Page 2 of 2 The myth of 'weapons-grade' enrichment
By Kaveh L Afrasiabi
integrated itself in Israel's incessant anti-Iran campaign, aimed at exerting
maximum pressure, even if that means twisting the facts and standing them on
their head.
Israel's 60-year history is replete with examples of its leaders misguiding the
public with their threats, such as when they painted Egyptian leader Gemal
Abdul Nasser as a "Hitler of the Middle East", when, in retrospect, the
historical record has established the carefully-orchestrated media campaign to
justify Israel's pre-emptive strike at Egypt (and other Arab states) in June
1967.
History often repeats itself and today Israel is reportedly poised to take on
Iran, despite the absence of any "smoking gun" and the
fact that neither Israel nor the US has "proved that Iran's nuclear program is
military", to paraphrase Russia's Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov. One would
think that after the Iraq fiasco, the bar for instigating warfare in the Middle
East would be set relatively higher. Yet the exact opposite seems to be the
case now, with the lame-duck President George W Bush, who upped the ante
against Iran in his recent European tour, reportedly tilting in favor of the
"wild card" in a military scenario with Iran, ie, Israel.
Concerning the latter, although US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has
signed a letter from the "Iran Six" countries to Iran, accompanying with an
incentive package, pledging to respect Iran's sovereignty, Rice's hawkish
colleagues in the Bush administration apparently have a different scenario in
mind. (The "Iran Six" includes the United States, France, China, Russia,
England and Germany.)
Thus, Mike McConnell, the US national intelligence director, told the
right-wing Fox TV last Sunday that Iran was a year or two from developing its
first nuclear bombs. McConnell's alarmist estimate on Iran is clearly at odds
with the US's National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iran, released late last
year, that confirmed that Iran's nuclear program was, and had been since 2003,
peaceful.
McConnell's own deputy, Donald M Kerr, has repeatedly defended the NIE report
before the US Congress, stating that the US intelligence community does not
plan to "revise" it.
Various pundits, such as former secretary of state Henry Kissinger, have
criticized the NIE report for failing to refer to Iran's enrichment program as
an evidence of weaponization. (See
Kissinger's foggy lens on Iran Asia Times Online, December 18, 2007.)
Yet, Kissinger and others critical of the NIE report overlook that as long as
there is no evidence of Iranian enrichment above the "low-grade" that is
qualitatively and technically different from "high-enriched" or "weapons-grade"
enrichment, no one can accuse Iran of engaging in proliferation by simply
pursuing a legal nuclear activity.
To return to Allison's piece above-mentioned, it is factually incorrect to
assume that Iran's low-enriched uranium is "one-third" what is required for a
nuclear bomb. First, only through extensive and a painstakingly difficult
technological process of re-processing and re-enriching uranium to
substantially higher levels (90% or more), can Iran's enriched uranium be
utilized for manufacturing bombs.
Second, with the IAEA's robust inspection of Iran's enrichment facilities, any
such diversion to "weapons-grade" enrichment would be instantly detected,
simply because significant modifications, re-assembling and re-configuration of
the cascades of centrifuges would be necessary and that could not possibly
evade the IAEA's watchful eyes.
Yet, all of this is ignored, with the tacit suggestion that Iran's program is
"unsupervised" when, in fact, it is one of the most exhaustively inspected and
supervised nuclear programs in the world, in light of some 3,500 hours of
inspection of its facilities since 2003.
In conclusion, misperceptions of Iran's nuclear activities form an important
prerequisite for a major military offensive against the country. This is the
concern as long as those misperceptions are propagated.
Kaveh L Afrasiabi, PhD, is the author of After Khomeini: New
Directions in Iran's Foreign Policy (Westview Press) and co-author of
"Negotiating Iran's Nuclear Populism", Brown Journal of World Affairs, Volume
XII, Issue 2, Summer 2005, with Mustafa Kibaroglu. He also wrote "Keeping
Iran's nuclear potential latent", Harvard International Review, and is author
of
Iran's Nuclear Program: Debating Facts Versus Fiction.
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