Category Archives: nuclear issues

The truth that the CIA is desperate to conceal

The New York Times reports:

A seven-year effort by the Central Intelligence Agency to hide its relationship with a Swiss family who once acted as moles inside the world’s most successful atomic black market hit a turning point on Thursday when a Swiss magistrate recommended charging the men with trafficking in technology and information for making nuclear arms.

The prospect of a prosecution, and a public trial, threatens to expose some of the C.I.A.’s deepest secrets if defense lawyers try to protect their clients by revealing how they operated on the agency’s behalf. It could also tarnish what the Bush administration once hailed as a resounding victory in breaking up the nuclear arms network by laying bare how much of it remained intact.

“It’s like a puzzle,” Andreas Müller, the Swiss magistrate, said at a news conference in Bern on Thursday. “If you put the puzzle together you get the whole picture.”

The three men — Friedrich Tinner and his two sons, Urs and Marco — helped run the atomic smuggling ring of A. Q. Khan, an architect of Pakistan’s nuclear bomb program, officials in several countries have said. In return for millions of dollars, according to former Bush administration officials, the Tinners secretly worked for the C.I.A. as well, not only providing information about the Khan network’s manufacturing and sales efforts, which stretched from Iran to Libya to North Korea, but also helping the agency introduce flaws into the equipment sent to some of those countries.

The Bush administration went to extraordinary lengths to protect the men from prosecution, even persuading Swiss authorities to destroy equipment and information found on their computers and in their homes and businesses — actions that may now imperil efforts to prosecute them.

While it has been clear since 2008 that the Tinners acted as American spies, the announcement by the Swiss magistrate on Thursday, recommending their prosecution for nuclear smuggling, is a turning point in the investigation. A trial would bring to the fore a case that Pakistan has insisted is closed. Prosecuting the case could also expose in court a tale of C.I.A. break-ins in Switzerland, and of a still unexplained decision by the agency not to seize electronic copies of a number of nuclear bomb designs found on the computers of the Tinner family.

The fact that the CIA and the US government have gone to such lengths to try and prevent the details about the CIA’s involvement in global nuclear proliferation being exposed, means that we can only speculate about what kind of damning information remains hidden.

Several scenarios seem possible:

  • that the CIA’s efforts to track the AQ Khan network reached a point where it might have appeared that it was aiding and abetting the network’s operation;
  • that bungled CIA efforts to sabotage the Iranian nuclear program resulted in Iran acquiring know-how or technology that it might not have otherwise been able to obtain;
  • and conceivably, that the CIA’s involvement in Iran’s nuclear program was so deep that it was exerting an influence over the strategic direction of the program.
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Why a nuclear Iran could be good for the US

Chan Akya presents an interesting argument — even if no one in Washington would be so bold as to articulate such thoughts.

Most of the hijackers on September 11, 2001, were of Saudi origin and despite nominally falling under the leadership of Osama bin Laden it stands to reason that they were mainly disenchanted due to the stifling anti-democracy of Saudi Arabia and the inherent hypocrisy of Wahhabism in a country that spent most of its time kowtowing to the Americans.

Fearing the tactical nightmare of dealing with hundreds if not thousands of these disaffected youth, America and Europe chose to make the strategic blunder of supporting the crumbling monarchies as long as they attacked their own youth. This was a stupid bargain, to put it mildly.

A sustainable situation would be to engender wider regime change in the Middle East by booting out the creaking and corrupt monarchies, to be replaced progressively with Islamic leaders capable of taking a development-oriented approach to their countries. To ensure this new generation of Middle East leaders do not get overly tempted by the possibilities of attacking America or Israel, it would be necessary to have a “natural” check in the region – namely Iran.

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Why Ahmadinejad fired FM Mottaki

insideIRAN.org reports on the sudden removal of Iran’s foreign minister on Monday.

Mohammad Reza Heidari, a former high-ranking Iranian diplomat in Norway, announced in December 2009 that he was quitting the foreign ministry and not returning to Tehran. He now lives in Oslo, where he spoke with Arash Aramesh of insideIRAN.org about Mottaki’s firing.

Q: Iran’s Minister of Foreign Affairs Manouchehr Mottaki was suddenly removed today. Did this surprise you and your friends in Iran’s diplomatic community?

A: In recent months, a number of events took place, which were interpreted by President Ahmadinejad as defeats for Mottaki. Mottaki was blamed for failing to prevent the passage of the UN resolution condemning Iran’s violation of human rights. He was blamed for failing to lead Iran to obtaining a seat in the UN Women’s Rights Panel. Then came the embarrassing story of sending illegal weapons to Nigeria. Mottaki traveled to Nigeria to minimize the damage but he failed there too. And the final blow came when UNESCO did not see Iran fit for holding a conference on philosophy. This was embarrassing to the Islamic Republic. The president tied these so-called defeats together so, if necessary, he would be able to convince the Supreme Leader that Mottaki had to go. Some of my friends and former colleagues in Tehran have told me that the Supreme Leader was not really involved in this and Ahmadinejad made this decision on his own.

He was suddenly removed. This is against diplomatic norms. It is very odd for the country’s top diplomat to be fired like this when the Foreign Minister is on an official visit delivering President Ahmadinejad’s message to the Senegalese government. This is very surprising.

Q: The Minister of Foreign Affairs has always been handpicked by the Supreme Leader. How could the president remove the Minister of Foreign Affairs without Ayatollah Khamenei’s knowledge or consent? Is this a show of power by President Ahmadinejad and sign that the Leader’s position has weakened?

A: There are rumors that Mr. Khamenei is very ill and some decision makers on the top have begun to exclude him from the decision-making process on some issues. It seems that Ahmadinejad’s supporters are stronger now. Mr. Mottaki had the backing of the Leader. Just months ago, the Leader wrote a letter asking Iranian officials to put aside their differences. The Leader specified that the country’s diplomatic affairs must be handled by the foreign minister.

Q: What is the main reason behind Mottaki’s removal?

A: Ahmadinejad wants to homogenize the government and make the nuclear issue the main pillar of his government. I have heard from my friends in the Ministry that Ahmadinejad has expressed his dissatisfaction with Mottaki. Ahmadinejad appointed Ali-Akbar Salehi, the current director of Iran’s Atomic Energy Agency, as acting minister. Salehi is trusted by the Leader as well.

This is also a signal to the world: the person in charge of Iranian diplomacy is the head of Iran’s nuclear program. This implies that the Iranian foreign policy is nothing but the nuclear issue; they are the same thing. The president wants to silence dissenting voices in the ministry. He wants to silence dissent in the Supreme National Security Council, headed by Saeed Jalili, Iran’s chief nuclear negotiator. Ahmadinejad wants a confrontational policy and does not like what moderates like Jalili and Mottaki have to say.

Supporters of Ahmadinejad do not want to talk about stopping enrichment. They want to be recognized as a nuclear power to satisfy their fantasy of being a power. Moderate conservatives are cautious and do not like this. The president has been constantly fighting with the parliament. He has had issues with his own conservative camp.

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Australia does not see Iran as “rogue state”; fears Israel could trigger nuclear war

Australia’s The Age, reports

Australia’s intelligence agencies fear that Israel may launch military strikes against Iran and Tehran’s pursuit of nuclear capabilities could draw the US and Australia into a potential nuclear war in the Middle East.

Australia’s peak intelligence agency has also privately undercut the hardline stance towards Tehran of the US, Israeli and Australian governments, saying its nuclear program is intended to deter attack and it is a mistake to regard Iran as a rogue state.

The warnings about the dangers of nuclear conflict in the Middle East are given in a secret US embassy cable obtained by WikiLeaks and provided exclusively to The Age. They reflect views obtained by US intelligence liaison officers in Canberra from Australian intelligence agencies.

”The AIC’s [Australian intelligence community’s] leading concerns with respect to Iran’s nuclear ambitions centre on understanding the time frame of a possible weapons capability, and working with the United States to prevent Israel from independently launching unco-ordinated military strikes against Iran,” the US embassy in Canberra reported to Washington in March last year.

”They are immediately concerned that Iran’s pursuit of nuclear capabilities would lead to a conventional war – or even nuclear exchange – in the Middle East involving the United States that would draw Australia into a conflict.”

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Iranians want nuclear arms, US survey finds

Agence France Presse reports:

Many Iranians are worried about international nuclear sanctions but also want the country to have atomic weapons, according to a survey by a US institute revealed Wednesday.

The poll, carried out by Charney Research for the International Peace Institute, a New York-based think tank, also indicated that most Iranians voted for President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in a controversial June 2009 election that many countries said was fixed.

Forty-seven percent of Iranians said sanctions ordered by the United Nations, and by individual countries, were having a big impact, said the poll of 700 people carried out in early September. Fifty three percent believed it is Iran’s major foreign policy problem.

But 71 percent of Iranians want the country to have nuclear weapons and only 21 percent opposed such a move. Lead researcher Craig Charney said this compared to 52 percent support for nuclear weapons and 42 percent opposition in a similar poll in 2007.

The fourth round of sanctions was passed by the UN Security Council in June this year. Iran refuses to halt uranium enrichment but has denied the West’s accusations that it is seeking a nuclear bomb.

Charney said the study shows “you can’t just propose the grand bargain and expect Iranians to accept it straight away.”

With international tensions rising, the poll indicated that the number of people who were pro-United States had fallen from 34 percent in 2008 to eight percent now. Sixty-eight percent believed that if there was an attack on Iran, it would come from the United States.

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Israel on Iran: So wrong for so long

Justin Elliot looks back at Israel’s repeated predictions that Iran would soon acquire nuclear weapons.

Officials at the U.S. Department of State, we learned from the secret cables released by WikiLeaks last week, have serious questions about the accuracy — and sincerity — of Israeli predictions about when Iran will obtain a nuclear weapon. As one State official wrote in response to an Israeli general’s November 2009 claim that Iran would have a bomb in one year: “It is unclear if the Israelis firmly believe this or are using worst-case estimates to raise greater urgency from the United States.”

So we thought this was as good a time as any to look at the remarkable history of incorrect Israeli predictions about Iran — especially given that the WikiLeaks trove is being used to argue that an attack on Iran is becoming more likely.

According to various Israeli government predictions over the years, Iran was going to have a bomb by the mid-90s — or 1998, 1999, 2000, 2004, 2005, and finally 2010. More recent Israeli predictions have put that date at 2011 or 2014.

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Why should Iran trust President Obama?

Flynt Leverett and Hillary Mann Leverett write:

In the run-up to a new round of nuclear talks between the P5+1 and Iran on Monday, Western commentators are re-hashing old arguments that the Islamic Republic is either too politically divided or too dependent on hostility toward the United States for its legitimacy to be seriously interested in a nuclear deal. From this perspective, the Obama administration has been more than forthcoming in its efforts to “engage” Tehran; the obstacles to diplomatic progress are all on the Iranian side.

But a sober examination of the Obama administration’s interactions with Iran since President Obama took office in 2009 reveals a dismaying mix of incompetence and outright duplicity that has done profound damage to American interests and credibility. In light of this record, the question is not whether the United States should have any confidence it can productively engage the Islamic Republic. The real question is: why should Iranian officials believe they can trust President Obama and his administration to deal with them straightforwardly and with a genuine interest in finding a diplomatic solution to the nuclear standoff?

The recent release of the Wikileaks cables confirms the assessment we have been offering since May 2009: The Obama administration has failed to follow up on President Obama’s early rhetorical overtures to Tehran with bold steps and substantive proposals to demonstrate its seriousness about rapprochement. Strategic engagement — think Nixon and China — is not the same as “carrots and sticks”. In fact, strategic engagement requires a self-conscious effort by the United States to put “sticks” aside in order assure Iran that it is serious about realigning relations. And that is something the Obama administration has never been willing to do. (Obama’s vague letters to Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei — dispatched as Obama ignored two letters sent by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad — were seen in Tehran as just the latest U.S. attempt to “game” Iran’s political system rather than to come to terms with it.)

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When lives are at stake and governments choose to guard our ignorance

Gary Anderson, a retired US Marine colonel, says that Julian Assange is an enemy combatant and is “as much an enemy to the United States as any Al Qaeda operative.”

Not long ago an Esquire headline writer posed the question: “Should we execute Julian Assange?” “We” being the national American vigilante?

“Lives are at risk” is one of those fire-alarm imperatives that drains blood from the brain. It sets arms and legs and vocal chords in motion, fixes the mind on red-light conclusions and turns quiet deliberation into an unaffordable luxury.

A few years ago in Reader’s Digest, Michael Crowley rang the same alarm bell when he demanded that life-threatening websites like Cryptome (a sibbling of WikiLeaks) be shutdown.

To understand what nuts and zealots can do with this sort of information [available through sites like Cryptome], recall what happened in the early 1990s when three abortion doctors were killed after pro-life extremists created “wanted” posters displaying the physicians’ names and photographs. A few years later, a website showed pictures of other abortion doctors, and listed the murdered ones with their names crossed out. Eventually the site’s Web server shut it down.

Having been an outlet for State Department and CIA propaganda in the 1940s and 50s, Reader’s Digest was already on shaky ground positioning itself as a champion of public interest, but it was the Department of Justice which revealed that on occasions Reader’s Digest itself had been a source of dangerous information.

A 1997 DoJ report on the availability of bombmaking information made it evident that the necessary know-how was not hard to come by.

Stories of crimes contained in popular literature and magazines also constitute a rich source of bombmaking information. For example, the August 1993 edition of Reader’s Digest contains an account of efforts by law enforcement officers to track down the killer of United States Court of Appeals Judge Robert S. Vance and attorney Robert Robinson. That article contained a detailed description of the explosive devices used by the bomber in committing the murders, including such information as the size of the pipe bombs, how the bombs were constructed, and what type of smokeless powder was used in their construction. According to the Arson and Explosives Division of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, in a bombing case originating in Topeka, Kansas, the devices were patterned after the bomb used to kill Judge Vance. Upon questioning, the suspect admitted to investigators that he constructed the bomb based on information contained in the Reader’s Digest article.

As Daniel Ellsberg notes, in its efforts to clamp down on embarrassing leaks, the government’s first recourse is invariably to declare that “lives are at stake”

That’s a script that they roll out — every administration rolls out — every time there’s a leak of any sort. The best justification they can find for secrecy is that lives are at stake. Actually lives are at stake as a result of silence and lies which a lot of these leaks reveal.

In the latest revelations from WikiLeaks, the dangers of secrecy are no more clearly evident than in what we now learn about the vulnerability of Pakistan’s nuclear stockpiles — an issue we have previously been repeatedly assured poses no immediate risk. Secretly, we now learn, America’s leading diplomats in Pakistan did not share the confidence that the administration wanted to instill among Americans whose ignorance it preferred to guard.

Less than a month after President Obama testily assured reporters in 2009 that Pakistan’s nuclear materials “will remain out of militant hands,” his ambassador here sent a secret message to Washington suggesting that she remained deeply worried.

The ambassador’s concern was a stockpile of highly enriched uranium, sitting for years near an aging research nuclear reactor in Pakistan. There was enough to build several “dirty bombs” or, in skilled hands, possibly enough for an actual nuclear bomb.

In the cable, dated May 27, 2009, the ambassador, Anne W. Patterson, reported that the Pakistani government was yet again dragging its feet on an agreement reached two years earlier to have the United States remove the material.

She wrote to senior American officials that the Pakistani government had concluded that “the ‘sensational’ international and local media coverage of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons made it impossible to proceed at this time.” A senior Pakistani official, she said, warned that if word leaked out that Americans were helping remove the fuel, the local press would certainly “portray it as the United States taking Pakistan’s nuclear weapons.”

The fuel is still there.

It may be the most unnerving evidence of the complex relationship — sometimes cooperative, often confrontational, always wary — between America and Pakistan nearly 10 years into the American-led war in Afghanistan. The cables, obtained by WikiLeaks and made available to a number of news organizations, make it clear that underneath public reassurances lie deep clashes over strategic goals on issues like Pakistan’s support for the Afghan Taliban and tolerance of Al Qaeda, and Washington’s warmer relations with India, Pakistan’s archenemy.

The issue here, however, is more complex than transparency vs secrecy. While the dangers posed by nuclear stockpiles in Pakistan — and for that matter anywhere else — should concern everyone, the overbearing relationship between the US and a client state which it has turned into a theater for remote war, has fed popular and well-founded suspicion about the intentions of the US government. Pakistanis widely believe that the United States is intent on stealing the Islamic republic’s nuclear crown jewels. Those suspicions will now be further compounded as Pakistan’s government struggles to placate competing international and domestic fears.

If transparency is the buzzword of this political moment, maybe it should be seen as a signal that a larger issue is in desperate need of remedying — an issue that WikiLeaks cannot address: that the need for transparency is symptomatic of a global deficit in trust.

We have repeatedly been given reason to expect that government leaders, corporations and other powerful institutions cannot be trusted. WikiLeaks now fuels that mistrust and those who feel threatened can either shrink behind the barricades of secrecy or acknowledge that they must address the monumental task of building confidence in the fragile idea of public service.

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WikiLeaks exposes Obama’s willingness to engage Iran as disingenuous

Christian Science Monitor reports:

WikiLeaks revelations that American officials were planning to raise pressure on Iran with more sanctions and a missile defense shield – even while President Obama was making high-profile public overtures to Iran – are being seen in Tehran as validation of deep skepticism from the start about Obama’s effort.

Iranians and analysts alike say the leaked diplomatic cables show a half-hearted attempt at engagement in which the US administration’s “dual track” policy of simultaneously applying pressure and negotiating was undermined by a singular focus on the pressure track and a growing assumption that engaging Iran was pointless.

“Although the [American] gestures sounded sincere and honest, according to these documents there was at least a parallel approach to keeping both options open, though they were 180 degrees apart,” says a veteran observer in Tehran who could not be named for security reasons. “WikiLeaks indicates that from the beginning [Obama] was very sharp on this issue, and some Iranian officials … were right [in their skepticism].”

Gary Sick adds:

The US undertook its engagement strategy with Iran with the clear conviction that it would fail. At the same time, it was preparing (and disseminating in private) an alternative pressure strategy. This is the most serious indictment of all.

According to the record, the Obama administration was briefing allies almost from the start — and before Iran had even had a chance to respond to offers of engagement — that we expected this initiative to fail and that we were actively preparing the pressure track that would immediately follow.

Iran could hardly have been unaware of all this, so the chance that they would respond favorably — even before the contested election in June 2009 and the brutal crackdown that followed — was essentially zero. The only conclusion I can draw from this is that Obama was never sincere about his engagement strategy. It has yet to be tried.

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US anticipates imminent nuclear test by North Korea

The Chosunilbo reports:

The U.S. Air Force moved a WC-135 Constant Phoenix reconnaissance jet from the U.S. mainland to the Kadena Air Base in Okinawa, in September in preparation for another nuclear test by North Korea, the Sankei Shimbun reported Tuesday.

The WC-135, a modified aircraft, is able to detect nuclear explosions from the air by collecting samples from the atmosphere. It was stationed in Okinawa about a month before North Korea carried out its second nuclear test in May 2009. Apparently the U.S. believes that another nuclear test is imminent after unusual movements were detected at the North’s test site.

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Stuxnet could cause Bushehr meltdown

On the eve of the release of a new IAEA report on Iran, officials linked to the UN nuclear oversight agency have added to speculation on the possible impact that the Stuxnet malware may have had on Iran’s nuclear program — including the possibility that it could lead to the meltdown of the reactor in the Bushehr nuclear power plant.

The Associated Press reports:

Iran’s nuclear program has suffered a recent setback, with major technical problems forcing the temporary shutdown of thousands of centrifuges enriching uranium, diplomats told The Associated Press on Monday.

The diplomats said they had no specifics on the nature of the problem that in recent months led Iranian experts to briefly power down the machines they use for enrichment — a nuclear technology that has both civilian and military uses.

But suspicions focused on the Stuxnet worm, the computer virus thought to be aimed at Iran’s nuclear program, which experts last week identified as being calibrated to destroy centrifuges by sending them spinning out of control.
[…]
Tehran has taken hundreds of centrifuges off line over the past 18 months, prompting speculation of technical problems.

A U.N official close to the IAEA said a complete stop in Iran’s centrifuge operation would be unprecedented to his knowledge but declined to discuss specifics.
[…]
Separately, another official from an IAEA member country suggested the worm could cause further damage to Iran’s nuclear program.

The official also asked for anonymity because his information was privileged. He cited a Western intelligence report suggesting that Stuxnet had infected the control system of Iran’s Bushehr reactor and would be activated once the Russian-built reactor goes on line in a few months.

Stuxnet would interfere with control of “basic parameters” such as temperature and pressure control and neutron flow, that could result in the meltdown of the reactor, raising the specter of a possible explosion, he said.

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Evolving understanding of Stuxnet

Reporting on the latest findings on the design of the Stuxnet malware which targeted Iran’s nuclear program, the New York Times says that Ralph Langner — a German software engineer who has been one of the leading investigators — has identified two forms of attack directed at different targets.

In a statement Friday on his Web site, he described two different attack modules that are designed to run on different industrial controllers made by Siemens, the German industrial equipment maker. “It appears that warhead one and warhead two were deployed in combination as an all-out cyberstrike against the Iranian nuclear program,” he wrote.

In testimony before the Senate on Wednesday, federal and private industry officials said that the Iranian nuclear program was a probable target, but they stopped short of saying they had confirming evidence. Mr. Langner said, however, that he had found enough evidence within the programs to pinpoint the intended targets. He described his research process as being akin to being at a crime scene and examining a weapon but lacking a body.

The second code module — aimed at the [Bushehr] nuclear power plant — was written with remarkable sophistication, he said. The worm moves from personal computers to Siemens computers that control industrial processes. It then inserts fake data, fooling the computers into thinking that the system is running normally while the sabotage of the frequency converters is taking place. “It is obvious that several years of preparation went into the design of this attack,” he wrote.

In a separate report, the New York Times said:

The paternity of the worm is still in dispute, but in recent weeks officials from Israel have broken into wide smiles when asked whether Israel was behind the attack, or knew who was.

Langner says: “Stuxnet is like the arrival of an F-35 fighter jet on a World War I battlefield.”

Why would Israel target a civilian nuclear facility that is generally understood to pose no proliferation threat?

In line with its practice of paying selective attention to international opinion, Israel’s public position has been that Iran should not be “rewarded” for its defiance of the international community by being allowed to operate Bushehr. Moreover, there could also be a political motive for trying to prevent Bushehr from operating successfully, that being, to undermine the credibility of the nuclear program in the eyes of the otherwise widely supportive Iranian public.

Langner says that a cyber attack targeting a nuclear reactor is virtually impossible but that Bushehr’s steam turbine (located outside the containment facility) could be hit and that “Stuxnet can destroy the turbine as effectively as an air strike.”

Like everyone else, the Israelis understand that the most critical part of the infrastructure in Iran’s nuclear program is not made of steel or concrete — it is the expertise of Iran’s nuclear scientists and engineers. (For that reason, Israel’s covert war against Iran apparently includes a “decapitation” program aimed at eliminating the top figures in Iran’s nuclear operations.)

Since many of the skills required to run a civilian nuclear power program are presumably transferable to a military program, sabotage on any of Iran’s nuclear facilities will have the net effect of becoming a drain on the human resources available to advance the program as a whole.

The fact is, after decades of nuclear development, Iran still has precious little to show for its efforts. Keep in mind, the construction of Bushehr began 35 years ago and Iran’s nuclear program was launched in the 1950s!

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U.S. and Israel: still no consensus on pressuring Iran

Tony Karon writes:

An open disagreement between Israel and the Pentagon in recent weeks has highlighted the dilemma President Barack Obama faces in making progress on Iran. Defense Secretary Robert Gates on Tuesday poured cold water on last week’s suggestion by Israeli Prime Minister that the only way Iran can be stopped from acquiring nuclear weapons is for the U.S. to threaten military action. Military action, Gates warned, would solve nothing; in fact it would be more likely to drive Iran to acquire nuclear weapons.

Netanyahu had warned, during a visit to the U.S., that “economic sanctions are making it difficult for Iran, but there is no sign that the Ayatullah regime plans to stop its nuclear program because of them.” The Israeli media reported that Netanyahu had told Vice-President Joe Biden, “The only way to ensure that Iran will not go nuclear is to create a credible threat of military action against it if it doesn’t cease its race for a nuclear weapon.”

Gates, however, turned Netanyahu’s argument on its head, warning that bombing Iran’s nuclear facilities would provide only a “short term solution,” setting the Iranians back two or three years. But any military strike would “bring together a divided nation [and] make them absolutely committed to obtaining nuclear weapons” via programs that would simply “go deeper and more covert.” Instead, Gates argued, “The only long-term solution to avoiding an Iranian nuclear weapons capability is for the Iranians to decide it’s not in their interest.”

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The fog of containment

Flynt Leverett and Hillary Mann Leverett write:

In the coming weeks, the United States may well be joining a new round of nuclear negotiations with Iran. But, rather than working to promote their success, most commentators seem to be consumed with explaining their anticipated failure. And their follow-up policy prescriptions seem designed to do more harm than good. Take Karim Sadjadpour’s article, “The Sources of Soviet Iranian Conduct,” in the November issue of Foreign Policy. Sadjadpour seeks to adapt George Kennan’s famous 1947 “Mr. X” article — which proposed the outlines of the Cold War “containment” strategy used against the Soviet Union — for America’s current Iran debate.

“Like the Soviet Union, the Islamic Republic is a corrupt, inefficient, authoritarian regime whose bankrupt ideology resonates far more abroad than it does at home,” Sadjadpour writes. “Also like the men who once ruled Moscow, Iran’s current leaders have a victimization complex and, as they themselves admit, derive their internal legitimacy from thumbing their noses at Uncle Sam.” It’s a clever conceit, but it would be a disaster for U.S. interests if Sadjadpour’s piece attains anything close to the level of influence achieved by Kennan’s.

That’s so for three main reasons. First, Sadjadpour’s reading of the drivers of Iranian foreign policy is profoundly at odds with the historical record of the Islamic Republic’s actual conduct. Second, his policy prescriptions would keep the United States from acting in its own best interests to pursue a comprehensive realignment of U.S.-Iranian relations. Third, his policy prescriptions would lead ultimately to a U.S.-initiated military confrontation with Iran.

Sadjadpour uses a highly selective exegesis of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s rhetoric about the United States as a basis for arguing that the Islamic Republic’s very survival requires antagonism with America. This is a politically convenient argument, absolving Washington of any responsibility to engage seriously with Tehran, until the deus ex machina of “regime change” solves the Iran problem.

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India’s sound advice on Iran

Stephen Kinzer writes:

This week in New Delhi, President Obama went further than any of his predecessors toward embracing India as an ally, and most Indians are thrilled by this warm treatment. This does not mean, however, that the two countries will align all of their foreign policies. In some areas, India would like the United States to change its approach.

One key difference is over Iran. India has the wiser policy, and Obama should consider emulating it.

Despite some changes in atmospherics, Obama’s approach to Iran has been remarkably similar to the one President George W. Bush took in his second term: don’t bomb Iran, but continue to threaten that “all options are on the table’’; steadily intensify economic sanctions, despite ample evidence that they weaken civil society and lavishly enrich the repressive Revolutionary Guard; insist on negotiations on the nuclear issue, but refuse to broaden the agenda to include issues that concern Iran.

India, like many other regional powers, takes the Iranian threat far less seriously than the United States does. It does not see Iran as an existential threat to anyone, but rather as just another thuggish country with resources, and wants to see it enticed back into the world’s mainstream. India would like the United States to adopt a more accommodating policy toward Iran — and could even serve as the bridge that makes it possible.

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The worst-kept secret: Israel’s bargain with the bomb

Noam Sheizaf writes:

“Ambiguity,” the key word used in describing Israel’s relationship vis-a-vis nuclear weapons, existed from the start. “There was a secret even before there was anything to hide,” states Avner Cohen, an Israeli-born philosopher and historical researcher who is an expert in Israel’s nuclear policy, in his new book.

“During the early 1950s, and even before then, there were those in Israel who dreamed about a nuclear project, but in reality there was almost nothing,” explains Dr. Cohen in an interview with Haaretz, from his Washington, D.C. home. “Some students were sent overseas to study nuclear physics, and a group started to look for uranium in the Negev. There was none. Nonetheless, this small group, which merely had a vision, already maintained a cult of secrecy.

“In those years, there was not yet an international regime against nuclear proliferation – this was a decade before the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. But even then, when theoretically anything was allowed, there was a sense of taboo. That the subject could not be discussed. [David] Ben-Gurion and [Shimon] Peres understood that in this sphere you don’t really want to state your objectives precisely. The sense was that designating goals would, in itself, stir an argument, and that it was better to avoid such debates, both internal and external. The idea was that it was crucial not to raise these questions.”

For Cohen, ambiguity in this realm is not merely a theoretical subject, it is the central issue which has fashioned his life. After an academic article he authored was disqualified by military censors in the 1990s, he left Israel. After publishing a book called “Israel and the Bomb” (Columbia University Press, 1999 ), an investigation was launched against him and he was barred from returning to Israel for several years. Cohen even played a certain role in the Yitzhak Yaakov affair – the case in which Yaakov, a retired IDF brigadier general, was indicted and detained for more than a year for harming national security by writing two books on Israel’s weapons development program.

Cohen’s newest work, “The Worst-Kept Secret: Israel’s Bargain with the Bomb” (Columbia University Press, 2010 ), is dedicated to two figures who represent two different poles in Israel’s culture of nuclear secrecy: Yaakov, who tried to share “prohibited” memories with the world and paid for it with a long detention, and Shalheveth Freier, a top official in the Israel Atomic Energy Commission (IAEC ), and one of the people who created the secret with their own hands.

In his new book, Cohen calls on Israel and Israelis to discuss anew the policy of ambiguity and its implications. In his view, for the past several years, the costs of such a policy have outweighed its utility. He does not believe that Israel should disarm, but rather that it should, in clear, simple terms, acknowledge these weapons and talk about them. That is precisely what he is trying to do in his research, and in this present article. Cohen is currently conducting research in the U.S. (right now he is a senior fellow at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies at the Monterey Institute of International Studies ); his book (unlike this article ) was not submitted to the Israeli censor.

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Lieberman orders a “day after” plan for dealing with a nuclear-armed Iran

Reuters reports:

Hardline Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman has commissioned a report on how to prepare for a nuclear-armed Iran as doubt mounts about the efficacy of preventive action, an Israeli source said on Monday.

Publicly, Israel has pledged to deny the Iranians the means to make a bomb but its previous, centrist government also discreetly drew up “day after” contingency plans should Tehran’s uranium enrichment pass the military threshold.

At the time, rightist opposition leader Benjamin Netanyahu called for Israel to consider preemptive strikes against its arch-foe’s nuclear sites. Now prime minister, Netanyahu has reined in such rhetoric while not ruling out the use of force.

In a sign the government is examining a full range of options, Lieberman, the most hawkish member of Netanyahu’s coalition, has ordered ministry strategists to draft a paper on “what to do if we wake up and discover the Iranians have a nuclear weapon,” said the senior Israeli political source, who declined to be named due to the sensitivity of the matter.

Considering the fact that Israeli leaders have been sounding the alarm about Iran’s “imminent” acquisition of nuclear weapons for over a decade, it’s a bit late in the day to be working on a “day after” plan. Indeed, it suggests rather strongly that despite warning that another Holocaust might be just around the corner, the leaders of a nation protected by its own arsenal of around 200 nuclear weapons has never been quite as afraid of Iran as they claimed.

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Stuxnet, Bushehr and Siemens WinCC software

Ben D, a commenter at this site and Arms Control Wonk is skeptical about my assertion that Siemens SCADA software is being used at Iran’s Bushehr nuclear facility. I based that claim on a UPI photograph that led the German industrial security expert, Ralph Langner, to speculate that Bushehr was the intended target of the Stuxnet malware.

These are Ben’s qualms:

Concerning the UPI image of a control panel with a MS look window superimposed that says.. “WinCC Runtime License: Your software license has expired. Please obtain a valid license”, well it doesn’t prove a thing.

First of all, the WinCC window could so easily be a photo- shopped overlay on the image of a process control panel.

Secondly, the Control Panel image is typical of process control panels everywhere and even if the WinCC window was not photo-shopped, what has that got to do with Bushehr. There is nothing else in the image to provide any information whatsoever about the local environment to provide any context as to its locality or purpose.

Thirdly, UPI does not provide a source for anyone claiming that the UPI Photo by Mohammad Kheirkhah is actually Bushehr, they just provide a narrative to imply that it is.

Fourthly, Ralph Lagner is not claiming the UPI image is actually genuine or that it is of Bushehr, he merely prefaces his speculative theory with ” If the picture is authentic, which I have no means of verifying,….”.

Has the image been doctored? I’m not in a position to determine that, but the Hacker Factor Blog did some image analysis and concluded that it was not doctored. He has other reasons for questioning whether it was taken at Bushehr but found no evidence that it had been manipulated with Photoshop.

This image apparently confirms that the photograph is of a computer monitor and the continuity in the ripple pattern across the part of the screen where the WinCC message appears seems to confirm that this was not inserted from a different screen image. (This ripple pattern can be seen both in the blue image and the close-up image.)

So, assuming that the WinCC expired-licence message was actually appearing on that monitor screen, is there any evidence that the monitor and the control system it depicts is in Bushehr?

Frankly, I was willing to accept that UPI was not misrepresenting or incorrectly labeling its photos, but still, some additional analysis was both in order and turned out to be fruitful. There is indeed evidence that this image depicts a Bushehr control system.

The elements in the schematic have a uniform numbering system — UA04B001, UA04B002 etc.

Another UPI photograph appears to show the physical components depicted on the system control monitor. This vessel shown on the right is numbered UA06B002. That particular number doesn’t appear on the monitor image but it’s hard to believe that this is not part of the same system.

OK. But maybe the screen image and the image of an Iranian technician turning a valve were taken some place other than Bushehr.

Well, UPI’s photographer was one among a group of international journalists who were shown around Bushehr in February 2009. They included Jon Leyne, a reporter for the BBC, and a video in his report shows the same assembly of pale gray vessels that appear in the UPI photo. Indeed, an AFP image in the same report shows the same technician, from a different angle, doing his valve-turning performance for the assembled press.

With the evidence that I’ve laid out I will assert with even more confidence that the Bushehr nuclear plant uses Siemens WinCC SCADA software. I also see little reason to doubt that Iranian officials were telling the truth when they said that Stuxnet had been found on personal computers used by the facility’s operators. What I remain skeptical about is their claim that the malware did not penetrate the system. How confident the Iranians are on that question may become evident in the coming months when the plant begins or fails to begin generating electricity.

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