The bomb continues ticking

It is not certain that the Lausanne understandings on Iran’s nuclear program will turn into a final and comprehensive agreement.

By YOSSI MELMAN
Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei (photo credit: REUTERS)
Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei
(photo credit: REUTERS)
ONE OF the major breakthroughs reached in Lausanne, Switzerland, on the “understandings” – no, there is no written and signed agreement – agreed upon by Iran and the six world powers in early April regarding Tehran’s nuclear program is the pushing back of its “breakout time to a bomb” to one year. The parties have until the end of June to work out the details and put the plan to paper.
Breakout time is a concept that defines the time Iran will need to assemble a nuclear weapon should it decide to breach the agreement.
How exactly did US President Barack Obama, with the help of his intelligence community, reach this one-year conclusion? According to the US intelligence assessment of a year and a half ago, on the eve of the interim agreement reached in Geneva, in November 2013, Iran was then very close to having the capability to assemble a nuclear weapon.
Experts were split on whether Iran was a few weeks or a few months away from this capability.
But they shared the nearly unanimous belief, as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu presented in his famous and flamboyant address to the UN General Assembly in 2012, that Iran was on the brink of becoming a nuclear threshold state and very close to assembling a bomb.
Thus pushing back Iran’s “breakout time” from two, three or even four months to a year is certainly a praiseworthy achievement. Especially since the majority of experts in Israel – including former Mossad and Military Intelligence chiefs – and abroad estimated that resorting to a highly effective military operation against Iran’s nuclear facilities would push back the breakout time to only two or three years. In this sense, a pushback of a year without war is not bad.
There arises the question of how the assessment of the time frame was reached. How is it possible to determine that an understanding based on the principles of Lausanne, if signed this coming June as a full-fledged written and comprehensive agreement, will actually push back Iran’s breakout time for assembling a bomb to a year? In order to assemble a bomb, Iran first of all needs approval from its leadership – namely Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
There is no indication that such a decision has ever been made in Tehran. But, even if the order had been given, Iran would need the knowledge, technology, facilities, equipment and material to produce its first nuclear weapon.
Here is the reality check. Iran has the knowledge (nuclear scientists); it has the technology (though not particularly sophisticated, it has uranium enrichment facilities); equipment (various models of centrifuges, both old and newer), and the material (natural uranium enriched to various levels under the threshold needed to create a bomb).
The assessment of its breakout time is not a precise science, and there are bound to be slight digressions of a few weeks here or there, but it is certainly possible to reach a close estimate.
The calculation is based on a few variables: on the number of centrifuges that remain in Iran’s possession, their quality, and the quantity of enriched materials it is allowed to keep.
The most important requirement for assembling a bomb is attaining fissile material – 22 to 25 kilograms of enriched uranium to a level of 93 percent, or three to five kilograms of plutonium produced in a nuclear reactor. Iran still does not have a nuclear reactor (its heavy water reactor in Arak is still under construction) and, according to the Lausanne understandings, even once it is completed its core will be reconfigured so it will not be capable of producing weapons-grade plutonium. The Arak reactor will only produce small quantities of plutonium to be used for medical purposes and thus Iran will always remain under the threshold of 3-5 kilograms per year needed for a bomb for the entire duration of the agreement.
NEVERTHELESS, IRAN has a substantial stock of uranium – 10 tons – enriched to 3.5 percent, an amount sufficient to manufacture six or seven bombs, if enriched further to 93 percent. But, according to the understandings, most of Iran’s uranium supply will be put under the custody and supervision of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). Following that, Iran will no longer be in possession of enough enriched uranium to create even a single bomb.
Under the terms of the Lausanne principles, Iran will be permitted over the course of the next 10 years to operate only 5,000 centrifuges for uranium enrichment. An additional 1,000 already installed centrifuges will produce uranium isotopes for medical purposes. Experts reason that 3,000 to 4,000 centrifuges for uranium enrichment would be enough for Iran to breakout to a bomb should it decide to do so. But its centrifuges are old, less advanced, models – called “P1,” named for Pakistan, and “IR-1,” named for Iran.
These centrifuges were produced 50 years ago in URENCO, the centrifuge manufacturing consortium owned by Britain, Germany and the Netherlands. In the early 1970s, a top Pakistani scientist Dr. Abdul Qadeer Khan arrived at the consortium for a training program.
Khan stole the drawings and plans for manufacturing centrifuges, and smuggled them back to Pakistan, thus enabling Pakistan to enrich its own uranium and develop a nuclear bomb. (A recent biography of Israeli-American Hollywood producer Arnon Milchan reveals that he participated in a similar operation, also in the 1970s, to steal similar drawings from URENCO on behalf of Israeli intelligence for its nuclear program.) Fast forward nearly a quarter century later to the 1990s: Khan sold the centrifuge plans, along with instructions for manufacturing and assembling them to the developing nuclear programs in Iran and in Libya.
In 2004, Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi surprised the world – and Israeli intelligence in particular – by reaching an agreement with Britain and the US whereby Libya would dismantle its nuclear program and its chemical weapons and pay billions of dollars in compensation to the victims of the Pan Am flight bombed by Libyan agents over Scotland in 1988.
In return for Gaddafi’s cooperation, the international sanctions on Libya were lifted and diplomatic relations were renewed. As part of the deal, Libya gave the British MI6 and the American CIA its technical drawings and centrifuge construction plans, and also the models in its possession.
Examining the Libyan centrifuges and drawings and using reverse engineering methods, the intelligence communities of the UK, US, Israel and probably Germany learned to understand how similar Iranian machines work and to what level of efficiency.
By assessing the quantity and quality of centrifuges and the amount of enriched uranium it is possible to calculate breakout times.
In Iran’s case, the centrifuges in its possession are old, dating to the early 1970s theft by Khan. They are less effective than the newer models, which spin at a much faster rate.
During the process of uranium enrichment using these older centrifuges, quite a lot of the material evaporates. It thus takes much longer and requires more material to enrich the uranium and the centrifuges are more liable to malfunction.
Journalist Julian Borger wrote in The Guardian in early April that the US, Britain and Israel – each separately, apparently – have secret sites where they have installed the old centrifuge models used by Libya. The goal of installing these facilities was to test the centrifuges and evaluate how effective they are at enriching uranium.
This is not the first time that foreign media has reported on tests of the kind involving Israel, aimed at assessing the capability and functioning of Iranian centrifuges.
About four years ago, The New York Times reported that Israel had constructed at its reported nuclear reactor compound in Dimona a workshop of centrifuges of the same model used by Iran. According to the report, this was part of the secret operation undertaken by the Israeli and American intelligence communities known as “the Olympic Games,” in which the destructive Stuxnet computer virus was programmed and later stealthily planted in the Iranian machines.
The purpose of the facility installed in Dimona was to understand the structure of the centrifuges, their components and how they operate, in order to subsequently infiltrate Iran’s nuclear enrichment facility in Natanz using the Stuxnet virus, unnoticed either completely or belatedly, thus causing heavy damage to the centrifuges.
According to foreign media reports, this is exactly what happened. One thousand centrifuges – one third of Iranian centrifuges at the time – were damaged in 2009-2010. It took a few months for Iranian scientists, computer experts and engineers to figure out what really damaged the machines.
But since then Iran overcame the problem, broadened its knowledge and cyber security, and compensated itself by building nearly 19,000 centrifuges, some of them more advanced than IR-1.
The report in The Guardian revealed that an examination of the Libyan centrifuges attained by the US, Britain and Israel led the US to the conclusion that with 5,000 old centrifuges – assuming they work at full capacity without malfunctioning – it would take Iran at least a year to “breakout to a bomb” and enrich the amount of uranium necessary to produce 22 kilograms of fissile material for one bomb.
But with media manipulation and allegations of lying spread by Supreme Leader Khamenei and US officials, and with the hovering shadow of Netanyahu and the US Republican Congress threatening to block any deal with Iran, it is not certain at all that the Lausanne understandings will turn into a final and comprehensive agreement.
In such case, we might be back to square one. There will be no restrictions on Iranian uranium enrichment and Tehran could get very close – two to three months from breakout – to assembling nuclear weapons if its leaders so decided.
Yossi Melman is an Israeli security commentator and co-author of ‘Spies Against Armageddon.’ He blogs at www.israelspy.com and tweets at yossi_melman