by Peter Jenkins

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s statement to the UN General Assembly today leaves me feeling frustrated. There are more than 30 points in it that I would dearly love to discuss with him, either because they seem to be of questionable veracity, or because they are assertions [...]]]> via LobeLog

by Peter Jenkins

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s statement to the UN General Assembly today leaves me feeling frustrated. There are more than 30 points in it that I would dearly love to discuss with him, either because they seem to be of questionable veracity, or because they are assertions that are not backed up by evidence.

But perhaps I should count myself lucky that such an opportunity will never come my way. I suspect Mr. Netanyahu is a politician who finds it hard to concede a point or learn from his mistakes.

If this piece has any readers, let me assure them that I am not going to itemise all 35 of the Israeli Prime Minister’s questionable propositions. Instead I propose to react to a handful of Mr. Netanyahu’s points (paraphrased below) that touch on my experience of the Iranian and North Korean nuclear issues over the last eleven years…

Rouhani was Iran’s chief nuclear negotiator between 2003 and 2005. He masterminded the strategy that enabled Iran to advance its nuclear weapons program behind a smoke screen of diplomatic engagement. Here’s what he said in his 2011 book: “While we were talking to the Europeans in Tehran, we were installing equipment in Isfahan.”

The US intelligence assessment is that Iran abandoned its nuclear weapons program in 2003. Francois Nicoullaud, who was France’s ambassador to Iran at the time, has written that it was Dr. Rouhani who, with the support of Iran’s Supreme Leader, ordered abandonment.

Iran’s completion of a uranium conversion plant at Isfahan in 2004 occurred with the full knowledge of Iran’s European negotiating partners, and indeed of the rest of the world, thanks to International Atomic Energy Agency’s (IAEA) inspection visits to the site. In doing so, Iran was not in breach of its 2003 agreement with Europe.

In 2002 Iran was caught red-handed secretly building an underground centrifuge facility in Natanz.

It is unknowable whether Iran intended the Natanz facility to be secret. In 2002, their safeguards agreement with the IAEA obliged them to declare new facilities 180 days before the first introduction of nuclear material. Well before the 180-day mark, an Israeli-supported anti-Iran organisation proclaimed to the world that Tehran was building a “secret” enrichment facility. An Iranian declaration followed in good time. Personally, I doubt the Iranians could have been naïve enough to intend a large facility to be secret.

In 2009 Iran was again caught red-handed secretly building a huge underground nuclear facility for uranium enrichment in a mountain near Qom.

A similar story. The US and its allies allowed their knowledge that this facility was under construction to leak. At much the same time Iran declared the facility to the IAEA. Would Iran have made that declaration had it not been for the leak? Would they have declared it later, 180 days before the introduction of material? These questions are unanswerable until the relevant Iranian archives are opened.

Why would a country with vast natural energy reserves invest billions in developing nuclear energy?

I wonder whether this question was ever put in the 1960s to the USA, Canada and the USSR. I wonder whether now Israel is putting it to the United Arab Emirates.

Iran has also continued work on the heavy water reactor at Arak; that’s in order to have another route to the bomb, a plutonium path.

To extract plutonium from spent reactor fuel a reprocessing facility is necessary. Neither the IAEA nor US intelligence has ever come across evidence of an Iranian reprocessing facility. Iran has assured friend and foe for the last ten years that it has no intention of acquiring a reprocessing capability.

Since Rouhani’s election — and I stress this — this vast and feverish effort has continued unabated… The sanctions policy today is bearing fruit.

These two assertions look to me to be contradictory. In any case, Iran’s “effort” hardly qualifies for the epithet “feverish”: 18,000 centrifuges installed over the course of seven and a half years; 10.000 kg of low enriched uranium produced over the same period (only enough for four or five nuclear devices, if further enriched, or for just over a third of a fresh fuel load for Iran’s sole power reactor).

In 2005, North Korea agreed to a deal that was celebrated the world over by many well-meaning people… A year later, North Korea exploded its first nuclear weapons device.

An alleged Iranian nuclear threat to global survival deserves more rigorous analysis than a vague argument by analogy. And this is an analogy that breaks down when exposed to facts. In 2005, the DPRK, unlike Iran, was not a party to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), and was not subject to IAEA safeguards; it already possessed enough plutonium for at least ten nuclear devices. Its leaders knew that the US and its allies were unable to make a credible threat to end the DPRK nuclear weapons program by force or to retaliate for DPRK bad faith, because the DPRK was capable of killing millions of South Koreans in a matter of hours by conventional means. The DPRK has a record of reneging on deals with the US; Iran does not. The DPRK is a “loner” that has not the remotest chance of ever being elected to preside over the 120-nation Non-Aligned Movement (NAM); Iranians care passionately about the prestige and reputation of Iran, which currently presides over the NAM.

In standing alone, Israel will know that it will be defending many, many others.

I wonder whom Mr. Netanyahu has in mind. India? China? Japan? Indonesia? Malaysia or Thailand? Sub-Saharan Africa? Latin America? Europe? Russia? Iraq? Turkey? Syria? Egypt? Algeria? Oman?

I would like to conclude with a quotation from a political thinker whom I would expect Mr. Netanyahu to admire: Nicolai Machiavelli. “I believe that forced agreements will be kept neither by princes nor by republics.”

Israeli fears will never be dispelled by forcing Iran to give up uranium enrichment, nor by destroying its enrichment facilities. Safety lies in the US negotiating an agreement that Iran will have no interest in breaking but that will nonetheless be subject to stringent verification and and actionable under the NPT.

I’ve been meaning to write about this report on the multifold human costs of militarily striking Iran’s nuclear facilities and am happy to find that it’s already been noted by Golnaz Esfandiari as well as Gordon Lubold, among others. (Marsha Cohen’s well-read Lobe Log post on [...]]]> via Lobe Log

I’ve been meaning to write about this report on the multifold human costs of militarily striking Iran’s nuclear facilities and am happy to find that it’s already been noted by Golnaz Esfandiari as well as Gordon Lubold, among others. (Marsha Cohen’s well-read Lobe Log post on the same topic was the closest thing to such a study that I’ve come across so far.) “The Ayatollah’s Nuclear Gamble” is sponsored by Utah’s Hinckley Institute of Politics and was authored by Khosrow B. Semnani, an Iranian-American engineer by training and philanthropist. It will be featured this week at a joint event by the Woodrow Wilson Center and the Iran Task Force at the Atlantic Council. With the study Semnani endeavors to scientifically prove something which seems obvious: attacking nuclear facilities in Iran could have devastating effects on possibly hundreds of thousands of Iranians who would be exposed to highly toxic chemical plumes and even radioactive fallout. Case studies were conducted on the Iranian cities of Isfahan, Natanz, Arak, and Bushehr. In Isfahan, a military strike on the nuclear facility there “could be compared to the 1984 Bhopal industrial accident at the Union Carbide plant in India”:

In that accident, the release of 42 metric tons (47 U.S. tons) of methyl isocyanate turned the city of Bhopal into a gas chamber. Estimates of deaths have ranged from 3,800 to 15,000. The casualties went well beyond the fatalities: More than 500,000 victims received compensation for exposure to fumes.

The environmental consequences would also be wide-ranging:

With the high likelihood of soluble uranium compounds permeating into the groundwater, strikes would wreak havoc on Isfahan’s environmental resources and agriculture. The Markazi water basin, one of six main catchment areas, which covers half the country (52%), provides slightly less than one-third of Iran’s total renewable water (29%) (Figure 26). According to the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), the groundwater discharge in the basin from approximately 155,000 wells, 22,000 channels and 13,500 springs is the primary water source for agricultural and residential uses.106 It is almost certain that the contamination of groundwater as a result of strikes would damage this important fresh-water source.

The report also touches on the unintended consequences of militarily striking Iran, such as a “short or prolonged regional war” and explains, as reputable analysts have, why the Israeli strike on Iraq’s Osirak facility is a “false analogy”:

The Osirak analogy is the fantasy that there will be no blowback from strikes against Iran’s nuclear facilities. It discounts the complexity, severity, scale, consequences, and casualties such an operation would entail. Iran’s nuclear program is not an empty shell, nor is it a single remote target. The facilities in Iran are fully operational, they contain thousands of personnel, they are located near major population centers, they are heavily constructed and fortified, and thus difficult to destroy. They contain tons of highly toxic chemical and radioactive material. To grasp the political and psychological impact of the strikes, what our estimates suggest is that the potential civilian casualties Iran would suffer as a result of a strike — in the first day — could exceed the 6,731 Palestinians and 1,083 Israeli’s reported killed in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict over the past decade. The total number of fatalities in the 1981 Osirak raid was 10 Iraqis and one French civilian, Damien Chaussepied.

According to Greg Thielmann of the Arms Control Association, the report makes a “valuable contribution to “colorizing” the bloodless discussions of the “military option.” Thielmann, who formerly worked on assessments of ballistic missile threats at the State Department’s intelligence bureau, told Lobe Log that he had not seen “a more serious look at the medical consequences for the Iranian population” than provided by this report.

While Thielmann calls the report an “impressive effort”, he also offered criticism. “I take strong exception to the author’s introductory assertion that diplomacy with the Islamic Republic “requires a willful act of self-deception,” and that regime change is the only way to achieve an acceptable resolution to the challenges of Iran’s nuclear program,” he said.

Thielmann was also “surprised” that the strike scenario analyzed in the study includes the Bushehr facility, “which is of much less proliferation concern than the other nuclear facilities mentioned, and which, because of the extensive use of Russian personnel in operating the reactor there, would carry high political costs to attack. ”

“Such an attack would also violate Additional Protocol I of the 1949 Geneva Conventions,” said Thielmann, who provided the following excerpt from Article 56 of the 1977 Additional Protocol I:

1. Works and installations containing dangerous forces, namely dams, dykes and nuclear electrical generating stations, shall not be made the object of attack, even where these objects are military objectives, if such attack may cause the release of dangerous forces and consequent severe losses among the civilian population. Other military objectives located at or in the vicinity of these works or installations shall not be made the object of attack if such attack may cause the release of dangerous forces from the works or installations and consequent severe losses among the civilian population.

It will be interesting to see whether the report gets mainstream media attention following the Wilson Center event and if it will spark further examination of this integral — but otherwise barely mentioned — aspect of using the “military option” on Iran.