Israel gauges fallout from Iran
strike By Victor Kotsev
Amid the ever-growing diplomatic noise and
military buildup in the Persian Gulf, a key issue
has received insufficient attention: the dual
problem of possible radioactive contamination and
civilian casualties resulting from an operation
against Iran. Strikes on nuclear facilities carry
enormous stigma; those directed at peaceful
installations, specifically, are considered a
grave violation of international law.
Although a persuasive legal argument could
be made that the Iranian nuclear program is
anything but civilian (something that the Islamic
Republic denies), many of the moral constraints
against attacking installations loaded with
thousands of tons of dangerous chemicals would
remain. Surprisingly, given how much has been
written and said on the topic of the Iranian nuclear
program, there is very
little reliable publicly available information on
the issue.
On the one hand, two prominent
Western experts contacted by Asia Times Online
suggested that it would be possible to conduct an
operation against the Iranian nuclear program
without releasing much radiation in the
environment. Though both stressed the speculative
nature of the discussion, their responses might
lead one to conclude that the danger of a
peacetime nuclear accident in Iran, if the nuclear
program is allowed to go on, would be greater.
Asked whether he thought it would be
possible to bomb the Iranian installations without
releasing large quantities of uranium hexafluoride
gas (the chemical compound of uranium which is
used in the enrichment process and which Iran has
stockpiled in the thousands of kilograms) into the
atmosphere, and whether he would comment on the
possible scale of civilian casualties and the
spread of nuclear fallout, Dr Bruno Tertrais, a
senior researcher at Fondation pour la Recherche
Strategique in Paris, responded:
Any precise answer to these
questions would be extraordinarily speculative.
A short answer to the first one is "probably
yes", but it depends so much on the type, number
of munitions used and on the aim points that one
can hardly go further. The expression "fallout"
is inappropriate: this would neither be a
nuclear explosion nor a nuclear accident. Note
also the following: Israel deliberately chose to
bomb the Iraqi and Syrian reactors before they
were operational as to minimize the risk of
release of radioactive particles. In any case,
the bombing of the main Iranian nuclear
facilities would not create radioactive
contamination of the atmosphere to a scale that
would be dangerous for the populations of the
country and of the region.
On the
question what he thought about the danger of a
peacetime nuclear accident in Iran - something
that was highlighted in several rare reports in
the Kuwaiti press that addressed the issue of
contamination related to the Iranian nuclear
program - he wrote:
Bushehr is a a mix of [German and
Russian] technologies, and is located on a
seismically active region; the risk is
non-trivial. Note that Iran is the only country
hosting a nuclear power plant that has not
signed the Nuclear Safety
Convention.
A number of other experts
have also criticized the safety at the Bushehr
plant - which by most accounts is not directly a
part of the military nuclear program - and several
incidents occurred there even before it became
fully operational last year.
Mark
Fitzpatrick, who directs the Non-Proliferation and
Disarmament Program at the International Institute
for Strategic Studies in London, elaborated
further on the former questions:
Bombing Natanz or Esfahan would
release fluorine, which is highly corrosive,
nasty stuff. Because Natanz is underground, the
atmospheric dispersal would be minimized. The
release would probably be worse at Esfahan,
which is above ground and has stocks of pure
fluorine as well as uranium hexafluoride. If
dispersed through bombing, the fluorine would be
lethal to workers at the plant. But it is heavy
so it wouldn't spread far.
There do not
appear to be residential areas near the plant
that would be affected.
Bombing Bushehr
would be worse because the irradiated fuel would
release radioactivity into the atmosphere. The
effect would be more akin to a dirty bomb rather
than a radioactive explosion. Bombing Bushehr
would not produce a Chernobyl or Fukushima-like
internal meltdown unless in the unlikely
circumstance that the bombing replicated nature
and knocked out all the redundant cooling power
mechanisms.
In short, the environmental
problems aren't the worst of the bad outcomes of
bombing.
In a subsequent e-mail,
Fitzpatrick clarified that uranium hexafluoride is
also a very heavy gas and would not spread far.
Nevertheless, it is important to note that
the uranium conversion facility at Esfahan is just
a few kilometers from the city, which is home to
over a million and a half Iranians.
Other
experts, moreover, are far less optimistic. Dr
Victor Mizin, a senior Russian analyst who is vice
president of the Center for Strategic Assessments
in Moscow, said in a telephone conversation that
while uranium hexafluoride and fluorine were
indeed heavy gases, it was impossible to ascertain
what other chemicals were stored near the Iranian
nuclear facilities; he voiced a concern that
chemical and biological weapons stockpiles could
also be hit.
He added that he doubted an
attack on the Iranian nuclear facilities would set
the program back significantly - barring the use
of tactical nuclear weapons - but that some of the
strikes, for example those on the yellowcake
production facilities, would "predictably" result
in radioactive contamination.
"I
understand that even the Israelis never speak
about hitting Bushehr," he added. "It would be
crazy ... Nobody is going to do that."
The
uncertainty that comes through in all of these
conversations forces an important point onto the
strategic calculus that has so far been at the
center of media attention.
The broader
debate about war in the Persian Gulf is usually
framed in terms of the strategic calculations of
the main actors. For example, the United States
and Europe worry about the Strait of Hormuz and
the global economy, Israel worries about a nuclear
arms race in the Middle East and cross-border
attacks, while the Gulf countries are concerned
about Iran's ability to project power by
conventional means. The civil war in Iran's
closest Arab ally, Syria, also features
prominently in these calculations.
If we
narrow the debate down to a more limited air
operation against the Iranian nuclear facilities,
two main questions are usually raised: can a
strike set back the Iranian nuclear program
sufficiently, and can the Iranian reaction be
contained? Conventional wisdom has it that Israel
could damage the Iranian nuclear program, while
the US could damage the Iranian nuclear program
more, and even hope to neutralize the powerful
Iranian counter-attack that is expected.
Little is said about contamination and
civilian casualties - though from some media
reports we could infer that such debates are
taking place in policy-making circles, away from
public scrutiny. Oddly enough, if we trust the
well-connected analyst Jeffrey Goldberg, the
Israeli leaders might be particularly scrupulous
about this.
In a column published by
Bloomberg last Monday, Goldberg shares his
impressions from a series of meetings with Israeli
officials:
[Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin]
Netanyahu, I'm told, believes a successful raid
could unclothe the emperor, emboldening Iran's
citizens to overthrow the regime (as they tried
to do, unsuccessfully, in 2009). ...
One
conclusion key officials have reached is that a
strike on six or eight Iranian facilities will
not lead, as is generally assumed, to all-out
war. This argument holds that the Iranians might
choose to cover up an attack, in the manner of
the Syrian government when its nuclear facility
was destroyed by the Israeli air force in 2007.
An Israeli strike wouldn't focus on densely
populated cities, so the Iranian government
might be able to control, to some degree, the
flow of information about it. [1]
Assuming that Goldberg has guessed
the intentions of Netanyahu - admittedly, it is
hardly a certainty - the idea of a limited
strike fits the goal of regime change; large-scale
civilian casualties would most likely have the
effect of rallying popular support behind the
Iranian regime.
If such a scheme succeeds,
regime change would likely halt the nuclear
program, which would accomplish Israel's goals in
a fairly bloodless way. Yet, as Goldberg himself
admits, such a scenario might be overly naive and
optimistic.
Numerous experts have warned
that even a very limited strike could easily
spiral into a full-scale war in the Persian Gulf,
the consequences of which could be disastrous.
An interesting though even more difficult
to verify point was made in another rare article
addressing the issue, published by the Jerusalem
Post on March 23, 2007. Attributing the
information to "foreign sources" - a frequently
used trick by Israeli journalists, usually
intended to bypass the military censor on less
important topics - Amir Mizroch writes:
According to foreign sources,
foreign diplomats believe a possible attack
would take place before the end of 2007. By that
time, Iran might have enough enriched uranium to
cause a humanitarian and environmental
catastrophe from radioactive fallout should its
nuclear facilities be damaged or destroyed in an
attack.[2]
One could speculate
further: for example, by pointing out that
Netanyahu, who assumed office in 2009, got a late
start. This is certainly true with respect to how
the Iranians have dispersed and fortified their
facilities over the past five years; the Israeli
prime minister, who sees the Iranian nuclear
program as an existential threat to his people, is
clearly in a bind, and in a worst-case scenario
might attempt to transfer some of the blame for a
disastrous attack on his predecessors' inaction.
Still, numerous past estimates about the
Iranian nuclear program that appeared in the
Israeli press have proved wrong, and ultimately
our best guesses about the calculations of the
people who might unleash a bloody war in the
Middle East are founded on very little reliable
information. If we pause to think about it, it is
far from a comforting thought.
Notes 1. Israelis
Grow Confident Strike on Iran's Nukes Can
Work, Bloomberg, March 19, 2012. 2.
Embassies in Teheran prepare escape plans. ;
Strike against nuclear facilities would have to
take place this year, before they become 'live':
[Daily Edition], MIZROCH, AMIR. Jerusalem Post
[Jerusalem] 23 Mar 2007.
Victor
Kotsev is a journalist and political
analyst.
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