Item:
"Nuke agency says Iran can make bomb."
moreThis
AP story reports a IAEA "secret annex" which concludes that "The agency . . . assesses that Iran has sufficient information to be able to design and produce a workable implosing nuclear device based on HEU (highly enriched uranium) as the fission fuel." ISIS, a non-profit organization, recently published a
leaked excerpt from the annex.
Response:
The IAEA Director General explains that the Annex is not a secret but rather a working draft which is not yet sufficiently vetted for publication.
According to ISIS, the objective of the Annex is to "summarize and assess the set of records from 2004 and earlier . . . about the possible military dimensions of Iran's nuclear program." These so-called "alleged studies" pertain to a program that U.S. intelligence believes was discontinued in 2003, though other intelligence agencies believe the program has been re-started. The IAEA draft Annex supplies no evidence of a re-start, but does mention that possibility.
moreWhile Iran has denounced the alleged studies as forgeries, the IAEA deems them consistent and credible enough to merit serious attention and follow-up. However, the IAEA has refrained from going so far as to declare them authentic. In fact, this same AP story reports a "high official" of the IAEA telling the IAEA board that "[if the intelligence on Iran's alleged weapons program experiments is genuine] there is a high probability that nuclear weaponization activities have taken place --
but I should underline 'if' three times." Another report claims, based on interviews with IAEA officials, that IAEA staff are divided on the authenticity of the alleged studies.
1The alleged studies, if genuine, strongly suggest that Iran has developed the know-how to make a crude nuclear weapon, but remains some distance from the much harder challenge of making a serviceable missile warhead.
more In fact, IAEA officials are reported to have run computer simulations of the re-entry vehicle designs in the alleged studies, and found them so far from serviceability as to raise questions about their authenticity.
2
Whatever the exact nature of the underlying facts, the Annex serves as a stark reminder that knowledge of how to design a nuclear weapon is widely available, and Iran almost certainly has the engineering capacity to turn that knowledge into at least a crude weapon should it acquire HEU and choose to make a weapon. Bombs and sanctions will not put that weapons know-how back in a bottle. The challenge now is to make sure that Iran is prevented or deterred from acquiring the all-important HEU that would be needed for any weapon.
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