by Dore Gold
Iranian President Hasan
Rouhani's efforts to change Western perceptions of Iran are already
being called a "charm offensive." Imitating Russian President Vladimir
Putin, who wrote an op-ed in The New York Times, Rouhani decided to
place an article in one of the other leading American newspapers, The
Washington Post. He wrote about Iran's "peaceful nuclear energy
program," suggesting that its entire purpose was for "generating nuclear
power" and "diversifying" Iran's energy resources.
This was old Iranian
argumentation. But he continued with it in an interview on NBC News a
day later, saying, "We have never sought, nor will ever seek, nuclear
weapons. We solely seek peaceful nuclear technology." He also took the
same message to CNN's Christiane Amanpour. This week in his speech at
the U.N. General Assembly he insisted yet again that the Iranian nuclear
program was for "exclusively peaceful purposes."
Thus Rouhani was not
only making a statement about Iran's future intentions, but he was also
rewriting history by saying that Iran had not sought nuclear weapons in
the past. In doing so, Rouhani was reopening one of the main debates
over the last decade about why Iran was constructing such a vast nuclear
infrastructure.
Roughly ten years ago,
the U.S. State Department published a power point presentation
illustrating the inherent weakness of the arguments the Iranians used to
defend their nuclear program. It noted that despite Iran's enormous oil
and gas reserves, Iranian officials claimed that Iran could no longer
rely on fossil fuels in the future. Ali Akbar Salehi, who today heads
Iran's Atomic Energy Organization, but in 2003 served as its
representative to the International Atomic Energy Organization, added
that Iran had to replace the consumption of oil with the use of uranium
ore as the primary source for Iran's energy.
But the State
Department study showed that while Iran still had ample oil and gas,
which could supply Iran for at least 200 years (in the case of gas),
Tehran actually had very limited supplies of uranium ore, especially if
it had plans of eventually building seven nuclear reactors for the
production of electricity. In fact, if Iran's domestic supply of uranium
ore was inadequate for a nationwide program of electricity production,
it was more than sufficient for the production of a respectable number
of atomic weapons every year. For the U.S., this was a red flag
indicating that the argument that Iran only wanted a civilian program
was completely disingenuous and what it really sought was a full scale
nuclear weapons program.
Then there was the
question of why Iran insisted that it must enrich its own uranium by
itself. Tehran actually had only one working reactor for producing
electricity at Bushehr, which used uranium fuel that was supplied by
Russia. Moscow assured Tehran that the Russian supply of enriched
uranium for Bushehr would not be disrupted. So why spend billions on
enrichment plants at Natanz and Fordo?
Moreover, many advanced
industrial states in the West import enriched uranium rather than build
an uneconomical enrichment infrastructure: for example, Finland, Spain,
South Korea, and Sweden. Even in the U.S., 92 percent of the uranium
used in nuclear power plants during 2010 was of foreign origin.
There must have been an
assumption among Iranian leaders that the West was either naive or
extremely gullible, for Tehran persisted with its arguments that its
nuclear efforts were only for civilian purposes. When Iran began to
enrich uranium beyond the 3.5% level in June, 2010 to the 20% level, its
spokesmen argued that this too was for civilian purposes; the small
Tehran Research Reactor needed this fuel, the West was told, for
manufacturing medical isotopes.
But while a year later,
Iran already had enough uranium enriched to 20% to meet its demand for
medical isotopes for at least seven years, it continued to produce 20%
enriched uranium using the medical isotopes argument, which was
transparently false. It was clear that the Iranians' single-minded
determination to expand their stock of this uranium was motivated by the
fact that the leap from 20% uranium to weapons-grade uranium could be
made in half the time it would take to enrich 3.5% enriched uranium to
weapons grade level.
There was one area in
which Iranian nuclear activities could not be covered up with the excuse
that they had some civilian purpose: the manufacture of nuclear
warheads for Iranian ballistic missiles, like the Shahab-3, which has
the range to strike Israel. In a highly classified briefing in February
2008 given to ambassadors to the IAEA in Vienna, captured Iranian
documents detailed how to design a warhead for the Shahab-3.
There was an
illustration of the arc of the missile's flight including the detonation
of its warhead at an altitude of 600 meters. According to the IAEA
experts a conventional explosion at 600 meters would have no effect on
the ground below, but 600 meters would be ideal for a nuclear explosion,
like the one caused by the Hiroshima bomb that exploded at that very
same altitude.
An IAEA report from May
2011, validated the concerns that were raised during the 2008 briefing.
It detailed a military research program that was based on "the removal
of the conventional high explosive payload from the warhead of the
Shahab-3 missile and replacing it with a spherical nuclear payload."
Ironically, Rouhani
spoke at a military parade in Tehran before heading out to New York.
Significantly, on the front of the lead vehicle of a line of trucks
transporting Shahab-3 missiles, there appears a banner that reads:
"Israel should cease to exist."
There is no way that
this kind of activity can be characterized as being part of a "civilian
nuclear program," no matter how smooth Rouhani's performance will be
during his visit to New York. Tellingly, in recent years, Iran has
firmly rejected Western requests to inspects its weapons complex at
Parchin, where much of this warhead development is believed to take
place. In the last year, anticipating pressures to open up Parchin to
inspections, the Iranians undertook a large concealment operation and
poured asphalt over areas it thought the IAEA might want to visit.
Rouhani became famous
for his remarks in 2005, when he was head nuclear negotiator and
national security adviser to former Iranian President Mohammad Khatami,
at which time he admitted to having exploited the time of the
negotiations with the EU-3 (Britain, France, and Germany) so that Iran
could complete its conversion plant in Isfahan, where the fuel that is
inserted into the centrifuges is produced. He brilliantly used diplomacy
to allow the Iranian nuclear program to advance, while giving the
Western powers the feeling that Iran was making concessions at the same
time.
This is precisely the sort of
formula he will seek now as he launches new negotiations with the Obama
administration. Only this time, Iran is far closer to its goal of
manufacturing nuclear weapons than it was in 2005. The West will have to
be extremely careful to see to it that Iran offers tangible concessions
and not just empty generalities about its desire for peace, if its
drive for nuclear weapons is to be truly stopped, and the security of
the Middle East protected.
Dore Gold
Source: http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_opinion.php?id=5805
Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.
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