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From TIME magazine:
Iran's Nuclear Threat
In
another worrying development for the Bush administration, Iran moves closer to
operation of a facility to enrich uranium
Saturday, Mar. 08, 2003
With war in Iraq looming
and North Korea defiantly pursuing its own nuclear program, the last thing
President Bush needs is another nuclear crisis. But that is what he may soon
face in Iran. On a visit last month to Tehran, International Atomic Energy
Agency director Mohamed ElBaradei announced he had discovered that Iran was
constructing a facility to enrich uranium — a key component of advanced nuclear
weapons — near Natanz. But diplomatic sources tell TIME the plant is much
further along than previously revealed. The sources say work on the plant is
"extremely advanced" and involves "hundreds" of gas centrifuges ready to produce
enriched uranium and "the parts for a thousand others ready to be assembled."
Iran announced last week that it intends to activate a uranium conversion
facility near Isfahan (under IAEA safeguards), a step that produces the uranium
hexafluoride gas used in the enrichment process. Sources tell Time the IAEA has
concluded that Iran actually introduced uranium hexafluoride gas into some
centrifuges at an undisclosed location to test their ability to work. That would
be a blatant violation of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, to which Iran is
a signatory.
The IAEA declined to comment. A senior State department official said he
believed El Baradei was trying to resolve the issue behind the scenes before
going public. But experts say the new discoveries are very serious and should be
handled in public. "If Iran were found to have an operating centrifuge, it would
be a direct violation [of the non-proliferation treaty] and is something that
would need immediately to be referred to the United Nations Security Council for
action," says Jon Wolfstahl of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
Iran insists that its nuclear program is for peaceful purposes and told
elBaradei that Tehran intends to bring all of its programs under IAEA
safeguards. U.S. officials have said repeatedly they believe Iran is pursuing
nuclear weapons.
The new discoveries could destabilize a region already dangerously on edge in
anticipation of war in Iraq. Israel — which destroyed an Iraqi nuclear plant in
Osirak in a 1981 raid — is deeply alarmed by the developments. "It's a huge
concern," says one Israeli official. "Iran is a regime that denies Israel's
right to exist in any borders and is a principal sponsor of Hezbollah. If that
regime were able to achieve a nuclear potential it would be extremely
dangerous." Israel will not take the "Osirak option" off the table, the official
says, but "would prefer that this issue be solved in other ways."
The revelations come at a particularly bad time for Washington, which is
locked in a battle to gain U.N. approval for an attack on Iraq and to build
consensus among its allies for a multilateral approach to the crisis in North
Korea. Critics of the Administration say Bush's hard public line against the
so-called "Axis of Evil," combined with the threatened war with Iraq, have acted
as a spur to both Iran and North Korea to accelerate their nuclear programs. "If
those countries didn't have much incentive or motivation before, they certainly
did after the Axis of Evil statement," says one western diplomat familiar with
the Iranian and North Korean programs. The Administration counters that both
programs have been underway for many years.
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