by David Isaac
Stopping Iran from ever returning to uranium enrichment is top of mind for U.S. non-proliferation expert David Albright.
American physicist David Albright, one of the foremost experts on Iran’s nuclear program, is reluctant to quantify exactly how far back that program has been pushed. Suffice it to say that in his opinion, it will be “many years” before the Islamic Republic can launch a nuclear warhead.
The situation is a far cry from what it was prior to the 12 days of airstrikes by Israel in mid-June, when Iran would have had enough enriched uranium for 22 weapons in five months.
“From the point of view of where we were before the bombing, we’re dealing with some of the remnants, dangerous remnants, but remnants nonetheless,” he told JNS.
Albright has spent decades in the field of nuclear non-proliferation. He cooperated actively with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) Action Team established after the Gulf War from 1992 until 1997. In June 1996, he was the first non-governmental inspector of the Iraqi nuclear program.
He is founder and president of the Washington, D.C.-based Institute for Science and International Security (what he terms “the Good ISIS”), a group dedicated to stopping the spread of nuclear weapons to terrorists and additional states.
Albright recently sat down to speak with JNS.
Q: How long do you think Iran’s nuclear breakout to a bomb was delayed?
A: It’s hard to quantify, but we’re really talking a long time. They [the Iranians] are just trying to figure out what happened to them. Sites like Natanz, Isfahan, they’re like ghost towns. You don’t see people around the destroyed buildings. We see them around Fordow. That one seems to have garnered much more Iranian interest. That says they stored valuable stuff there.
Q: How would you describe Israel’s operation?
A: I think they effectively destroyed the centrifuge program. It was very important to target the centrifuges. We think up to 20,000 were destroyed or rendered inoperable. Natanz runs on natural uranium hexafluoride—that’s the workhorse of the entire enrichment program. The plant that could provide the uranium hexafluoride is destroyed or heavily damaged.
The Israelis hit the three known sites to make centrifuges, and the IAEA assessment was Iran probably didn’t have another one of any serious size. And so you took away their ability to make more centrifuges.
That’s the enriched uranium side. There are two parts: getting enriched uranium and then building the bomb itself. I think there was more damage done on the weaponization side than on the enrichment side, relatively speaking.
Weaponization includes everything else you need to get the bomb to work, a whole variety of things: initiation of the high explosion, called a multi-point initiation system, turning the weapon-grade uranium into metal, melting it and molding it into components, the neutron initiator, finishing steps.
Iran’s ability to make centrifuges, make hexafluoride, put together all the piping and all the electronics and get it to work has been severely degraded.
But the Iranians took the idea of weaponization seriously. The knowledge is in their heads. So the Israelis decided that what was critical was to kill the personnel. Israel sent all kinds of text messages threatening a whole range of scientists with death. There was a warning, saying that if you work on nuclear weapons we’ll kill you. And then they made this countrywide offer that if you have something important or secret to tell us, come forward.
So it’s very risky to work in this program anymore.
Another way to look at it is: what’s the risk that Iran would be able to launch a ballistic missile with a nuclear warhead on top of it at Israel? Or at Europe? And I’d say that that’s years away now.
Q: You’ve said you don’t think America should have been involved in the attack. Why?
A: It would have been better if Israel had done the attack on its own. The United States needs to negotiate a ceasefire agreement, which includes an end to [uranium] enrichment, and to do it in a verifiable manner. So I think it would have been politically easier to do that if the United States hadn’t directly engaged in the military conflict.
Q: Could Israel have taken out the Fordow nuclear site alone?
A: My view before the attack by the United States was yes. We had identified the ventilation shaft and felt that Israel could manage to do something through the ventilation shaft with the weapons that it has. There may have been a need for a ground operation of some kind.
My understanding from Israeli statements was that they felt they could take out Fordow. Obviously, the United States did it much more effectively, dropping five bunker busters down each shaft. It was pretty dramatic and beyond what Israel could have done.
But I would ask the question: if Israel couldn’t do it, why did it start the war? I just don’t know the answer. I do know that Israel had pretty detailed building designs for Fordow from the [Iranian] nuclear archive. The bottom line is I would have recommended Israel do it alone with the United States in a supportive role, then stepping in very aggressively in the negotiations to insist on a ceasefire deal that ends enrichment.
Q: What do you think of the activity at Fordow post-bombing?
A: What we saw was they wanted to work safely around the holes created by the bunker busters. They were basically setting up so they could access the ventilation shafts and be able to put plates on top of the holes. One of those spots is pretty unstable. They probably were doing some sampling for radiation. What you worry about is hydrofluoric acid, and that can volatize, and it can come up the shaft in theory. And so they may be working to measure that above the shafts and at the tunnel entrances.
We worried they would try to get access. Part of this concern is probably the reason that the United States may consider, or Israel may consider, bombing again.
Q: Do you think Iran moved any of its uranium stockpile before the attack as it claimed?
A: There’s certainly concern that things were leaving the building [at Fordow], although when we looked at the trucks outside, they mostly looked like dump trucks, like they were bringing things in to seal the tunnel entrances.
There is a view in the U.S. administration that Iran thought Fordow was invincible and that it was a safe place to store things. So they were actually bringing things there. And the same would apply to a mountain at Isfahan; that it was a place to store enriched uranium, or leave the centrifuges, or whatever they valued as an asset.
An Iranian senior official told [IAEA head Rafael] Grossi that they were going to move enriched uranium if there was a threat. Now we’re not politicians, we’re analysts. We have to take the Iranians at face value that they planned to move things.
We don’t know what was left. There’s natural uranium. There’s stocks of less than 2%, stocks of less than five, stocks of 20% and stocks of 60%. I doubt if they moved it all.
Iran may have prioritized moving its 60% and 20%.
A few years ago, the IAEA reported that eighty-five percent of both inventories were at what’s called the Tehran fuel plate manufacturing plant. That’s at Isfahan. In Israel’s first strike, that was bombed, and then Israel came back a couple days later and bombed it some more. So some of it may have been caught in there.
Iran blocked the [tunnel] entrances at Isfahan to try and make it harder to penetrate those tunnels. But Israel bombed, and then the United States bombed the tunnel entrances. You see tremendous damage at each entrance. And so they are technically sealed until Iran tries to dig them out.
[U.S. President Donald] Trump implied they moved it all into Fordow—the 60%, maybe the 20%. But others worry maybe they moved it into this mountain complex at Isfahan.
They probably had around 435 [kilograms of enriched uranium]. There’s a number that floats around, 400 kilograms, but that’s what they made through mid-May. And then they continued producing at a rate of about 35 kilograms a month.
Q: What are the big questions that remain for you?
A: When can we get an enrichment ban? Trump can make comments like, “It’s obliterated,” but on a technical level, you’re put in a more difficult position where people want to know: how long would it take Iran to get weapons-grade uranium? How long would it take to build the bomb? How long would both take together and what’s the chance of detection? What’s left?
What you’re forced to do is think, “Well, if they really work hard at this and are determined, maybe in a year or two they could start to think about building a bomb.” So you end up with this sort of worst-case assessment. After the 1981 bombing of Osirak in Iraq, Iraq built a massive, secret nuclear weapons program, much of which escaped detection by Israel and the United States. So you just can’t walk away. My biggest concern is: how do you get a ban on enrichment that’s verified? Now is the time to do it. Iran’s just been defeated, regardless of its statements, and the war can start again at any time.
Q: Do you think Iran understands it’s lost the war?
A: No, and I am worried. And that’s why I want to see Trump be very aggressive and firm. It’ll probably take more military strikes to get the message through to Iran. It wasn’t easy in ’91 with Saddam [Hussein]. He had to accept a ceasefire and then very draconian conditions, and he tried to cheat and do all kinds of things. It was really a tough struggle. And it did involve bombing, cruise missile attacks, at different times over a couple years.
Q: What is the most dangerous scenario?
A: That the powers that be in Israel and the United States just say, “OK, mission accomplished.” We then watch Iran struggle to rebuild what’s been destroyed, and eventually they do. So I worry in the longer term that Iran will move to build nuclear weapons, and it’ll be hard to detect and hard to defeat. This is a problem that requires ongoing attention.
Q: Is regime change the best way to ensure Iran doesn’t pursue a nuclear weapon?
A: I don’t think so. But if you’re faced with a Hitlerian-type regime where the leadership doesn’t care about the suffering of its people, is determined to cling to power and maintains it wants to enrich and to eliminate the State of Israel, I don’t think you have any other choice. It’s not regime change. It’s destroying the regime. What comes next is anyone’s guess, because I don’t think you can manage regime change from the United States and Israel. You just hope for a better future for the country.
David Isaac
Source: https://www.jns.org/ensuring-iran-never-gets-the-bomb/
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