The U.S. intelligence community is mulling changes to its 2007 assertion that Iran four years earlier suspended a formal effort to design and construct a nuclear weapon, the Wall Street Journal reported today (see GSN, Oct. 15).
(Oct. 16) -
Technicians move a container of uranium yellowcake at Iran's Isfahan uranium conversion facility in 2005. U.S. intelligence agencies are reportedly reassessing their 2-year-old assertion that Iran halted its formal nuclear-weapon development program in 2003 (Behrouz Mehri/Getty Images).
The 2007 National Intelligence Estimate overturned earlier conclusions on Iran's nuclear activities, asserting with "high confidence" that Tehran halted the program in late 2003 and stating with "moderate confidence" that the effort had not been resumed (see GSN, Dec. 3, 2007). Washington and its allies have long suspected that Iran's nuclear program is aimed at producing bombs, an allegation the Middle Eastern state has consistently denied.
Despite increasing criticism of the 2007 assessment by U.S. lawmakers and other Western governments, the nation's 16 intelligence services are not "ready to declare that [conclusion] invalid," said one high-level U.S. intelligence official. Instead, the agencies could reconsider how the status of Iran's nuclear activities might have changed since the estimate was issued, according to the source (see GSN, Sept. 17).
The intelligence community now has "a lot more information since we last did" an assessment of Iran's nuclear-weapon activities, the official said, adding that some of the new knowledge "tracks precisely with what we've seen before" while other material "causes us to reassess what we've seen before."
"At some point in the near future, our analytic community is going to want to press the reset button on our judgments on intent and weaponization in light of Qum and other information we're receiving," the official said, referring to a recently disclosed and still unfinished Iranian uranium enrichment facility.
Intelligence officials have been peppering the White House with short assessments of Iran's nuclear capabilities, while staffers for both the National Security Council and Vice President Joseph Biden have called for a new comprehensive intelligence estimate on the matter, according to a source with knowledge of the developments.
A U.S. intelligence assertion that Iran has restarted nuclear-weapon development efforts could bolster international support for new international penalties aimed at pressuring Tehran to halt its disputed nuclear work, said one European official involved in Iran policy.
"Countries would no longer be able to hide behind the [2007] NIE," the official said.
Still, a new national intelligence estimate would take months to complete, putting into question how its timing could affect Western threats to pursue new sanctions on Iran if the country does not halt its uranium enrichment program by December. The enrichment process can produce nuclear power plant fuel but also nuclear-weapon material (Gorman/Solomon, Wall Street Journal, Oct. 16).
The United States, Russia and France hope Iran will agree in multilateral talks Monday to send much of ts low-enriched uranium to Russia for further refinement, Paris indicated yesterday. Iran tentatively accepted the arrangement in negotiations earlier this month with the five permanent U.N. Security Council member nations and Germany, Western powers have indicated.
Under the proposal, France would also provide Iran with four fuel cells for use at a research reactor in Tehran, where the fuel enriched by Russia would be used under international supervision, said French Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Christine Fages.
"France supports this initiative which, if effectively carried out in these conditions, would allow reduction in the short term of the risk that Iran could use this uranium for a nuclear weapon," she said (Associated Press/Google News, Oct. 15).
Russian Foreign Ministry official Andrei Nesterenko suggested yesterday that Moscow might also offer fuel assemblies to Iran, according to Interfax (Interfax, Oct. 15).
A high-level Iranian official, though, hinted that Tehran does not intend to finalize the agreement during next week's discussion, Reuters reported today.
"Time is on our side," the official said.
Iran's top nuclear official is not expected to attend next week's meeting (Mark Heinrich, Reuters, Oct. 16). One Western official was discouraged that Iranian Atomic Energy Organization head Ali Akbar Salehi would not appear at the talks, Deutsche Presse-Agentur reported.
Participants at next week's negotiations could focus on hammering out details of the arrangement, including the timing and size of the uranium shipment from Iran. France indicated in a Foreign Ministry paper that it wants the delivery to take place before the end of 2009 (Deutsche Presse-Agentur/Earth Times, Oct. 16).
"We don't know if engagement will work. But we think even if it does not work as a strategy, as a tactic it is useful to basically frame all our other policy options. They will be viewed as more legitimate, more credible, because we will have tried," David Makovsky, an expert with the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, told Voice of America (Meredith Buel, Voice of America, Oct. 15).
Iran's low-enriched uranium supply contains "impurities" that could prevent the nation from enriching the material to a weapon-grade level, Nucleonics Week reported in its Oct. 8 edition.
International assistance in enriching the material might remove the contaminants, according to a Washington Post column published today.
"It's especially cheeky for Iran to try to leverage as a concession their willingness to receive international cooperation in supplying nuclear fuel," said George Perkovich, a nonproliferation expert with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace (David Ignatius, Washington Post, Oct. 16).
Meanwhile, one analyst predicted that U.N. nuclear watchdog inspectors would be unable to prove that Iran's Qum facility was originally intended to produce weapon-grade uranium, Trend Daily News reported.
"In order to determine whether the plant had a military purpose, it will be necessary to determine whether it had administrative connections with the Iranian Ministry of Defense. This would require the inspectors to have access to original documentation and to key plant personnel in order to investigate issues going beyond verifying the design information. In my view it is unlikely that Iran would agree to allow this access," Shannon Kile, an analyst with the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, stated by e-mail (T. Konyayeva, Trend Daily News, Oct. 15).
Intelligence analysts could deduce Iran's possible military intent for the Qum site from its underground location as well as the use of construction materials that could harden the facility against an attack, experts told the Christian Science Monitor (Peter Grier, Christian Science Monitor Oct. 11).
In Washington, the Senate backed a measure yesterday that would prohibit the Energy Department from buying emergency petroleum reserves from firms selling more than $1 million in refined petroleum products to Iran, Agence France-Presse reported. The House of Representatives has already approved the measure placed in an energy funding bill for the new fiscal year (Agence France-Presse/Google News, Oct. 15).
"They (Americans) have already imposed sanctions against our country, but achieved nothing. The world is a big place and all states are not controlled by a certain bullying regime," state media yesterday quoted Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as saying, according to the Xinhua News Agency (Xinhua News Agency, Oct. 15).
Elsewhere, Israeli and Iranian officials discussed nuclear matters in a secret meeting arranged by Australia, the Australian Associated Press reported today (Australian Associated Press/MSN.com, Oct. 16).