The Iranian “President”, Mahmoud Ahmedinejad, in an interesting move, has called for an investigation into the death of Neda Agha-Soltan – the sweet-faced young lady that the world has been watching bleed out on the streets of Tehran  on low resolution footage available through YouTube. I think there is a high probability that his course of action will blow up in the hairy faces of the Iranian leadership.

Let me be the first to predict the investigation’s findings. The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), possibly in conjunction with Britain’s MI-6, inserted a covert team of snipers that shot the girl in order to stir up trouble. The intelligence agencies of these Western governments decided to to this after they succeeded in an Internet blitz to cast doubt on the legitimacy of Ahmedinejad’s landslide victory.

Now, as I have said in past posts, I am no great believer the predictive ability of even the most revered experts when it comes to the behavior of other humans. However, in this case, I feel safe in that there is only one tack that Ahmedinejad is taking. This song and dance goes roughly like this, there is no significant dissent in Iran. That’s right dissenters, not to mention gays and lesbians, are not indigenously occurring phenomenon within the borders of Iran. Rather , this is all a foreign-led attempt to drive a wedge through the state of Iran so that the imperialists can topple a legitimate government.

This might have been a sound strategy, if anyone were listening. It’s true that there are plenty of Iranians who have reason to resent the United States and Britain. If you happened to be a political prisoner of the Shah or a torture victim of the SAVAK, you might legitimately hold ill-will toward the governments that helped to prop up that regime. Furthermore, whatever America’s involvement was in facilitating a coup against the Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadeq in 1953, it gives credibility to the claim of imperialistic meddling in Iran’s domestic political affairs. (This is precisely why countries like the US have to have the courage of their convictions to not undermine democratically elected scary governments in favor of friendly, but domestically brutal, dictators. Selective respect for the institutions of democracy and rule of law is a mistake with a long shadow.)  So, given this history, this strategy might be the means to create an “us against them” mentality in the populace that would heal divides. However, no one seems to be taking the rhetoric seriously.

This approach is not working for a couple reasons, I believe. First, it is a young population and they know their experience with an oppressive and, on some fronts [e.g. the economy], incompetent government, but they have only the stories of old-timers about imperial interference in their country (though the perception about operations in Iraq may be a different matter – not that there was any love lost between Iranians and Saddam Hussein.) People weight their own experience more substantially than they do history book chapters. Second, as I have discussed in past posts, it becomes increasingly more difficult each day for tyrants to control the flow of information. We live in an era in which a run-of-the-mill cel phone is a window to the rest of the world.

Given the lack of traction his strategy is achieving, I think that the scripting of investigation results will be a big mistake for Ahmedinejad and the Ayatollah Khamenei. Trying to twist the girl’s death to their own advantage could raise the stakes to a “torch and pitch-fork” level of volitility. Any path Ahmedinejad takes, other than the unlikely route of taking responsibility for the incident and submitting the gunman to legal justice, will further raise animous of the citizenry and reduce the government’s legitimacy. Even if it wasn’t a pro-Ahmedinejad malitiaman that killed Neda Agha-Soltan, the government’s legitimacy is so low that it would impossible to convince the people of it.

There is a lot of debate in the US about what the American approach should be toward Iran. President Obama has argued that if America takes sides, it could only help Ahmedinejad and Khamenei, and I suspect this is correct. Others argue that the US should be supporting Mousavi, but that seems to be the same mistake  we fell into in the 50’s. Regardless of the approach taken, we definitely don’t want to what we did in Hungary in 1956 and Iraq in the 1990’s. That is, we don’t want voices telling the opposition there will be support for bold action, and then failing to follow through. This is another lesson that I hope the US government has learned.

It may be true that there isn’t any reason to expect that Iran’s position on its fuel cycle facility policy will change  regardless of who wins tomorrow’s election. After all, the Ayatollah Khamenei is the Supreme Leader, and does dictate policy on issues at that strategic a level. However, with Mr. Mousavi holding his own, we may yet see what can happen without the Howard Stern of heads of state in the Presidency of Iran.

It may, in fact, be a test case for the role of harsh rhetoric in international diplomacy. Are acrimonious words just for the benefit of domestic consumption and devoid of any influence on foreign policy outcomes. Or, on the other hand, can less vitriol translate into gains at the negotiating table? With both a US and Iranian leadership that is less prone to engage in harsh language, will we see progress toward reduction of the threat or not?

Old Photo of Natanz Enrichment Site

Iran’s President, Mohamed Ahmedinejad, has been arguing that only America is really concerned about the Iranian nuclear program. Occasionally, he may acknowledge that there are a few European countries that he portrays as under America’s thumb that may have an interest as well, but that is the extent of the problem. Of course, in reality there are many other countries that have reason to be concerned about Iran’s nuclear program, not the least of whom are other regional states such as Saudi Arabia. Furthermore, Director General Mohamed ElBaradei’s statements to the International Atomic Energy Agency’s (IAEA’s) Board yesterday may indicate a yet broader concern. ElBaradei stated that, while the IAEA has been able to monitor Iran’s special nuclear material production facilities, it can make no definitive claims about an alleged nuclear weapon program whose existance has been suggested by classified intelligence reports.

Should we dismiss Ahmedinejad’s claims that Iran has gotten many expressions of support from the leaders of other countries about Iran’s nuclear program? I suspect that there is a core truth in that statement, and that it has developed as a result of poor nonproliferation policies and statements that have muddied the waters. Iran can point not only to the fact that it is a Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) member that appears to be in compliance with facility safeguard provisions (though perhaps not with  requests for transparency), but also to statements that confuse the issues such as the one delivered by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission Chairman in Budapest today. http://www.forbes.com/afxnewslimited/feeds/afx/2008/09/23/afx5459052.html Dr. Klein said that Iran could buy its fuel on the open market and has no reason to pursue nuclear fuel production to meet its energy needs. It is true that they could buy the fuel from abroad (far more cheaply than they can make it, in fact), but by pointing to their decision to go that route as a sign that there is somehow a nefarious intent risks raising the ire of other states in that boat. It equates behavior that is in compliance with Article IV of the NPT with a crime.

I can imagine many states responding that USEC didn’t NEED to build the American Centrifuge Project, American and foreign utilities receiving that fuel could get it elsewhere. Why should some countries be able to participate in the nuclear fuel market, and others be locked out. The more Iran can create the impression that the efforts against it are designed by the existing nuclear fuel oligopoly to maintain their favorable market conditions, the more support it is likely to see from states who signed into the NPT beleiving that they could pursue any nuclear technology as long as it is for its peaceful purposes.

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