by Yonah Jeremy Bob
IAEA should focus on weaponization; stopping ballistic missiles is a lost cause.
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PEOPLE GATHER around the water nuclear reactor at Arak, Iran, in December 2019.
(photo credit: WANA NEWS AGENCY/REUTERS)
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If Iran gets nuclear weapons, it could deliver them not only with
land-based ballistic missiles, but also by ship-based cruise missiles, a
top Iran nuclear expert has told The Jerusalem Post.
In a new book, Iran’s Perilous Pursuit of Nuclear Weapons, obtained exclusively by the Post,
Institute for Science and International Security (ISIS) president David
Albright and researcher Sarah Burkhard say that “the most
straightforward way to dramatically reduce Iran’s prospects of building
nuclear weapons is to focus on the nuclear explosive production and
nuclear weaponization pillars.”
Part
of the reason the focus should shift to IAEA inspections of
weaponization, notes the book, is because realistically, “the
elimination of the [nuclear] delivery system pillar is more difficult to
thwart because Iran has so many options for delivering nuclear weapons,
ranging from ballistic missiles to cruise missiles to ships.”
A ship-based cruise-missile nuclear-weapon option for Iran has not been discussed much.
Further,
Albright writes that: “Negotiations should aim to limit ballistic
missiles, but it should be recognized that eliminating this pillar in
its entirety is impossible,” given years of Western complacency and
Iranian progress on the issue.
Before
even getting to some other powerful revelations, Albright’s book in
some ways upends the entire way that the nuclear issue is viewed by Iran
hawks – of which Albright is one of the more prominent in the camp.
Conventionally,
the fight over US policy toward the Islamic Republic divides into those
who are for or against returning to the 2015 nuclear deal, including
lifting president Trump’s sanctions if Tehran returns to the deal’s
nuclear limitations.
While Albright has pointed out holes in the 2015 deal for years, he is also a realist.
Given
the Biden administration’s posture, Albright explores how the US and
other interested countries could try to head Iran off from getting a
nuclear weapon even if some of its “nuclear pillars” are not blocked as
much as he might hope.
Put simply, if the Biden team returns to the 2015 deal, how could Iran still be contained?
ONE OF the items on punch lists of Iran critics has been that the 2015 deal did not limit Iran’s ballistic missile program.
Albright would have wanted this program limited years ago.
But
given Iran’s progress since 2015 and Washington’s current posture, he
is saying that blocking Iran on this front might be a lost cause.
He explains that the Islamic Republic has too many different kinds of ballistic missiles it can use.
Also,
Albright says that Tehran could even use ship-based cruise missiles, so
putting partial limits on some ballistic missiles would be ineffectual.
Rather,
he suggests that a major benefit of the 2018 Mossad raid on Tehran’s
secret nuclear archive is that it gives the world powers much more
insight into how to supervise and block the Iranian
weaponization-efforts side of the nuclear program.
Of
course, this would require a much more forceful approach by the IAEA
and world powers in terms of resolving where each element of
weaponization revealed by the archive is being stored, and then
monitoring them all.
In
some ways, this would, in and of itself, be a game-changer approach –
but Albright suggests that it could be palatable given the new
information and the idea that the elements being monitored have no use
except for weaponization.
There are at least three items he cites that the IAEA would need to explore and monitor regarding Iran’s efforts.
One
would be the Islamic Republic’s “maintaining the capability to use
computer codes to simulate a nuclear weapons explosion. Greater use of
simulations would make component testing less necessary.”
A
second would be “retaining a mastery of the multi-point initiation
system, e.g., the shock wave generator, including possibly having
conducted a successful ‘cold test’ of a nuclear explosive with a
surrogate nuclear core.”
In
a May 2019 ISIS report describing some of what was revealed in the
Iranian Nuclear Archive, he explained that a shock wave generator “has
the purpose of uniformly initiating a spherical shell of high
explosives, or the ‘main charge,’ which in turn compresses the nuclear
core made from weapon-grade uranium to achieve a supercritical mass for a
nuclear explosion.”
The third item would be “having the capability to make the neutron initiator.”
In
another ISIS report that month, he said that “Iran planned on using a
relatively sophisticated neutron source, or initiator, to trigger a
chain reaction in the weapon-grade uranium core of its nuclear weapons.”
All three of these elements, if not policed by the IAEA, could help Tehran move much more swiftly to being able to explode the uranium it enriches for a nuclear bomb.
IN
CONTRAST, if the IAEA gains new inspection powers over these elements
exposed by the Mossad, Iran could be prevented from developing a nuclear
weapon despite other major holes in the 2015 nuclear deal.
In
terms of how much time Iran would need to enrich uranium to
weaponizable levels, Albright explores scenarios where the currently
discussed three to four months could drop to two months or even just
over one month by the end of 2020.
The
idea is that as the Islamic Republic enriches more uranium up from the
5% level to the 20% level and some even to the 60% level, the distance
it has to cross to get to the 90% level is significantly reduced.
Despite
this warning, Albright told the Post that the volume of uranium which
Iran has enriched to the 60% level is quite small, and the bigger
problems in reducing its time to a nuclear weapon relate to the volume
of 20% enriched uranium and to advanced centrifuges like the IR-4 or
IR-6.
Advanced
centrifuges can enrich uranium at a much faster rate than the country’s
standard IR-1, which makes up most of its nuclear program.
Another
solution Albright suggests is getting Iran to agree to nuclear limits
which would leave it two years from a nuclear weapon instead of one
year.
This would
require Tehran to roll back both its advanced centrifuge program and
possibly to cut in half the number of older IR-1 centrifuges it was
allowed to operate under the 2015 deal.
Though
the book notes that the assassination of Iran military nuclear chief
Mohsen Fakhrizadeh in November 2020 was a significant setback in
managing weaponization efforts, it adds that he had prepared a whole new
generation of nuclear scientists to take his place.
This accounts for how Iran can continue to present such a nuclear threat despite his loss.
The
book also gives an impressive history of Iran’s nuclear program as well
as tremendous depth in discussing the findings of the secret nuclear
archive.
Yonah Jeremy Bob
Source: https://www.jpost.com/middle-east/exclusive-if-it-gets-nukes-iran-could-fire-using-cruise-missiles-668309
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