Potentially groundbreaking news regarding the Iranian nuclear program: It’s in much worse shape than anyone in the West thought, if David Ignatius of the Washington Post is right. Ignatius seems to have found a fascinating nugget from an article in the trade magazine Nucleonics Week (subscribe today!). If that article is correct, then Iran’s nuclear progress has been far, far overstated — the low-enriched uranium it has so far compiled is essentially useless; impurities in the uranium would make it impossible to re-enrich it into weapons-grade material. That adds a whole new spin to the tentative agreement Iran reached two weeks ago in which the West could help enrich Iran’s uranium to levels necessary for civilian nuclear power:
You’ve got to hand it to the Iranians, though, for making the best of what might be a bad situation: In the proposal embraced in Geneva, they have gotten the West to agree to decontaminate fuel that would otherwise be useful only for the low-enriched civilian nuclear power they have always claimed is their only goal.
“It’s especially cheeky for Iran to try to leverage as a concession their willingness to receive international cooperation in supplying nuclear fuel,” noted George Perkovich, the director of the nonproliferation program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
Iran would basically try to get the West to solve its technological problem for them. A second important issue raised by Ignatius’ piece is why Iran’s enrichment process is as flawed as it apparently now known to be. I suspect that American and Israeli intelligence operations may have something to do with the malfunctioning of Iranian equipment, as it has already been widely reported that both countries have decided to launch covert operations aimed at delaying the nuclear program in lieu of a military strike. The CIA, for instance, set up front companies to sell Iran faulty components for its uranium-enriching centrifuges. Israel may eventually rely on covert ops to attack Iran’s facilities, rather than the politically riskier approach of using airstrikes.
All of this is crucially important as President Obama decides how to approach the Iranian nuclear issue going forward, especially in light of the sudden “conciliatory” approach on the part of the Iranians. It’ll also be interesting to see how this–and the recent revealing of the Qom facility and other subsequent intelligence–impacts a potential reassessment of the (highly flawed) National Intelligence Estimate in December 2007 that downplayed Iran’s nuclear ambitions.
