Locations of Key Iranian Nuclear Facilities
There is a lot of talk about the possibility of an imminent attack by Israel on Iranian nuclear facilities. Presumably this would involve destroying the Natanz gas centrifuge facility that houses Iran’s pilot enrichment facility and the hardened underground site of the industrial-scale enrichment facility that is under development. It could also include a conversion facility (less critical) at Esfahan that transforms natural uranium into a gaseous state, and the construction site for a heavy water reactor and facilities that could be used to process spent fuel with the potential for separating out plutonium at Arak.
In terms of priorities, it appears that Iran’s quickest route to the bomb hinges upon being able to enrich enough uranium to high levels (80-95%) of uranium-235. Highly Enriched Uranium (HEU) can create an explosive force through a sustained chain reaction, but natural uranium or the low enriched uranium (4-6% U-235) that Iran says it seeks to make for its light water reactor being constructed at Bushehr cannot. Enrichment requires converting natural uranium, which has only a small fraction of U-235, into a gaseous form (uranium hexaflouride), and then running this gas through centrifuges to separate the isotopes by weight so as to achieve a high concentration of U-235. The other route, which North Korea used to obtain its fissile material, involves running a load of fuel in a reactor (heavy water moderated preferably), and then reprocessing the spent fuel to separate out the Plutonium, which is bomb-usable material. It should be noted that Iraq was focused on the Plutonium path to the bomb until the Israelis destroyed their reactor at Osirak in 1981, at which time they switched to an enriched uranium path to the bomb – a fact that escaped the notice of the global community until after the 1991 Gulf War. It was later discovered that Saddam’s regime was not that far from being able to produce a bomb.
It is very reasonable that Israel should be uneasy. Iran denies Israels right to exist, has a track-record of supporting terrorists, and has a leadership in Ahmedinejad that seems to be fundamentally out of touch with reality. The second issue mentioned, about supporting terrorists or working through terrorists, is an important one. There are many people that think that Iran’s leadership is irrational and might gladly suffer massive retaliation for the opportunity to destroy Israel. However, there doesn’t seem to be any evidence to support this assertion. Enemies often have difficulty understanding each other (part of what makes them prone to be enemies), and it is easy to leap to conclusions about the other’s state of mind. I suspect that there were many people in the early days of the Cold War who thought Stalin couldn’t be swayed by threats of retaliation because he was such a vile and black-hearted criminal. However, he, and all subsequent Soviet administrations, did prove to be rationally deterrable. However, the anonymity that the use of terrorist proxies might offer could substantially mitigate the stability of deterrence. (Remember it is not important whether it is likely that they could get way without a retaliatory response from a global perspective, but whether they think they might be able to from their own limited perspective.)
The issue of “attribution” may be usefully considered. In this case, attribution refers to the ability to trace a weapon back to its source. In the days of the Cold War, states could track ballistic missiles back accurately to a point of departure through analysis of their trajectories and bomber bases could be watched from satellites for signs of activity. However, what if a terror group gets a bomb into a country in a shipping container, via a four-wheel drive vehicle, or on a camel’s back. I am now writing beyond my technical understanding, and even experts seem to have different views on this issue. However, the consensus seems to be that, if the Iranians were to build a bomb and test it in a manner that traces (radiation, particles, whatever) entered the atmosphere (and could thus be monitored), then if a bomb built from fissile material from the same production line were to explode in Tel Aviv or anywhere else in the world, it could be definitively traced back to Iran. However, there are bomb designs that are reliable enough to be constructed without testing. (Such a bomb might be heavy and cumbersome, and impossible for the aforementioned camel to lug around. It might also be evidence that the Iranians were not interested in a deterrent arsenal [i.e. not building compact warheads that could be carried by a missile.])
While I have thus far painted a grim picture that Iran might conclude that it could escape the fate of massive retaliation if it used terrorist proxies and an untested weapon design. This is probably a much less likely prospect than this initial picture would indicate. Let’s put aside the fact that a bomb going off in Israel would point unambiguously toward one suspect, and that retaliation would be forthcoming whether there was a legal standard of evidence or not. A more interesting question is how Iran would get to the bomb considering that its facilities are under safeguards.
It might do two things. First, it could build a ”covert parallel program”. In other words, it could take the knowledge it gained from Natanz and build a second enrichment plant elsewhere that would be off the International Atomic Energy Agency’s (IAEA) books. Of course, Natanz was its original covert program. So Iran would bear both high costs and the risk that such a facility would be discovered, and could, therefore, be ‘once bitten and twice shy’. The important issue is that, if they are pursuing this path and Israel doesn’t know where the hidden facilities are, then their bombing would not do any good.
Second, Iran could conduct a “strategic breakout” of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) regime. That is, it could withdraw from the NPT (this is supposed to require a 3 month warning) and throw out inspectors and IAEA monitoring equipment. If they do this, Israel would probably not need to attack because the US likely would at that point (and possibly with a UN Security Council mandate.)
I am almost inclined to think that a better path than insisting that the Iranians to stop enrichment (which they clearly are unresponsive to and have an Article IV of the NPT [allowing the development of peaceful nuclear technologies] argument to make), would be to press them to [re]adopt Additional Protocol standards. Iran has signed by not ratified the Additional Protocols, but for a brief period of time agreed to behave as if they were in effect. The push to get them to adopt Additional Protocols as soon as possible and to make a good-faith effort to behave as if in accordance with them in the mean time would make it riskier and more difficult to produce a bomb (though certainly not impossible.)
For those interested in the nitty gritty of this issue I would suggest the paper entitled “Osirak Redux…” by two MIT Scholars that is linked below. It gives insight into Israel’s capability to conduct such an attack, as well as the limitations they face beyond those experience with the closer 1981 attack on Iraqi facilities.
http://web.mit.edu/ssp/Publications/working_papers/wp_06-1.pdf
