[CealialactBek]

by F. William Engdahl

In the past weeks media reports have speculated that Washington is ‘thinking the unthinkable,’ namely, an aggressive, pre-emptive nuclear bombardment of Iran, by either the United States or Israel, to destroy or render useless the deep underground Iranian nuclear facilities.

The possibility of war against Iran presents a geo-strategic and geopolitical problem of far more complexity than the bombing and occupation of Iraq. And Iraq has proven complicated enough for the United States. Below we try to identify some of the main motives of the main actors in the new drama and the outlook for possible war.

The dramatis personae include the Bush Administration, most especially the Cheney-led neo-conservative hawks in control now of not only the Pentagon, but also the CIA, the UN Ambassadorship and a growing part of the State Department planning bureaucracy under Condi Rice. It includes Iran, under the new and outspoken President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. It includes Putin’s Russia, a nuclear-armed veto member of the UN Security Council. It includes a nuclear-armed Israel, whose acting Prime Minister, Ehud Olmert, recently declared that Israel could ‘under no circumstances’ allow Iranian development of nuclear weapons ‘that can threaten our existence.’ It includes the EU, especially Security Council Permanent Member, France and the weakening President Chirac. It includes China, whose dependence on Iranian oil and potentially natural gas is large.

Each of these actors has differing agendas and different goals, making the issue of Iran one of the most complex in recent international politics. What’s going on here? Is a nuclear war, with all that implies for the global financial and political stability, imminent? What are the possible and even probable outcomes?

The basic facts

First the basic facts as can be verified. The latest act by Iran’s President, Ahmadinejad, announcing the resumption of suspended work on completing a nuclear fuel enrichment facility along with two other facilities at Natanz, sounded louder alarm bells outside Iran than his inflammatory anti-Israel rhetoric earlier, understandably so. Mohamed El Baradei, Nobel Peace prize winning head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, the UN body, has said he is not sure if that act implies a nuclear weapons program, or whether Iran is merely determined not to be dependent on outside powers for its own civilian nuclear fuel cycle. But, he added, the evidence for it is stronger than that against Saddam Hussein, a rather strong statement by the usually cautious El Baradei.

The result of the resumption of research at Natanz appears to have jelled for the first time, a coalition between USA and the EU, including Germany and France, with China and even Russia, now joining in urging Iran to desist. Last August President George Bush announced, in regard to Iran’s announced plans to resume enrichment regardless of international opinion, that ‘all options are on the table.’ That implied in context a nuclear strike on Iranian nuclear sites. That statement led to a sharp acceleration of EU diplomatic efforts, led by Britain, Germany and France, the so-called EU-3, to avoid a war. The three told Washington they were opposed to a military solution. Since then we are told by Der Spiegel and others the EU view has changed to appear to come closer to the position of the Bush Administration.

It’s useful briefly to review the technology of nuclear fuel enrichment. To prepare uranium for use in a nuclear reactor, it undergoes the steps of mining and milling, conversion, enrichment and fuel fabrication. These four steps make up the 'front end' of the nuclear fuel cycle.

After uranium has been used in a reactor to produce electricity it is known as 'spent fuel,' and may undergo further steps including temporary storage, reprocessing, and recycling before eventual disposal as waste. Collectively these steps are known as the 'back end' of the fuel cycle.

The Natanz facility is part of the ‘front end’ or fuel preparation cycle. Ore is first milled into Uranium Oxide (U³O8), or ‘yellowcake,’ then converted into Uranium Hexaflouride (UF6) gas. The Uranium Hexaflouride then is sent to an enrichment facility, in this case Natanz, to produce a mix containing 3-4% of fissile U235, a non-weapons-grade nuclear fuel. So far, so good more or less in terms of weapons danger.

Iran is especially positioned through geological fortune to possess large quantities of uranium from mines in Yazd Province, permitting Iran to be self-sufficient in fuel and not having to rely on Russian fuel or any other foreign imports for that matter. It also has a facility at Arak which produces heavy water, which is used to moderate a research reactor whose construction began in 2004. That reactor will use uranium dioxide and could enable Iran to produce weapons grade plutonium which some nuclear scientists estimate could produce an amount to build one to two nuclear devices per year. Iran officially claims the plant is for peaceful medical research. The peaceful argument here begins to look thinner.

Nuclear enrichment is no small item. You don’t build such a facility in the backyard or the garage. France’s large Tricastin enrichment facility provides fuel for the nuclear electricity grid of EdF, as well as for the French nuclear weapons program. It needs four large nuclear reactors, just to provide over 3000 MWe power for it. Early US enrichment plants used gaseous diffusion. Enrichment plants in EU and Russia use a more modern centrifuge process that uses far less energy per unit of enrichment. The latter or centrifuge process is also the Iranian type.

To make weapons grade Uranium requires more than conventional civilian electric power grade uranium fuel.

‘Unmaking’ weapons grade uranium today is also a geopolitically interesting process, not irrelevant to the current dispute over Iran. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, under agreements designed to insure that the Soviet nuclear arsenal would be converted to peaceful uses, military weapons uranium came on to the civilian market under a US-Russian agreement.

Today more than half of all the uranium used for electricity in the USA nuclear power plants comes from Russian military stockpiles. Currently 20% of all electricity produced in the US is nuclear generated meaning that Russian uranium fuels some 10% of all US electricity.

In 1994 a $12 billion contract was signed between the US Enrichment Corporation (now USEC Inc) and Russia's Techsnabexport (Tenex) as agents for the US and Russian governments. USEC agreed to buy a minimum of 500 tonnes of weapons-grade uranium over 20 years, at a rate of up to 30 tonnes/year beginning 1999. The uranium is blended down to 4.4% U-235 in Russia. The USEC then sells it to its US power utility customers as fuel. In September 2005 this program reached its halfway point of 250 tonnes or elimination of 10,000 nuclear warheads.

Worldwide, one sixth of the global market of commercial enriched uranium is supplied by Russia from Russian and other weapons-grade uranium stocks. Putin has many cards to play in the showdown over Iran’s nuclear program.

The issue of whether Iran was secretly building a nuclear weapon capability first surfaced from allegations by an Iranian exile opposition group in 2002.

Natanz has been under IAEA agency purview since suspicions about Iran’s activities surfaced. It was prompted by reports from an Iranian opposition organization, National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI), and led IAEA head Mohamed El Baradei to tour Iran’s nuclear facilities in February 2002, including the incomplete plant in that city of Natanz about 300 miles south of Tehran. The NCRI is the political arm of the controversial People's Mujahedeen of Iran, which both EU and US governments officially brand terrorist but unofficially work with increasingly against the Teheran theocracy.

Possible Iranian strategy

It’s undeniably clear that Iran’s newly-elected President Ahmadinejad has a more confrontational policy than his predecessor. The Iranian Ambassador to Vienna, speaking at a conference in Austria where this author was present in September 2005, shocked his audience by stating essentially the same line of confrontational rhetoric: ‘If it comes to war, Iran is ready…’.

Let’s assume that the Western media is correctly reporting the strident militant speeches of the President. We must also assume that in that theocratic state, the ruling mullahs, as the most powerful political institution in Iran, are behind the election of the more fundamentalist Ahmadinejad. It has been speculated that the aim of the militancy and defiance of the US and Israel is to revitalize the role of Iran as the ‘vanguard’ of an anti-Western theocratic Shi’ite revolution at a time when the mullahs’ support internally, and in the Islamic world, is fading.

Let’s also assume Ahmadinejad’s actions are quite premeditated, with the intent to needle and provoke the west for some reason. If pushed against the wall by growing western pressures, Ahmadinejad’s regime has apparently calculated that Iran has little to lose if it hit back.



Continued...

source Iran presents a vexing challenge for America and the world: the prospect of a nuclear-armed Iran is disturbing, yet there is no simple way to prevent Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon. What then are we to do?

[Sironimoll]

This thread is redundant. There are plenty of these in the war and peace section.