IRAN HAS ANOTHER PATH TO THE NUCLEAR BOMB - Filenews 6/7
By Ilan Berman
Criticism of the way the Trump administration chose to end the conflict with Iran – through a fourteen-point Memorandum of Understanding that left the Iranian regime "standing", more hardline internally and strengthened in terms of its regional political position, continues. According to the White House, however, this process will be a strategic victory in the long run, because it paves the way for a lasting solution to Tehran's persistent nuclear ambitions.
Here, however, there is cause for concern, as the Trump administration's approach for now offers a partial solution.
So far, U.S. involvement has focused on the most obvious and long-debated way Iran could develop a nuclear weapon — through enriched uranium. It overlooks a second, equally powerful avenue: plutonium reprocessing. It is worth noting that the Iranian regime has proven that it has the technical capability to do both, as well as a long history of deceptive actions in the nuclear field, which suggests that Iran will follow this path as well, if given the opportunity.
At the heart of Iran's choice of plutonium is the nuclear power plant located in the city of Boucher. Since the mid-1990s, Rosatom, Russia's state nuclear agency, helped build the nuclear power plant and then operated it for years before handing over control to the Iranian regime. In this context, Moscow provided Tehran with the technical foundations to boost its nuclear know-how as well as a semblance of legitimacy for its insistence on acquiring nuclear.
Today, after three decades of operation, Boucher has accumulated a significant reserve of spent nuclear fuel. Henry Sokolski, a leading nuclear expert who directs the Center for Nuclear Non-Proliferation Policy Training, estimates that today Iran "has about 2,100 kilograms of weapons-grade plutonium" in Bushehr, enough "to build more than 200 bombs."
In addition, the Iranian regime has sufficient capabilities to do so. As Sokolski explains, the technical steps required to convert plutonium into nuclear bombs are no more difficult than those required to convert uranium into a weapon. In both cases, the material is turned into metal, moulded and machined to form usable nuclear material. The key difference lies in the process of converting fissile material into bombs (chemical reprocessing in the case of plutonium, rather than enrichment, which can be carried out secretly and in small batches). In addition, the time frame for doing all this is about the same – a matter of weeks, once they have the fissile material at their disposal.
The key difference, then, lies in accessibility. Much of Iran's stockpiles of highly enriched uranium – more specifically, the much-discussed 440 kilograms of near-war-grade "nuclear powder" – are now deeply buried, scattered or destroyed as a result of U.S. and Israeli airstrikes on key regime facilities last year. In contrast, Iran's stockpiles of plutonium are located in spent fuel tanks in Bushehr, which makes it much easier to divert them in a short period of time.
This is not a hypothetical concern. It is a "thorn" of the Memorandum between the US and Iran, which risks focusing exclusively on uranium enrichment, leaving other avenues open for the development of nuclear weapons, as was the case with the 2015 nuclear deal during the Obama administration. In short, no matter how effective the negotiations between Washington and Tehran prove to be, Bushehr's plutonium provides the Iranian regime with the means to build a potential "bomb in the underground" if it decides to do so.
To prevent this, specific actions will be needed. Sokolski argues that Iran's plutonium path should be closely monitored through "near real-time" surveillance, instead of the current, comparatively limited approach taken by the International Atomic Energy Agency, the UN's nuclear watchdog. He also argues that Iran's spent fuel should not be in the hands of the Iranians, so that the regime's nuclear experts do not simply have the raw material needed to activate a plutonium path. Finally, he says that current plans for further construction in Boucher must be cancelled so that the inventory that the US still has to deal with does not increase further.
It is a tip that deserves to be taken seriously. The Iranian regime has made its nuclear ambitions abundantly clear and has poured huge resources into this program over the past few decades. Logic, therefore, dictates that American policy must deprive it of any possibility of turning these ambitions into a weapon – and not just the most obvious one.
Forbes
