Ahmadinejad inaugurates heavy water plant which can manufacture plutonium for weapons
DEBKAfile
http://debka.com/headline.php?hid=3177
August 26, 2006
Touring the site at Khondab near Arak, 190 km southwest of Tehran Saturday, Aug. 26, the Iranian president said Iran is not an atomic threat – even to Israel. But five days before the UN deadline for Iran to halt uranium enrichment, he boasted the Arak plant will be able to produce 16 tons of heavy water a year.
This is taken by DEBKAfile’s military sources as confirmation that, in addition to accelerated uranium enrichment, Iran has embarked on a second technology for producing fuel for nuclear warheads – plutonium as a by-product obtained from the Bushehr nuclear reactor.
On the uranium track, European sources in Vienna revealed last week that Iran has acquired P-2 centrifuges to speed up the pace of enrichment.
Tehran is thus doubly defying the West and the UN after sending a fudging response to the incentives package on offer for abandoning enrichment.
DEBKAfile notes that Tehran has made no secret of these menacing advances in its nuclear program. They were openly unveiled last week. But because no hard American or European rejoinder was forthcoming, the Iranians pushed ahead with further admissions: Wednesday, Aug. 23, a senior official in Tehran forecast another dramatic announcement on Iran’s nuclear program; Saturday, Ahmadinejad pulled the heavy water rabbit out of his hat.
The United States, Europe and Israel have every reason to be fearful of the course on which Iran is speeding forward pell-mell.
DEBKAfile’s military sources report Tehran is taking encouragement from the quiescence of the Bush administration and Israel on two linked issues: a European force for Lebanon which announces in advance that it will not disarm Hizballah or bar its acquisition of massive quantities of war materiel from Iran and Syria; and Iran’s nuclear advances. No one is stopping the rulers of the Islamic Republic’s campaign to neuter UN resolutions, UN nuclear watchdog’s injunctions and diplomacy of any kind. They are therefore free to follow up the Lebanon war with new and aggravated attacks on Israel - conventional by Hizballah and eventually, nuclear by Iran.
Iran takes new nuclear step
Times Online
Sarah Baxter, Washington
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2089-2330623,00.html
August 27, 2006
IN A show of defiance against western efforts to curb Iran’s nuclear programme, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad inaugurated the new phase of a heavy water reactor project yesterday, prompting an Israeli warning that Tehran had taken another step towards producing a bomb.
The Arak plant in central Iran can now make eight tons of heavy water a year, with output expected to rise tenfold.
Heavy water aids nuclear fission and the plutonium by- product could be used to make warheads. But the reactor to produce plutonium is still under construction.
The Iranian president insisted the plant was for peaceful purposes. “We are not a threat to anybody,” he said at the opening. “There is no talk of nuclear weapons.”
Arak’s construction was kept secret until the opposition National Council of Resistance of Iran revealed its existence along with the Natanz uranium enrichment facility in 2002.
An Iranian nuclear official claimed there was no need for the International Atomic Energy Agency to supervise Arak as it did not have a military purpose. But experts warned plutonium production could pose a greater threat than uranium enrichment.
“With uranium it’s much easier to put in safeguards to monitor the atmosphere and instruments,” said Paul Ingram, a nuclear analyst with the British American Security Information Council. Arak could produce enough plutonium for one or two nuclear weapons a year.
Ephraim Sneh, a senior Israeli MP, said Arak marked “another leap in Iran’s advance towards a nuclear bomb”.
The Iranian media reported last week that an announcement concerning the “nuclear birth” of the nation would be made within days. Ahmadinejad’s inauguration of Arak could be it, but there is speculation that the regime plans more surprises before a UN deadline for suspension of its uranium enrichment programme expires on Thursday.
Eiland: Iran leadership poses threat
The Jerusalem Post
By DAVID HOROVITZ
http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1154525940677&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull
August 24, 2006
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, if he ever became the supreme decision maker in his country, would “sacrifice half of Iran for the sake of eliminating Israel,” Giora Eiland, Israel’s former national security adviser, told The Jerusalem Post on Thursday.
At present, Eiland stressed, the ultimate decision maker in Iran was Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, 67, whom he said was “more reasonable.” But, Eiland went on, “if Ahmadinejad were to succeed him - and he has a reasonable chance of doing so - then we’d be in a highly dangerous situation.”
The 49-year-old Iranian president, he said, “has a religious conviction that Israel’s demise is essential to the restoration of Muslim glory, that the Zionist thorn in the heart of the Islamic nations must be removed. And he will pay almost any price to right the perceived historic wrong. If he becomes the supreme leader and has a nuclear capability, that’s a real threat.”
In facing up to Iran’s nuclear ambitions, Eiland said the United States had three possible courses of action, “all of them bad,” and that a decision could not be postponed for too long, “since delay, too, is a decision of sorts.”
The first option was “to give up” - to accept that Iran was going nuclear and try to make the best of it. By “making the best of it,” Eiland said, he meant “isolating Iran economically, politically and internationally in the hope that this will eventually prompt an internal push for regime change.”
This might also give other nations the sense that the political price of going nuclear was too high for them to contemplate, and might thus deter nations such as Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Turkey, Algeria and others from seeking to emulate Iran and spelling the full collapse of the nuclear nonproliferation era.
Washington’s second option was to launch a last-ditch effort at diplomatic action, he said. At this stage, a mixture of sanctions and bonuses would not be sufficient to deter Iran altogether, but it might seek to persuade Teheran to suspend progress for two or three years.
“In return, the US would have to open direct engagement with Teheran, with full recognition of the regime. This would boost the regime’s credibility and standing at home and allow it to say it was voluntarily suspending the program for a while,” he said.
The advantage for the Bush administration was that “Bush could then say, ‘They didn’t go nuclear on my watch, and it’s up to my successors to keep things that way.’”
The third option, said Eiland, was a military operation - born of the sense that the diplomatic process would not work and that there could be no compromise with an axis-of-evil power. However, internal political realities and public opinion in the US were not conducive to this, he said, nor was international support readily available. Furthermore, said Eiland, "this would be action that would have to be taken within months.
If not, and if Iran continues enrichment, it will complete the research and development stage and have a proven ability which it can then duplicate at numerous sites. And at that point it could not be stopped by military action. Six months or 12 months from now would be too late, he said.
Tellingly, Eiland noted, it seemed to him that the difficulties facing the administration over that third course were growing.
As the crisis with Iran deepens, meanwhile, some Israeli sources believe the US has acted foolishly in spurning opportunities for international diplomatic cooperation against Iran in recent years, and that Israel mistakenly encouraged this course of action.
The US might have had more success isolating Iran two years ago, when Bush and French President Jacques Chirac were stronger, Iran was weaker and the situation in Iraq looked better, said the sources.
As recently as a few months ago, on a trip to Ukraine, which is a vital Russian sphere of influence, US Vice President Richard Cheney criticized the Putin regime’s record on democracy, the sources pointed out. Against that kind of background, the US should not be surprised now, therefore, to find Russia less than willing to fully cooperate on its Iran strategy.
Israel, these sources went on, realized early the danger posed by Iran’s nuclear drive but erred in supporting the US in hanging tough rather than pushing it toward cooperation.
As for Israel’s military options, these sources spoke of an immense dilemma for the government. Declining to go into detail, they noted only that Israel was not as potent militarily as the US and mused about what might happen if a military action proved unsuccessful in thwarting the nuclear program. Iran might then complete its nuclear drive and, branding Israel a preemptive aggressor, claim legitimacy for a strike of its own at Israel.
