rssExperts Weigh In on Obama’s Explanation of Iran’s Nuclear Facility
Monday, September 28, 2009 at 6:00 am
- 14 Comments
Flanked by the French president and the British premier, President Obama on Friday dramatically stated that the “size and configuration” of a previously undisclosed Iranian nuclear facility near the clerical city of Qom make it “inconsistent with a peaceful program.” Several independent experts believe the facility is most likely being constructed to support a nuclear weapons program, especially as Iran’s concealment of it comes after years of nondisclosure and obstruction of inspections. But even those experts believe that the “size and configuration” of the facility does not necessarily mean it could only be used to build an atomic bomb.
The facility in Qom, which is not yet completed, is significantly smaller than the enrichment facility at Natanz that has concerned the International Atomic Energy Agency since 2003. Natanz contains 50,000 centrifuges, compared to the 3,000 the administration believes to be at Qom. All that raises questions about the basic economic logic of constructing such a small facility to produce peaceful nuclear power.
Illustration by: Matt Mahurin
“If you have 50,000 [-centrifuge] facility, you don’t go to all the expense build a new facility to increase capacity by 6 percent,” said James Acton, a nuclear researcher at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “None of this makes sense for an economic standpoint. What it does make sense for is a weapons standpoint.”
Yet that reasoning is inferential, not explicitly concluded from the “size and configuration” of the Qom facility. “It’s kind of hard to draw clear red lines about [centrifuge] numbers,” Acton cautioned. “Any facility is capable of producing any amount of uranium of any enrichment if it has time to do so.”
Added Ivanka Barzashka, a nuclear analyst with the Federation of American Scientists, “The size of a facility does not determine whether it can or cannot produce weapons-grade, or highly-enriched, uranium. Both enrichment to a low degree for a nuclear reactor and to a high degree for a nuclear weapon is done by gas centrifuges. In both cases, these are exactly the same machines.” The issue for Barzashka, like Acton, is that “certain things make economic sense and others don’t,” and building a 3,000-centrifuge facility to enrich uranium for nuclear power would most likely take ” about 90 years to get one years fuel load. This of course makes no sense.”
David Albright, the president of the Institute for Science and International Security, said he was confused by Obama’s statement. “Size doesn’t tell me anything,” said Albright, whose organization posted satellite photographs of the facility’s exterior on Friday. “There’s no real hard and fast threshold” based on number of centrifuges that distinguishes a nuclear-weapons facility from a nuclear-energy facility. While one possibility for Qom is the production of a smaller facility for conducting nuclear research, Albright, like Acton, said that “I personally believe this is for a nuclear-weapons capability.”
Uranium used for a nuclear weapon must be enriched to a high potency, over 90 percent, through the use of centrifuges to separate out the fissionable isotopes. Centrifuges are arranged together in so-called cascades to achieve greater potency in less time. At the United Nations General Assembly, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said that Iran is interested in enriching uranium to about 20 percent, which could provide for nuclear energy but is far short of weapons-grade enrichment. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said in an interview aired Sunday on CBS’s “Face The Nation” that Iran “can’t say anything” to satisfy international concerns about Iran’s nuclear program after years of Iranian concealment and deception, but instead must “open up the entire system to extensive investigation” by the IAEA.
“If you wanted a facility to make enough low-enriched uranium for a power reactor you need a site like Natanz,” Albright continued, since fueling a nuclear-power reactor requires a large amount of enrichment. “You need about 50,000 centrifuges. But if you want [enriched uranium] for a bomb,” Albright said, then “3,000 is plenty. Two thousand would be enough. But you can’t reverse it and say if it’s small it can’t be used for civilian purposes.”
The small number of centrifuges at the facility, though, raises questions about how efficiently the Iranians could produce enough enriched uranium at Qom for a big nuclear reactor to generate power, as the Iranians claim. Using the types of centrifuges the Iranians use, known as P-1s, with 3,000 of them, would “take years to produce enough material for even one reactor load,” said Joseph Cirincione, the president of the Ploughshares Fund, a nonprofileration organization. But in “one year,” he said, a 3,000-centrifuge facility could conceivably “enrich enough uranium for one crude nuclear weapon.” According to calculations by nuclear expert Andreas Persbo posted to the blog ArmsControlWonk, the facility could produce about 40 kilograms worth of high-enriched uranium in that time, enough for about one and a half bombs.
A negotiation in Geneva scheduled for October 1 will be the venue for Iran to disclose additional information about its nuclear program to a consortium of nations — the United States, the U.K., France, Germany, China and Russia — informally known as the P5+1. The leaders have insisted over the last several days that the IAEA will be given full access to the Qom facility to better determine its capabilities.
Albright said the configuration of the centrifuges at Qom would help the IAEA reach some conclusions. “If it’s a pilot [research and development] program, then, for example, you’d see a hodgepodge of 164 [centrifuges] running in cascade,” he said, and the fewer of those cascades at the facility would indicate that the program is aimed at “getting them to work properly,” rather than producing “a certain level of enriched uranium in large quantities.” Albright added that he saw no evidence that the U.S. intelligence community had knowledge of the configuration of the cascades at the Qom facility.
Similarly, Albright was unable to learn what Obama meant by “configuration” of the facility when he approached his contacts in the administration this weekend. “We tried to figure it out, but didn’t get a satisfactory answer,” he said. “Maybe [Obama] knows something that some of us don’t know. We would assume he means the arrangements of these cascades,” but it is unclear.
Before leaving Pittsburgh, President Obama acknowledged the U.S.’s credibility problem when citing secret intelligence to accuse an adversary of a secret weapons program in the wake of the Iraq war. Obama said the intelligence undergirding his statements was the “work product of three intelligence agencies” from the United States, U.K. and France, all of which “checked over this work in a painstaking fashion, precisely because we didn’t want any ambiguity.”
Barzashka, Albright, Acton and Cirincione all agreed that the concealment of the Qom facility raised serious questions about Iranian nuclear intentions. They agreed that the small number of centrifuges apparently at Qom indeed casts doubt on the facility’s utility for civilian nuclear power. Albright added the fact that the facility is built deep into a mountain, where a potential U.S. or Israeli airstrike would be hard-pressed to destroy it, further feeds the inference that the plant is for a military program.
Albright said it was important to examine administration statements based on secret evidence, even as the preponderance of the evidence supports Obama’s case. “Intelligence information is used to increase [international pressure] for sanctions and lay a path for possible military action,” Albright said, “so that information has to be publicly scrutinized carefully.”
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14 Comments
Pingback posted September 28, 2009 @ 6:09 am
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by TMC Member Feed. TMC Member Feed said: Wash. Independent: Experts Weigh in on Obama’s Explanation of Iran’s Nuclear Faci.. http://bit.ly/1aJDw9 [...]
Comment posted September 28, 2009 @ 1:11 pm
Looks like you guys left some editor-reporter chatter in the last graf…
“Albright said it was important NOT? to examine administration statements based on secret evidence, even as the preponderance of the evidence supports Obama’s case.”
Comment posted September 28, 2009 @ 5:43 pm
I think we have a uranium cowboy on our hands: http://www.criminaljusticeuniversity.net/blog/2…
Comment posted September 28, 2009 @ 8:33 pm
There is a major blunder the MSM seems to have ignored in the negotiating stance with Iran.
Obama gave up a powerful element when he backed off the Europe based missile shield without concessions from Putin.
Russia continues it’s rhetoric, and now there is little chance that Iran's leadership will fall into line on the nuclear arms front.
http://pacificgatepost.blogspot.com/2009/09/oba…
… And forget about sanctions.
———-
Comment posted September 28, 2009 @ 9:42 pm
No surprises here, and what is missing is some history and “intelligent information” RE: The French connection, USA Credibility and the Elephant in the Room!
Obama has stated that “Iran is breaking rules that all nations must follow … and threatening the stability and security of the region and the world…[this] is going to lead to confrontation.”
What Obama needs to confront is Israel and their still un-inspected WMD Facility that everyone in the world knows all about-except most Americans!
In my 2005, 2006 interviews with the Whistle Blower of Israel's WMD Program, Mordechai Vanunu told me:
“The Israelis have 200 atomic weapons and they accuse the Palestinians and Muslims of terrorism. The Dimona is 46 years old; reactors last 25 to 30 years. The Dimona has never been inspected and Israel has never signed the Nuclear Proliferation Treaty but all the Arab states have.
“Twenty years ago when I worked there they only produced when the air was blowing towards Jordan ten miles away. No one knows what is happening now. The world needs to wake up and see the real terrorism is the occupation and the Palestinians have lived under that terror regime for 40 years.
“It’s very sad that Hilary Clinton went to the Jewish Wailing Wall and forgot the real crying wall is the Palestinian wall; the apartheid wall, the wall is not for defense, but to keep this conflict permanent.
“Israel is only a democracy if you are a Jew.”
To be credible Obama must also confront Shimon Peres on what he said in 1963 while he was Israel’s Deputy Minister of Defense and met with President John Kennedy, inside the White House.
Kennedy told Peres, “You know that we follow very closely the discovery of any nuclear development in the region. This could create a very dangerous situation. For this reason we monitor your nuclear effort. What could you tell me about this?”
Peres replied, “I can tell you most clearly that we will not introduce nuclear weapons to the region, and certainly we will not be the first.”
By September of 1986, Peres was convulsing over Vanunu, who had been employed as a lowly tech in his progeny; Israel’s clandestine underground nuclear weapons centre in the Negev called the Dimona.
Peres ordered the Mossad, to “Bring the son of a bitch back here.”
Peres ordered Vanunu’s kidnapping that included a clubbing, drugging and being flung upon an Israeli cargo boat back to Israel for a closed door trial that led to 18 years in jail-most all in solitary.
In 1985, before quitting the Dimona, Vanunu shot 56 photos of the top-secret labs and production processes that proved Israel had become a major nuclear power by stockpiling between 100 and 200 atomic bombs within the underground WMD facility where plutonium production, and secret nuclear weapons were assembled without any knowledge, debate or authorization from its own citizens.
Obama must also confront the 'French Connection' and what Vanunu told me in 2005:
“Did you know that President Kennedy tried to stop Israel from building atomic weapons?
“In 1963, he forced Prime Minister Ben Guirion to admit the Dimona was not a textile plant, as the sign outside proclaimed, but a nuclear plant. The Prime Minister said, ‘The nuclear reactor is only for peace.’
“Kennedy insisted on an open internal inspection. He wrote letters demanding that Ben Guirion open up the Dimona for inspection.
“The French were responsible for the actual building of the Dimona.
“The Germans gave the money; they were feeling guilty for the Holocaust, and tried to pay their way out. Everything inside was written in French, when I was there, almost twenty years ago.
“Back then, the Dimona descended seven floors underground. In 1955, Perez and Guirion met with the French to agree they would get a nuclear reactor if they fought against Egypt to control the Sinai and Suez Canal. That was the war of 1956. Eisenhower demanded that Israel leave the Sinai, but the reactor plant deal continued on.
“When Johnson became president, he made an agreement with Israel that two senators would come every year to inspect. Before the senators would visit, the Israelis would build a wall to block the underground elevators and stairways. From 1963 to ’69, the senators came, but they never knew about the wall that hid the rest of the Dimona from them.
“Nixon stopped the inspections and agreed to ignore the situation. As a result, Israel increased production. In 1986, there were over two hundred bombs. Today, they may have enough plutonium for ten bombs a year.”
To be a true leader Obama must keep the promises he made in Prague:
“As the only nuclear power to have used a nuclear weapon, the United States has a moral responsibility to act…When we fail to pursue peace, then it stays forever beyond our grasp. We know the path when we choose fear over hope. To denounce or shrug off a call for cooperation is an easy but also cowardly thing to do. That’s how wars begin. That’s where human progress ends…the voices of peace and progress must be raised together…Human destiny will be what we make of it…Words must mean something.”
Eileen Fleming, Founder of WeAreWideAwake.org
A Feature Correspondent for The Palestine Telegraph and Arabisto.com
Author of “Keep Hope Alive” and “Memoirs of a Nice Irish American ‘Girl’s’ Life in Occupied Territory”
Producer “30 Minutes with Vanunu” and “13 Minutes with Vanunu”
Comment posted September 28, 2009 @ 9:56 pm
They addressed it, they just didn't fetishize it like some right wing Cold War addicted kooks might want. Cheney has been wrong since at least 1966 and some people are committed to continuing that record of myopia and idiocy because it serves them politically, financially, and socially.
Comment posted September 28, 2009 @ 10:25 pm
You bet forget about sanctions if they are like the ones the UN-under duress by the USA-imposed upon Iraq in the 1990's that led to the deaths of 1/2 a million innocent Iraqi children who according to UNICEF and WHO were denied clean water and basic medicine because of those sanctions!
You bet forget about sanctions if they are like the ones inflicted upon Palestinian's in Gaza in 2006 for democratically electing Hamas; for over half of the 1.5 million open air prisoners there are children under 18 years of age who are also denied clean water and so much more!
What needs to be 'sanctioned' exposed and dissented from is USA foreign policy!
Do you know that America is on the record in the UN in 1999 as abstaining from voting for the UN Decade of Creating a Culture of NONVIOLENCE for All the Children of the World because to support such an initiative “would make it too hard for US to wage war.”
God have mercy on US all for our arrogance, ignorance and stupidity that presupposes we should rule the world!
I AM but one lone voice out of the wilderness as well as a righteously angry American-Irish dissident and Christian Anarchist in Solidarity with The Sermon on The Mount who has been to Israel and Occupied Palestine 7 times since 2005 and i know that God is LOVE and:
“Love is not the starving of whole populations. Love is not the bombardment of open cities. Love is not killing…Our manifesto is the Sermon on the Mount, which means that we will try to be peacemakers.” -Dorothy Day
Please WAKE UP USA CORPORATE MEDIA!
The times have a changed due to the Internet and The New Fourth Estate who do NOT take assignments from editors or paychecks from conglomerates; we go-seek the truth and report as accurately as we can.
Can't we PLEASE work together and learn to SHARE this one world with the poor, oppressed and occupied; for they are our sisters and brothers; they are all really just US in different skins!
Or else; by accident or design-mad men will blow US up!
Only in Solidarity do “we have it in our power to begin the world again.”-Tom Paine
xoxe,
Eileen Fleming, A Feature Correspondent for The Palestine Telegraph and Arabisto.com
Founder of WeAreWideAwake.org
Author of “Keep Hope Alive” and “Memoirs of a Nice Irish American 'Girl's' Life in Occupied Territory”
Producer “30 Minutes with Vanunu” and “13 Minutes with Vanunu”
Comment posted September 28, 2009 @ 10:37 pm
Cheney only blows IDIOT WIND and we should ignore him!
“Your corrupt ways had finally made you blind. Idiot wind, blowing like a circle around my skull, from the Grand Coulee Dam to The Capitol. Idiot wind, blowing every time you move your teeth; You're an idiot”-Bob Dylan
Candidate Bush once claimed his favorite philosopher was Jesus:
President Bush proved he didn't know jack about that philosophy!
When THAT DAY we call 9/11 happened the world was with US!
But Bush blew it big time when he went on TV and told US if we wanted to help we should “go shopping” and that really got my Irish up and I hit the 'war path' and began to research and learn WHY did a few-and back then it was just a few-people in the world hated US!
I learned plenty!
You can too:
http://www.wearewideawake.org/index.php?option=…
http://www.wearewideawake.org/index.php?option=…
Pingback posted September 29, 2009 @ 2:15 pm
[...] already UN. This week news broke that Iran had a nuclear facility that had remained a secret up until now. But they’re just doing peaceful nuclear power [...]
Pingback posted September 29, 2009 @ 3:08 pm
[...] I couldn’t fit into my piece yesterday: Ivan Oelrich, the acting president of the Federation for American Scientists, weighs in on what [...]
Comment posted September 29, 2009 @ 6:26 pm
They could've already sourced U238 and Pu from elsewhere, by now.
Chimpface is taunting NATO, but the Iranians probably already have nukes. An unpleasant thing to think about is that quite a few expat Iranians–in the U.S., Canada and Britain–actually support Ahmedinajad's regime. That's a big base of sleeper cells, with which to smuggle in and emplace nukes in the West. To paraphrase a movie tagline: they could already be here.
Jihadis don't think like us. When they set those suicide bombs off, they literally hold their junk, since they think they'll need it for that big 72 ho gangbang in the sky (not their heads, apparently). Islam really IS part of the threat. People who kill their sisters for getting divorced really DON'T think like us, nor have qualms about murdering innocents:
http://ca.news.yahoo.com/s/afp/090929/world/jor…
Comment posted October 1, 2009 @ 7:39 pm
WILL ISRAEL ATTACK IRAN?
[The First School of Taught]
The first school of taught is that Israel will not attack the Shi-ite Persian Republic of Iran based upon the idea that;
* Obama, has been at odds [Publically Only] with Benyamin/ Binyamin [BiBi Gift from God] Netanyahu the Prime Minister of Israel, over Jewish settlement in the West Bank and peace moves with the Palestinians, saying in July, that Israel would [absolutely not] be given a green light to attack, Iran.
* Iran is not an Israeli problem, it is an international problem.
* The Israeli threat to strike Iran militarily if the West fails to stop the nuclear program is a bluff, by Israeli directed at getting the Community of Nations to act, rather than having Israel be on the front lines, diplomatically or otherwise.
* Israel would be reluctant to anger the Community of Nations with a surprise pre-emptive attack upon Iran, but would need Military Support and want Diplomatic Cover, from the Empire.
* Risk of retaliation from Iran, and guerrilla groups under the umbrella of the (IFF) Islamic Freedom Fighters, [ Hezbollah, Hamas etc.].
* Economic and diplomatic backlash from the [U.N.] United Nations membership, the [BRIC] Brazil, The Russian Federation, India, The Peoples Republic of China, [EU], European Union, the Community of Nations.
** That such an attack would have to be a game changer, not a pinprick, with failure not an option triggering all reactions listed plus unforeseen consequences of any such action.
* Strategists rule out an attack on already heavily bunkered sites which are defensively spread out, which, would mean an effective strike force would have to be a large one, upon the following sites;
BONAB/TEHRAN/RAMSAR
Research/ Reactor Facilities
ARAK
Heavy Water/ Uranium Processing Enrichment
NATANZ/ISFAHAN
Uranium Processing and Enrichment
BUSHEHR
Heavy Water
SAGHAND
Uranium Mining
[The Second School of Taught]
Can be read in an article written by [Alastair Macdonald; Editing by Charles Dick], entitled How Might Israel Attack Iran? The article lays out the methods from both Overt and Covert, of Cyber-War, Mossad Sabotage, Air Assault, Land Attacks, Sea Attack, and the Missile Defense System of Israel in the event of a retaliatory attack.
* The Vice-President of the Empire Joe Biden, is on the same page with [BiBi], and opposite that of The Media Messiah Imperial President, [Publically] that Israel has the absolute right to pre-emptive attack Iran on the basis of being [Existentially Threatened].
* [BiBi’s] position is that the problem is not military capability, [your ability to stand and be determined is not more important than your firepower], the problem is whether you have the stomach, the political will, to take action.
* Iran’s defenses remain penetrable now but the holes in that defense maybe found by Iran and plugged, and that Israel would not necessarily need American approval to launch An attack.
* If Iran has the bomb, Arab allies would become part of its [Sphere of Influence]
* Iran threatens the Community of Nations, apart from Israel and would be a blow against, especially, The American-Israeli Empire’s interests, on the energy front. Who will dominate the oil in the region The American-Israeli Empire or the [BRIC] and Tehran?
[CUTTING TO THE CHASE]
Cutting to the Chase the Imperial Media Messiah President is a [LIAR and Traitor], and the (DC/544) Degenerate Democratic and Republican Crooks, are vacillators to that Treason, that is a given and has over and over again said one thing while doing another, or doing nothing at all and such is the present case with Israel’s Pre-emptive Nuclear Attack upon Shi-ite Persian Republic of Iran. The Messiah has not only given the Green Light to such an attack but has been paving the road, having;
* Throwing Eastern Europe under the bus to prevent the Russian Federation from delivering [S-300] Missiles to Iran on the Russian Ship, [The Arctic Sea], with [BiBi] making a secret trip to Moscow, with the deal, later signed by the Messiah.
* Strong arming Saudi Arabia into granting over flight rights to Israel for the pre-emptive attack.
* And pressuring the Egyptians to allow Israel to sailed one of its three German-made Dolphin submarines into the Red Sea through Suez in June, opening a way to the Gulf. The submarines are believed to be capable of firing nuclear and conventional cruise missiles.
* And the Empire must provide any and all assistance to Israel that it can covertly if possible but if necessary will be compelled to do so overtly.
[THERE IS NOT ANOTHER OPTION BUT AN ATTACK] in the mind set of either party, a lot of smoke and mirrors, but it’s a done deal and [VERY SOON]
HERCULE TRIATHLON SAVINIEN
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Comment posted August 23, 2010 @ 2:06 am
by Israeli directed at getting the Community of Nations to act, rather than having Israel be on the front lines, diplomatically or otherwise.
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