The United States, France and Britain have announced that Iran is building a second centrifuge facility at a site near Qom. The general reaction has been that “this changes everything.” Actually, this is the scenario we’ve been warning about all along.
For some time, a few of us – including Josh Pollack and Andreas Persbo – have been arguing (with little success) that the public debate around Iran has been misguided. There’s been a singular focus on so-called “breakout scenarios” at Iran’s previously-disclosed enrichment plant at Natanz. The idea is that Iranians would amass enough low enriched uranium there — and then one day kick the international inspectors out, further enrich the uranium to bomb-grade, and have themselves the core of a working nuclear weapon.
But Natanz is the most watched site in the world. If the Iranians build a bomb, they will do it someplace else. Like Qom.
Josh Pollack has done a wonderful job of tackling these issues in the past. “One of the shortcomings of breakout lit so far may be its emphasis on on a single site. A hidden site is also a possibility,” he’s previously noted.
The real risk was always that Iran would construct a covert site other than Natanz. As long as Iran remains under the current safeguards arrangements, I wrote to a colleague this summer, we have “no confidence that Iran is not simply trucking centrifuge components to another location, buried deep under some mountain.”
That was just intended as a colorful way of explaining the problem of covert sites, relative to breakout. I didn’t know that there was in fact another site, actually under a mountain. And, I confess, I am pleasantly surprised that we caught the bastards – again.
But the revelation of a covert site ought to put the focus of our policy back on getting more access to the Iranian program to detect and deter the construction of undeclared facilities, rather than attempting to place arbitrary limits on declared facilities.
Worries of a Covert Site Grew After 2007
There were plenty of reasons to worry Iran was working on a second site. I started to worry until late 2007 when I read a little-remarked paper from the International Institute of Strategic Studies, Nuclear Iran: How close is it? The unnamed author suggested in passing that he wouldn’t be surprised if Iran were constructing a second, clandestine site:
Well, I was surprised to read that. (When IISS makes a statement about Iran, it always makes sense to read very, very closely.) So surprised, in fact, that I e-mailed some friends.
Then the 2007 National Intelligence Estimate on Iran came out. If you read it carefully, it made the same argument:
There it was clear as a bell: The intelligence community wasn’t worried about what they see at Natanz; they are worried at what they can’t see elsewhere. (I wonder what gave them “moderate confidence.”)
Yet, for some reason, most reporters and policy analysts continued to focus on breakout at Natanz.
I should point out that our friends at ISIS focused on a much more sophisticated breakout scenario in which Iran would divert LEU produced at Natanz to a second, clandestine facility. (We just don’t know yet if Iran intended to divert LEU from Natanz, as ISIS worried, or uranium from earlier in the fuel cycle.) And, to his credit, after I made an irritated comment on the blog about the focus on breakout, Bill Broad called me to ask why I though that was the wrong story. But those are the exceptions.
I don’t know why breakout obsessed people for so long – maybe because wonks could make calculations in kilograms and days. These have a sense of precision, though false, that the abstract possibility of a second site lacked – until today.
Second Site Points to the Need to Improve Monitoring
Maybe, the revelation should change some things — like shifting the international community’s approach from trying to constrain Natanz to the goal of improving monitoring of the entire Iranian nuclear program. This is the conversation that Jackie Shire and I had back in February (around the 2:30 mark):
If we decide that we are more worried about clandestine facilities than breakout, there are profound policy ramifications. Instead of bargaining with Iran to cap or suspend work at Natanz and other declared sites – which will be like playing whack-a-mole – we should have been bargaining about gaining extraordinary access for the international community. That means, among other things, getting the IAEA into Iran’s centrifuge workshops and talking to engineers and technicians. A colleague suggested the “safeguards equivalent of a colonoscopy.” That’s an apt metaphor.
The ability to detect clandestine facilities is essential to enforcing Iran’s compliance with its safeguards obligations. Otherwise, the Iranians will keep digging holes in mountains. Our best chance of preventing an Iranian bomb depends on policymakers in Iran believing that certain steps toward a bomb will be detected and expose the regime to mortal peril.
So far, that has not been our focus – there has been a lot of hullabaloo about forcing Iran to accept “zero” centrifuges. But even if Iran shuttered Natanz and, now, Qom, without better monitoring arrangements than are currently in place, we would have little confidence that Iran wasn’t building yet another clandestine centrifuge site.
Fortunately, we’ve been either that good or that lucky twice in a row now. If the New York Times is to be believed, Iran opened up about the facility largely because it became clear in Tehran that the site’s secrecy had been compromised. The intelligence community deserves praise for catching Iran twice now; let’s hope Tehran’s third time is not a charm.
The way to make sure that Iran can’t move secretly toward a bomb lies in much better access in several areas: The international community has demanded access to the site near Qom, which is the place to start. But it also needs regular, intrusive access to Iran’s centrifuge workshops and other suspect sites. And it needs access to Iran’s personnel, including those who worked in what is believed to have been a clandestine program at Lavizan-Shian in Tehran. Such access is far more important than arbitrary limits at Natanz, which Iran seems unlikely to accept in any event.
[Photo: irdiplomacy.ir]
