There's still no need to panic over Iranian nukes

By Shashank Joshi
The Telegraph
Last updated: September 4th, 2012

It’s that time again. A new report on Iran from the UN’s International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) means a new bout of panic. The Australian, deciding that the facts weren’t quite exciting enough, declared that: “Iran is stockpiling weapons grade uranium” (it’s not).  The New York Times, quivering with excitement, announced: “Iran is close to crossing what Israel has long said is its red line: the capability to produce nuclear weapons in a location invulnerable to Israeli attack”.

Iran is said to be on the brink of the “zone of immunity”, the point at which – according to Israel’s Defense Minister Ehud Barak – “Iran’s accumulated know-how, raw materials, experience and equipment … will be such that an attack could not derail the nuclear project”.

The problem with this concept is that it doesn’t quite make sense.

First, what does “derail” mean? If it means terminate, then too late: Iran is in the zone already. As the top US military officer Martin Dempsey explained yesterday, an Israeli attack would “clearly delay but probably not destroy Iran's nuclear programme”. This is unsurprising, as Iran has the know-how to produce weapons in secret even if its known facilities were obliterated.

More importantly, what exactly is putting Iran further into this zone of immunity? Yes, its underground enrichment facility at Fordow is hardened, but there is vanishingly little evidence to suggest that it’s getting more impenetrable over time.

In fact, as the new IAEA report clarifies, it is primarily two things that are changing. First, Iran is enriching more uranium. In particular, its stockpile of uranium enriched to 20 percent – which is nine-tenths of the way to weapons-grade – has doubled since February. Second, Iran has doubled the number of its underground centrifuges since May. Even though it’s not using all of these, this still increases its enrichment capacity.

The concern, then, is this: Iran could “break out” by taking the uranium it has enriched so far, feeding it into this considerably expanded set of centrifuges, and produce weapons-grade uranium suitable for a bomb. And it could do so at an ever-quickening pace. But could it do all this before it was detected and bombed? Almost certainly not.

Iran is still using extremely old centrifuge designs, and – something that was missed in most reporting – has taken steps that actually put it further away from a bomb. Iran set aside over half of its stockpile of 20 percent enriched uranium for conversion to fuel plates used in its medical research reactor. In that form, the stuff is much harder to use for weapons purposes (and impossible to use quickly). Iran is left without enough for even one bomb. Yes, it will eventually make up this lost amount through more production – but that takes time, and its willingness to eat into this stockpile, a bargaining chip for Iran, is a positive step.

The upshot is that Iran – if it chose to do so at all – would take months, not weeks, to produce the weapons-grade uranium for a single bomb. And even if the breakout timeline did fall to weeks, this would still not eliminate the risk of getting caught by IAEA inspectors, foreign intelligence services, or both. In this sense, Iran is not about to leap into the zone of immunity.

Even if Iran did succeed in getting together enough weapons-grade uranium, it would take another year or so to actually put the whole thing together into a nuclear device. Putting that device onto a missile would take even longer. If it were to try any of this, it would almost certainly face a serious military campaign led by the United States, which could do far more damage than Israel.

All in all, the IAEA’s reports are crucial. They confirm that Iran hasn’t diverted any of its nuclear material. They remind us that the IAEA is worried about military nuclear activities. And they keep us informed about Iran’s swelling nuclear programme. It is this information that would be lost if Iran were to be bombed and IAEA inspectors inevitably expelled. But it is crucial that the IAEA’s findings be interpreted soberly and carefully, rather than with the continual undertone of panic that Israel has sought to instill over the summer.

Shashank Joshi is an Research Fellow at the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI). He is also a doctoral student of international relations at Harvard University’s Department of Government.