The Coming Nuclear Showdown with Iran

Kenneth Timmerman, The Jerusalem Post:

The Iranian regime's new hard-line president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, wasted no time in putting the world on notice as to the Islamic Republic's nuclear intentions.

In his initial press conference after his victory against billionaire cleric Ali Akbar Hashemi-Rafsanjani in a clearly rigged election, the new president reasserted Iran's "right" to nuclear technology, and said negotiations with the Europeans would continue "while preserving our national interests and insistence on the right of the Iranian nation to use nuclear energy."

The Europeans have been urging Iran to give up its uranium enrichment and heavy water programs, since the nuclear materials they produce can be used for energy or weapons. But instead of convincing Teheran that it will pay a price for non-compliance, the E-3 (France, Germany and the UK) have offered a basket of enticements, from membership in the World Trade Organization to enhanced technology exchange.

Despite these inducements, Iran's clerical leaders continue to stall for time, making commitments that they break before the ink is even dry. At the most recent meeting of the board of governors of the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna on June 15, Deputy Director-General Pierre Goldschmidt once again accused Iran of cheating on its safeguards obligations, this time by falsifying declarations on plutonium experiments.

From my own reporting from Vienna, it is clear that the IAEA board lacks the political will to put Iran on the carpet for repeated violations of its safeguards commitments, despite repeated urging from US Ambassador Jackie Wolcott Sanders.

Instead, European delegates such as Germany's Friedrich Groning, have scolded Sanders for breaking the "Vienna rules" by pressing for a hard line on Iran, and have attempted to turn the closed-door meetings into a forum for insulting President George W. Bush.

On Monday, German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder met with Bush in the White House, urging him to make new concessions to the mullahs - the European "response" to the election of Ahmadinejad. The West cannot bar Teheran from the peaceful use of nuclear energy, "even though some might not like that," Schroeder said.

Schroeder's logic goes something like this: The Islamic Republic has cheated repeatedly with the IAEA. We really wish they wouldn't do this, so every time they cheat, we get a little nicer. Now, with a new hard-line president, it's time to get really nice. Why not acknowledge the inevitable? Iran is going to get nuclear weapons, so we'd better get used to that idea if we want to achieve peace in our time.

The Bush administration has rightly rejected this logic. But the US also knows that it will not be able to count on Germany, Russia, China or former ally, France, should Iran's case go to the United Nations Security Council for sanctions.

We don't have very much time to get this right.

IRAN'S CLANDESTINE nuclear weapons program was relaunched in 1985 by none other than Ali Akbar Hashemi-Rafsanjani, the smiling mullah who announced during the recent presidential campaign that if elected he would broker a deal over Iran's nukes with the United States.

For 20 years, Iran has been working hand in glove with infamous Pakistan nuclear impresario A.Q. Khan, who became an adviser to Iran's Atomic Energy Organization in 1987. For some reason, the US intelligence failed to pick up on this - although as an investigative reporter, I wrote about their relationship repeatedly during the late 1980s and 1990s.

In 1995, the Islamic Republic signed a landmark nuclear cooperation agreement with Russia that included the building of a plutonium production reactor, a uranium centrifuge plant, and uranium mining and milling assistance.

Alarmed at this development, president Bill Clinton met with president Boris Yeltsin in Moscow in May 1995 and convinced him to drop the plutonium reactor and the enrichment plant. Under the guise of assistance to a civilian nuclear energy program, however, Russia continued to train Iranian nuclear technicians and to transfer nuclear technology. The IAEA said nothing.

Similarly, China signed an agreement in the mid-1990s to build a uranium conversion plant in Isfahan, to allow Iran to make uranium hexafluoride feedstock for a centrifuge plant the Iranians claimed they did not have or intend to build.

Again, the Clinton administration intervened and got the Chinese to back off from their commitment - at least, so they claimed. We now know, however, that the Chinese turned around and sold the Iranians a complete set of blueprints for the entire plant, right down to the piping and air ducts. The Iranians built that plant in secret until the IAEA finally knocked on the door in 2003.

Last year the Iranians broke yet another commitment to the E-3 and processed 37 tons of uranium through this plant - enough "hex" for up to five bombs.

AT HIS meeting at Bush's Crawford ranch in April, Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon counseled the president to go the extra mile along the diplomatic route. This was not an admission of weakness, but an avowal of just how bad the military options with Iran will be.

Iranian defectors I have interviewed over the past two years tell me the Islamic Republic has assembled 15 nuclear warheads. They also identified a deeply-buried site south of Natanz where the regime is stockpiling the warheads and the Shahab-3 missiles to launch them, and claimed to know of five additional buried nuclear depots. READ MORE

Western intelligence agencies have confirmed the location of the underground site, which they have identified as a missile launch facility. So far there is no hard corroboration that Iran possesses the nuclear warheads. However, during his last official overseas trip as secretary of state, Colin Powell told reporters in December 2004 that the US had fresh intelligence from an Iranian "walk-in" on efforts to mate nuclear warheads to missiles. This is the last step before a country becomes an avowed nuclear weapons state.

If the Iranians used the equipment we now know that they purchased from the A.Q. Khan network over the past 18 years, today they could have enough fissile material to produce between 20 to 25 nuclear weapons, according to publicly available estimates developed by nuclear experts.

What if the ayatollahs got the bomb? For years, this was a rhetorical question. Today, it is a reality for which Americans and Israelis must prepare.

The writer is author of the new book Countdown to Crisis: The Coming Nuclear Showdown with Iran and executive director of the Foundation for Democracy in Iran (www.iran.org).