iran could not realistically make more than
about the 3,000 it now has, any deal limiting them to this number
would be an empty bargain.
A good estimate of the number of centrifuges
Iran could make is also important in assessing the effectiveness
of a military air strike option. If Iran had the capacity to make
many more centrifuges than the number now installed, then an air
strike that destroyed the Natanz facility would not cripple Iran's
enrichment programme for very long.
In 2005, when the IAEA had access to Iran's
declared workshops, it conducted an inventory of centrifuge parts
and counted approximately one million components. According to
an informed official, Iran then had enough parts for approximately
10,000 machines. Dr. ElBaradei in May 2007 warned that Iran could
be on track to have 8,000 centrifuges running by December. He
gave no basis for that figure, leading many analysts to assume
that it was a simple extrapolation based on the pace of installation
at that time. However, the estimate appears to have been based
on an understanding of how many centrifuges Iran could assemble
with the components it had on hand.
Whether or not Iran can indigenously manufacture
all the necessary parts for the centrifuge cascades is central
to an assessment of its centrifuge production limits. When the
IAEA conducted its inventory of Iran's centrifuge components,
it did not know what proportion were imported or domestically
produced. The agency no longer has access to the components or
to the centrifuge workshops and thus cannot verify Iran's claims
that it is able to manufacture all of the nearly 100 components
for each centrifuge. Western intelligence agencies had earlier
assessed that Iran faced bottlenecks in not having sufficient
quantities of some key raw materials such as maraging steel and
not being able to produce certain sophisticated components. IAEA
officials now believe that Iran has managed to import enough maraging
steel through the black market for its centrifuge purposes. The
head of an Iranian company working on advanced P-2 centrifuges
told the IAEA he could obtain all necessary parts and materials
domestically except for bearings, special oils and magnets. Whether
this is still the case and whether the same limits on domestic
production apply to the P-1 version is unclear.
The timeline assessments are based on an assumption
that Iran is using only the relatively inefficient P-1 (first
generation Pakistan) centrifuges installed at Natanz. If, however,
Iran is able to produce more efficient second generation P-2 centrifuges,
its ability to produce HEU would more than double (for the same
number of machines). Iran received P-2 design plans from the A.Q.
Khan network in 1995, and Khan's chief foreign associate, B.S.A.
Tahir, told investigators that the network had also delivered
three complete P-2s to Iran as samples, although he produced no
corroborative evidence. Iran's earlier statements that it did
not pursue any work on the P-2 design from 1995-2002 were not
credible to the IAEA. The Agency's 15 November report concludes
that Iran's statements on the declared P-2 R&D activities
are consistent with the Agency's findings.
President Ahmadinejad's boast in April 2004
about research on advanced centrifuges suggested that Iran has
done a good deal of work on the P-2. It would not be surprising
to hear that Iran has a pilot P-2 plant somewhere with a small
cascade being installed. In fact, the November IAEA report said
Iran informed the Agency it had tested a new generation of centrifuge
design. Keeping such a plant secret would be consistent with Iran's
stated policy of ignoring the routine safeguards obligation to
make early declarations of nuclear facilities.
In accordance with the work plan it agreed to
with the IAEA on 21 August, Iran promised to answer questions
about its P-2 procurement and development efforts. While addressing
some questions about past activities, Iran has revealed little
new information about the current status of its programme. The
15 November report concluded that the IAEA's knowledge about Iran's
current nuclear program is diminishing. If the IAEA ever is able
to close the books on Iran's past activities, and if it is asked
to verify any future deal that would set limits on Iran's programme,
it would need to obtain a clear baseline picture of Iran's programme
that runs up to the present. As the international community attempts
to assess the present and future capacity of Iran's nuclear programme,
there are still more questions than answers.
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