On December 11, the spokesman for the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) confirmed that his agency was, as Gareth Porter asserted on this website earlier this month, not interested in accepting a recent invitation by Iran to visit Marivan, at least at this time.
The spokesman, Serge Gas, reportedly told Reuters in an email that the agency had “explained clearly to Iran—on more than one occasion—that an offer of a visit of Marivan does not help address specific concerns related to the issue of large-scale high explosive experiments.” No further elaboration was made in the email, according to Reuters.
As someone who has worked at a senior level for the IAEA and who has respect for its mission and its dedicated personnel, I found this statement—and the decision not to accept Iran’s invitation—disappointing and worrisome.
In its 2011 special report on weaponization in Iran that was leaked to the Washington-based Institute for Science and International Security (ISIS), among others, the IAEA asserted that it had received generally consistent “information” that “large scale high explosive experiments” for nuclear-weapon development had been carried out “in the region of Marivan” (paragraph 43 of the Annex). The information, which appeared in more than 1,000 pages of documents (paragraph 12), cited hemispherical explosive configuration, fiber optic sensors, and streak cameras, among many other details. Indeed, the IAEA’s description of the experiments allegedly carried out at Marivan was some of the most detailed in the weaponization annex.
The report said the source for this information was an unnamed “Member State” and that more than ten other Member States provided supplementary information (paragraph 13)—including “procurement information, information on international travel by individuals said to have been involved in the alleged activities, financial records, documents reflecting health and safety arrangements, and other documents demonstrating manufacturing techniques for certain high explosive components”—that “reinforces and tends to corroborate the information.”
The report about the large high-explosive experiments involving hemispherical charges at Marivan constitutes a very serious allegation because, if the hydrodynamic experiments were actually conducted using uranium (which is not mentioned in the report), they would constitute not only a violation of the IAEA’s safeguards agreement with Iran, but also a “smoking gun” pointing to the existence of a nuclear weapons program. And while such experiments carried out without uranium would not constitute a safeguards violation, they would unquestionably also support critics’ claims that Iran was indeed developing nuclear weapons.
The IAEA report and its annex have never been published by the Agency. In fact, a search for “Marivan” on the IAEA website turns up nothing. Nonetheless, no one has questioned the authenticity of the leaked version of the report that includes the paragraph referencing “the region of Marivan.” Since then, the story has been picked up by think tanks, NGOs, and media reports all of which breathlessly describe the alleged experiments but fail to mention their allegedly having taken place in Marivan.
As Porter reported, Iran’s Permanent Representative to the IAEA, Reza Najafi, informed the agency’s Board of Governors on November 21 that Iran was ready to give the IAEA “one managed access” to the Marivan region to verify the information included in the Annex. But the IAEA has now rejected the invitation. As noted by Reuters, “…the IAEA’s main priority for its long-stalled investigation into Iran’s nuclear program has been to go to another location, the Parchin military base [sic] southeast of Tehran, where the Vienna-based agency says other nuclear-related explosives tests may have been conducted, perhaps a decade ago.”
I addressed at some length in a previous post the many reasons why I find it quite improbable that the building that the IAEA has asked to visit at Parchin (which is actually not a base at all, but rather a sprawling complex of military factories) would be the site of sensitive nuclear weapons-related testing. Moreover, it bears noting that the alleged Marivan tests cited in the IAEA’s report are of too great a magnitude to be conducted at the Parchin site, which was purportedly designed to combine uranium and high explosives in much smaller experiments. The IAEA’s insistence to visit Parchin under the circumstances is puzzling, to say the least.
Marivan is important. In fact, it is the litmus test for the credibility of the IAEA’s 2011 report. If the IAEA claims detailed knowledge of a test and its location, it is critical that it work with Iran to verify that information. If, however, the information turns out to be false, irrelevant, inactionable or beyond the scope of IAEA’s expertise, then the agency should either withdraw its 2011 “Weaponization Annex” or issue a revised report after a thorough vetting of the rest of its contents. As noted above, the large-scale high explosive experiments are the most detailed claim in the agency’s weaponization report. That claim needs to be investigated and resolved, and the IAEA’s reluctance to do so is deeply disturbing.
Marivan is also important because if, indeed, the report was based on false information, it further weakens the already-thin case for visiting Parchin, which, in my view, constitutes a quixotic quest that threatens to derail far more important talks and agreements involving Iran’s nuclear materials The Agency’s strong suit has always been tracing and accurately reporting the quantities of nuclear materials of Member States, and it should focus on that mandate as a priority.
Bob Kelley is a professional nuclear engineer licensed in California. He spent the early years of his career in the nuclear weapons program of the US on topics such as plutonium metallurgy, vulnerability of nuclear warheads and warhead engineering. He has worked on a number of isotope separation schemes for the actinides including uranium separation by gas centrifuge and plutonium laser isotope separation. In mid-career he switched to analysis of foreign nuclear weapons programs. This included the use of satellite imagery and other kinds of intelligence information. This led to becoming Director of the Remote Sensing Laboratory in Las Vegas, the premier nuclear emergency response and aerial measurements laboratory for image and radiation sensing in the USDOE. He later applied this knowledge for the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna as a Director for challenging nuclear inspections in Iraq and many other countries.
]]>by Gareth Porter
When Iran offered last month to allow the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to visit the Marivan region near the border with Iraq, the IAEA might have been expected to respond with alacrity to the opportunity.
The IAEA had been complaining for months that Iran had not provided the information and access required to “clarify” allegations of nuclear weapons-related experiments. But the immediate IAEA response to the Iranian offer, as well as the previous history of the Marivan issue, suggest that the nuclear agency is less than eager to take advantage of it. That reason appears to be because the Agency’s source for the alleged experiments failed to identify the site where the alleged experiments were supposed to have been conducted.
The Agency’s November 2011 report asserted that “information” provided by a “Member State” indicated that Iran had carried out “large scale high explosive experiments” in “the region of Marivan” using a technique for initiating an explosive charge found in “some known nuclear explosive devices.”
In a significant development in the IAEA-Iran process for resolving the “possible military dimensions” (PMD) issue however, Iran’s Permanent Representative to the IAEA, Reza Najafi, told the Board of Governors during its quarterly conference November 21 that Iran was ready to give the IAEA “one managed access” to the western Marivan region to “prove” that the allegations of nuclear weapons experiments were “wrong and baseless.” He said such alleged experiments “could easily be traced if the exact site would be visited.”
The Iranian diplomat said the unnamed Member State that had made the charge—which he said was either the United States or Israel—“should specify the site’s exact location. Otherwise it should confess that it has misled the IAEA with false information.” Najafi added, “In fact, there is no such location at all.”
The response from Gill Tudor, the spokesperson for IAEA Director-General Yukiya Amano, was non-committal. “The situation regarding a visit to the Marivan region is not as simple as that conveyed by Iran. The Agency will discuss the offer with Iran,” she said.
Two weeks after the Iranian offer, the IAEA was still silent on whether it has contacted Iran to discuss the offer. “The topic is still under consideration,” said Serge Gas, the IAEA Director of Communications, in response to this writer’s query December 3 about any follow-up with the statement.
A source close to the Agency told me, however, that the issue of a visit to Marivan “has gone to sleep for the moment.”
The Iranian mission to the IAEA, meanwhile, said it had nothing to add to Ambassador Najafi’s initial offer.
The IAEA’s apparent hesitancy about an inspection visit to Marivan is remarkable in light of Amano’s criticism of Iran for allegedly failing to provide information on suspect sites. Amano declared in a speech at the Brookings Institution in Washington Oct. 31 that Iran still had not provided information on the issues that Iran had agreed to address last summer, one of which was the alleged high explosives experiments.
But instead of pursuing a possible inspection of the site of the alleged Marivan experiment, Amano has focused solely on gaining access to the site at Iran’s Parchin military base where, according to the 2011 IAEA report, Iran had constructed a large explosives containment vessel in 2000 for hydrodynamic testing of nuclear weapons designs.
That report did not claim that the alleged cylinder at Parchin had actually been used for any nuclear weapons-related experiment, however. It asserted only that it was “suitable” for carrying out the same kind of experiment on a multipoint initiation system for a bomb that it said had been already performed in Marivan.
Former IAEA nuclear weapons expert Robert Kelley, who had twice headed the Agency’s Iraq Action Team, has argued that an inspection of the alleged Marivan high explosives experiments should thus take the priority. In February 2012, Kelley, a former director of the US Department of Energy Remote Sensing Laboratory in Nevada, told Jonathan Tirone of Bloomberg News, “The Agency needs to put Marivan first, because it is the sleeping dog in the last report.”
The day after Kelley was quoted on Marivan, Iran’s permanent representative to the IAEA, Ambassador Ali Asgar Soltanieh, told a visiting IAEA delegation, which had requested the day before to visit Parchin during its two-day stay, that it could carry out an inspection visit to Marivan instead. But the IAEA delegation rejected the offer, claiming that it had not been given enough lead-time to prepare for such a trip, according to Soltanieh.
The IAEA had never brought up Marivan publicly again until Najafi’s offer at the Board of Governors meeting. The only plausible reason for its present apparent reluctance to pursue such a visit is that the Member State that provided the intelligence on the alleged experiments failed to identify a specific site in the Marivan region.
Marivan is one of the “counties” of Iran’s Kurdistan province. It includes three districts with three cities and 151 populated villages with a total population of about 170,000 people.
The IAEA certainly had access to satellite images for the entire Marivan region, and would have searched through those images for any site that looked like it could be the location of the purported high explosives experiment. Apparently, it did not find a specific location that seemed plausible.
The allegation about the Marivan experiment isn’t the only one that lacked a specific location. The intelligence on the alleged explosives cylinder “suitable” for conducting the same type of experiment was also not connected to a specific site at the sprawling Parchin facility at the time that its alleged existence was first reported to the IAEA.
The IAEA revealed in its August 2012 report that the location of the Parchin site “was only identified in March 2011.” IAEA reports are carefully worded, and any intelligence information is always attributed to one or more unidentified Member States. The use of passive voice—which allowed the Agency to avoid the question of who did finally identify the location—strongly implies that the identification of the site at Parchin was not the result of new intelligence information provided by the original or some other, but rather resulted from the IAEA’s own searching through satellite images for a site with physical characteristics considered consistent with the intelligence the Agency had obtained. So the Parchin site is likely merely the IAEA’s best guess as to the location of the alleged object, the very existence of which is very much in question, as Kelley has argued on this website.
The fact that the unnamed Member State or States that provided the intelligence claims apparently failed to specify locations for either of the two major alleged Iranian nuclear weapons-related activities adds yet another reason to question the reliability of the intelligence used by the IAEA to construct what Amano calls the “case” that Iran carried out covert nuclear weapons research. But there are other compelling reasons to question those and other such intelligence claims. Kelley has discussed some of those reasons in multiple articles. Others are discussed in my own book-length study on the misinformation and disinformation surrounding the Iran nuclear issue.
Despite the problematic nature of the intelligence currently at the center of the PMD issue, the treatment of the issue in American news media continues to focus overwhelmingly on Iran’s refusal to allow the IAEA to inspect the site that has now been identified at Parchin. The implication has been that Iran is hiding something. At the same time, one would be hard-pressed to find US coverage of Iran’s latest offer.
There are other explanations for Iran’s reluctance to permit the IAEA to inspect Parchin, however. On one hand, Iran would not want to set a precedent for allowing inspections of its military sites on the basis of intelligence that it argues is not supported by credible evidence when hostile powers could exploit that opening to gather military intelligence. On the other hand, it can’t be expected to give away its ultimate negotiating chip to the IAEA without a concession of comparable value in return.
Photo: Resident Representative of the Islamic Republic of Iran Reza Najaf photographed with IAEA Director General Yukiya Amano in Vienna, Austria, 26 September 2013. Credit: Dean Calma/IAEA
]]>by Peter Jenkins
Iran and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) issued a joint statement on May 21 to the effect that they had agreed on a further set of practical measures within the framework of their cooperation agreement reached November 11, 2013. The first two measures relate to IAEA [...]]]>
by Peter Jenkins
Iran and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) issued a joint statement on May 21 to the effect that they had agreed on a further set of practical measures within the framework of their cooperation agreement reached November 11, 2013. The first two measures relate to IAEA concerns about a possible military dimension (PMD) to Iran’s nuclear program, the other three to Iran’s Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) safeguards agreement:
1) Exchanging information with the Agency with respect to the allegations related to the initiation of high explosives, including the conduct of large-scale high explosives experimentation in Iran.
(2) Providing mutually agreed relevant information and explanations related to studies made and/or papers published in Iran in relation to neutron transport and associated modelling and calculations and their alleged application to compressed materials.
3) Providing mutually agreed information and arranging a technical visit to a centrifuge research and development centre.
(4) Providing mutually agreed information and managed access to centrifuge assembly workshops, centrifuge rotor production workshops, and storage facilities, as well as concluding the safeguards approach for the IR-40 reactor.
The aim here is to complete implementation of these measures by Aug. 25, 2014. This is alsothe third of such sets. The first was announced on Nov. 11 of last year, the second on February 20.
The absence in Wednesday’s statement of any news about implementation of the Feb. 20 measures is almost certainly insignificant. The IAEA reported on implementation of the Nov. 11 measures in one of its quarterly reports on Iran to the IAEA Board of Governors. It can be inferred that the IAEA intends to report on the Feb. 20 measures in the quarterly report that will likely be issued some ten days before a June 2 meeting of the Board.
A particularly interesting feature of that report will be the IAEA’s findings in relation to the last of the Feb. 20 measures: “Providing information and explanations for the Agency to assess Iran’s stated need…for the development of Exploding Bridge Wire [EBW] detonators”.
Since February 22, 2008, if not earlier, the IAEA has believed that such detonators could “be relevant to nuclear weapon R&D”. Will Iran have succeeded in persuading the IAEA that its development of EBW detonators was for conventional military or even civil applications? “EBW detonators are the standard in virtually all conventional military applications and in the mining industry. There is a huge market for them. So characterising them as an indicator of a nuclear weapons program is odd” notes Robert Kelley, a nuclear weapons expert who has worked at the IAEA.
Items 1 and 2 in the new list are IAEA concerns first made public in the annex to GOV/2011/65 of November 8, 2011. In paragraph 57 of that annex, at the end of a section on the neutron initiation of nuclear explosions, the IAEA stated: “Given the importance of neutron generation and transport, and their effect on geometries containing fissile materials in the context of an implosion device, Iran needs to explain to the Agency its objectives and capabilities in this field”.
Paragraphs 47-51 of the same annex relate to alleged Iranian “hydrodynamic experiments”. They detail information made available to the IAEA by third parties; this information suggested that Iran had manufactured surrogate nuclear weapon components (not using fissile or nuclear material) and might have used those surrogates in high explosive experiments.
The fact that Iran is now ready to address these concerns is promising. It suggests a decision in Tehran to be more cooperative than in the past in resolving issues that have enabled Iran’s enemies to impute to Iran the blackest of nuclear intentions.
Nonetheless, it is to be seen whether the IAEA will be satisfied if Iran declines to provide answers that indicate a nuclear weapon connection — if, for instance, they point to a nuclear reactor connection. “Neutron transport is important in reactors as well as nuclear weapons,” remarks Kelley. Can the IAEA bring itself to accept answers that do not support the nuclear weapon accusations that have been leveled at Iran?
The last point to note about this week’s statement is the target completion date of Aug. 25. This is a reminder that the IAEA is pursuing its investigations into Iranian compliance with its NPT safeguards obligations, and alleged nuclear-related activities, in parallel with, but without any formal connection to the negotiations on which the US, Iran and five other powers have embarked pursuant to the November 24, 2013 Joint Plan of Action (JPOA).
It also suggests that the parties to this negotiation have agreed that the resolution of all PMD concerns is not a necessary precondition for agreeing the “comprehensive solution” envisaged in the JPOA, since the negotiation parties continue to hope that, despite recent difficulties, they can wrap up their work by July 20 or thereabouts.
. The first two measures relate to IAEA concerns about a possible military dimension (PMD) to Iran’s nuclear program, and the other three to Iran’s Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) safeguards agreement:
1) Exchanging information with the Agency with respect to the allegations related to the initiation of high explosives, including the conduct of large-scale high explosives experimentation in Iran.
(2) Providing mutually agreed relevant information and explanations related to studies made and/or papers published in Iran in relation to neutron transport and associated modelling and calculations and their alleged application to compressed materials.
3) Providing mutually agreed information and arranging a technical visit to a centrifuge research and development centre.
(4) Providing mutually agreed information and managed access to centrifuge assembly workshops, centrifuge rotor production workshops, and storage facilities, as well as concluding the safeguards approach for the IR-40 reactor.
The aim here is to complete implementation of these measures by Aug. 25, 2014. This is the third of such sets. The first was announced on Nov. 11 of last year, the second on February 20.
The absence in Wednesday’s statement of any news about implementation of the Feb. 20 measures is almost certainly insignificant. The IAEA reported on implementation of the Nov. 11 measures in one of its quarterly reports on Iran to the IAEA Board of Governors (GOV/2014/10 of 20 February 2014). It can be inferred that the IAEA intends to report on the Feb. 20 measures in the quarterly report that will likely be issued some ten days before a June 2 meeting of the Board.
A particularly interesting feature of that report will be the IAEA’s findings in relation to the last of the Feb. 20 measures: “Providing information and explanations for the Agency to assess Iran’s stated need…for the development of Exploding Bridge Wire [EBW] detonators”. Since February 22, 2008 (GOV/2008/4), if not earlier, the IAEA has believed that such detonators could “be relevant to nuclear weapon R&D”. Will Iran have succeeded in persuading the IAEA that its development of EBW detonators was for conventional military or even civil applications? “EBW detonators are the standard in virtually all conventional military applications and in the mining industry. There is a huge market for them. So characterizing them as an indicator of a nuclear weapons program is odd” notes Robert Kelley, a nuclear weapons expert who has worked at the IAEA.
Items 1 and 2 in the new list are IAEA concerns first made public in the annex to GOV/2011/65 of November 8, 2011.
In paragraph 57 of that annex, at the end of a section on the neutron initiation of nuclear explosions, the IAEA stated: “Given the importance of neutron generation and transport, and their effect on geometries containing fissile materials in the context of an implosion device, Iran needs to explain to the Agency its objectives and capabilities in this field”.
Paragraphs 47-51 of the same annex relate to alleged Iranian “hydrodynamic experiments”. They detail information made available to the IAEA by third parties; this information suggested that Iran had manufactured surrogate nuclear weapon components (not using fissile or nuclear material) and might have used those surrogates in high explosive experiments.
The fact that Iran is now ready to address these concerns is promising. It suggests a decision in Tehran to be more cooperative than in the past in resolving issues that have enabled Iran’s enemies to impute to Iran the blackest of nuclear intentions.
Nonetheless, it is to be seen whether the IAEA will be satisfied if Iran declines to provide answers that indicate a nuclear weapon connection — if, for instance, they point to a nuclear reactor connection. “Neutron transport is important in reactors as well as nuclear weapons,” remarks Kelley. Can the IAEA bring itself to accept answers that do not support the nuclear weapon accusations that have been leveled at Iran?
The last point to note about this week’s statement is the target completion date of Aug. 25. This is a reminder that the IAEA is pursuing its investigations into Iranian compliance with its NPT safeguards obligations, and alleged nuclear-related activities, in parallel with, but without any formal connection to the negotiations on which the US, Iran and five other powers have embarked pursuant to the November 24, 2013 Joint Plan of Action (JPOA).
It also suggests that the parties to this negotiation have agreed that the resolution of all PMD concerns is not a necessary precondition for agreeing the “comprehensive solution” envisaged in the JPOA, since the negotiation parties continue to hope that, despite recent difficulties, they can wrap up their work by July 20 or thereabouts.
Photo: IAEA Director General Yukiya Amano meett with Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javed Zarif at IAEA headquarters in Vienna on February 18 on the margins of the nuclear-related talks between Iran and world powers. Credit: Dean Calma/IAEA
]]>That Associated Press story displaying a graph alleged to be part of an Iranian computer simulation of a nuclear explosion — likely leaked by Israel with the intention of reinforcing the media narrative of covert Iranian work on nuclear weapons – raises serious questions about the International Atomic [...]]]>
That Associated Press story displaying a graph alleged to be part of an Iranian computer simulation of a nuclear explosion — likely leaked by Israel with the intention of reinforcing the media narrative of covert Iranian work on nuclear weapons – raises serious questions about the International Atomic Energy Association’s (IAEA) claim that it has credible evidence of such modeling work by Iran.
The graph of the relationship between energy and power shown in the AP story has now been revealed to contain absurdly large errors indicating its fraudulence.
Those revelations indicate, in turn, that the IAEA based its publication of detailed allegations of nuclear weapons-related Iranian computer modeling on evidence that should have been rejected as having no credibility.
Former senior IAEA inspector Robert Kelley, who has challenged the accuracy of IAEA reporting on Iran, told Lobe Log in an e-mail that “It’s clear the graph has nothing to do with a nuclear bomb.”
“The pretty, symmetrical bell shaped curve at the bottom is not typical of a nuclear explosion but of some more idealized natural phenomena or mathematical equation,” he said. “Clearly it is a student example of how to perform integrals to which someone has attached some meaningless numbers.”
Nuclear physicists Yousaf Butt and Ferenc Dalnoki-Veress also pointed out that the graph depicted by AP is not only so rudimentary and crude that it could have been done by an undergraduate student, but is based on a fundamental error of mind-numbing proportions.
The graph shown in the AP story plots two curves, one of energy versus time, the other of power output versus time. But Butt and Dalnoki-Veress noted that the two curves are inconsistent. The peak level of power shown in the graph, they said, is nearly a million times too high.
After a quick look at the graph, the head of the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Cal State Sacramento, Dr. Hossein Partovi, observed, “[T]he total energy is more than four orders of magnitude (forty thousand times) smaller than the total integrated power that it must equal!” Essentially, the mismatch between the level of total energy and total power on the graph is “more than four orders of magnitude”, which Partovi explained means that the level of energy is 40,000 times too small in relation to the level of power.
One alert reader of the account of the debunking of the graph at the Mondoweiss blog cited further evidence supporting Kelley’s observation that the graph shown by AP was based on an another graph that had nothing to do with nuclear explosions.
The reader noted that the notation “kT” shown after “energy” on the right hand scale of the graph does not stand for “kilotons” as Jahn suggested, but “Boltzmann constant” (k) multiplied by temperature (T). The unit of tons, on the other hand, is always abbreviated with a lower case “t”, he pointed out, so kilotons would be denoted as “kt”.
The reader also stated that the “kT” product is used in physics as a scaling factor for energy values in molecular-scale systems, such as a microsecond laser pulse.
The evidence thus suggests that someone took a graph related to an entirely different problem and made changes to show a computer simulation of a 50 kiloton explosion. The dotted line on the graph leads the eye directly to the number 50 on the right-hand energy scale, which would lead most viewers to believe that it is the result of modeling a 50 kiloton nuclear explosion.
The graph was obviously not done by a real Iranian scientist — much less someone working in a top secret nuclear weapons research program — but by an amateur trying to simulate a graph that would be viewed, at least by non-specialists, as something a scientist might have drawn.
Although AP reporter George Jahn wrote that officials who provided the diagram did so “only on condition that they and their country not be named”, the country behind the graph is not much of a mystery.
Blogger Richard Silverstein has reported that a “highly-placed Israeli source” told him the diagram “was stolen by the Mossad from an Iranian computer” using one of the various malware programs deployed against Iran.
Whether one chooses to rely on Silverstein’s reporting or not, it is clear that the graph is part of a longer stream of suspicious documents supposedly obtained by Israeli intelligence from inside Iran’s nuclear program and then given to the IAEA over the past few years.
Former IAEA Secretary General Mohammed ElBaradei refers in his memoirs to documents provided by Israel in 2009 “purportedly showing that Iran had continued with nuclear weapons studies until at least 2007.” ElBaradei adds that the Agency’s “technical experts” had “raised numerous questions about the documents’ authenticity”, and suggested that US intelligence “did not buy the “evidence” put forward by Israel” in its 2007 National Intelligence Estimate.
Jahn’s story indicates that this and similar graphs were the basis for the IAEA’s publishing charges by two unnamed states that Iran had done computer modeling that the agency said could only have been about nuclear weapons.
Jahn cites a “senior diplomat who is considered neutral on the issue” as confirming that the graph accompanying his story was one of “a series of Iranian computer-generated models provided to the IAEA by the intelligences services of member nations.”
Those “computer generated models” were discussed in the November 2011 report, which referred to “[i]nformation provided to the Agency by two Member States relating to modelling [sic] studies alleged to have been conducted in 2008 and 2009 by Iran….” The unnamed member states were alleging that the Iranian studies “involved the modelling [sic] of spherical geometries, consisting of components of the core of an HEU nuclear device subjected to shock compression, for their neutronic behaviour at high density, and a determination of the subsequent nuclear explosive yield.”
Nothing in that description of the alleged modeling is documented by the type of graph shown by the AP story.
The IAEA report concludes by saying, “The information also identifies models said to have been used in those studies and the results of these calculations, which the Agency has seen.”
In other words, the only evidence that the IAEA had actually seen was the graphs of the alleged computer modeling, of which the graph shown in the AP story is alleged to be an example. But the fact that data on that graph has been credibly shown to be off by four orders of magnitude suggests that the Israeli claim of Iranian computer modeling of “components of the core of an HEU nuclear device subjected to shock compression” was completely fabricated.
Former IAEA Inspector Kelley also told Lobe Log that “We can only hope that the claim that the IAEA has relied on this crude hoax is false. Otherwise their credibility has been shattered.”
- Gareth Porter, an investigative historian and journalist specialising in U.S. national security policy, received the UK-based Gellhorn Prize for journalism for 2011 for articles on the U.S. war in Afghanistan.
]]>More expert opinion discrediting the alarmist claims being made about the latest IAEA report, which recycles old and suspicious intelligence. This time from former IAEA inspector, Robert Kelley, interviewed here on The Real News.
]]>More expert opinion discrediting the alarmist claims being made about the latest IAEA report, which recycles old and suspicious intelligence. This time from former IAEA inspector, Robert Kelley, interviewed here on The Real News.
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