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| A view of the Arak heavy-water project 190 km (120 miles) southwest of Tehran August 26, 2006. Iran President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad launched a new phase in the Arak heavy-water reactor project on Saturday, despite Western fears it is aimed at producing a bomb. REUTERS/ISNA/Handout |
Iran aims to start a reactor next year
which the West fears could arm an atomic bomb; Israel, which has bombed such
construction sites around the Middle East before, may try to stop the plant
being completed.
The timetable for the planned start-up of
the Arak heavy-water research plant is closely watched: Israeli and Western
experts say any attacker would probably prefer to act before it becomes
operational – to avoid generating radioactive fallout.
The Islamic Republic says it will make
isotopes for medical and agricultural use. But analysts say this type of
facility can also produce plutonium for weapons if the spent fuel is
reprocessed – something Iran says it has no intention of doing.
Time may be pressing for adversaries who
want to act.
“Whoever considers attacking an active
reactor is willing to invite another Chernobyl,” former Israeli military
intelligence chief Amos Yadlin said, referring to the 1986 Soviet reactor
accident which sent radioactive dust across much of Europe.
“And there is no one who wants to do
that.”
Yadlin, who runs Tel Aviv University’s
Institute for National Security Studies, was among eight pilots who in 1981
bombed Iraq’s Osirak reactor. Still under construction, Israel believed nuclear
fuel was about to be loaded and decided to hit it then, avoiding a risk of
sending fallout over nearby Baghdad.
Further underlining Israel’s
determination to prevent its enemies from acquiring the means to assemble
nuclear bombs, it attacked a site in Syria in 2007 that the United States said
was a reactor being built with North Korean help. Syria denied that.
Israel, widely assumed to be the Middle
East’s only nuclear-armed state, now sees Iran’s purportedly civil nuclear
program as the most serious risk to it and has threatened military action if
diplomacy and sanctions fail to make Tehran hold back.
Western and Israeli worries about Iran
are focused largely on uranium enrichment plants buried underground at Natanz
and Fordow, as such material refined to a high level can provide the fissile
core of an atomic bomb.
But diplomats and experts say Arak could
offer Iran a second route to nuclear bombs, if it decided to build such arms.
ANOTHER “RED LINE”?
“The concern about that plutonium route
and the Arak site has got much stronger,” said a Western diplomat in Vienna,
where the U.N. nuclear agency is based. “I think it is another red line,” added
the envoy, who is not from one of the big powers.
It was a reference to a “red line” for
Iran set by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in September, when he
told the United Nations that Tehran must not be allowed to amass an amount of
medium-enriched uranium that could, if refined further in a relatively
uncomplicated process, make even a single bomb.
Iran has since kept its medium-enriched
uranium stockpile below that point by converting some of it to make reactor
fuel, in effect postponing any deadline for Israeli military action.
Israeli Strategic Affairs and
Intelligence Minister Yuval Steinitz said Arak was “definitely a concern” but
Iran’s uranium enrichment track was still a “far more pressing” issue.
Iran says its nuclear work is a bid to
generate electricity and also to make progress in other areas of scientific
research. It denies accusations it is seeking to develop atomic weapons.
Mark Fitzpatrick, director of the
non-proliferation and disarmament program of the International Institute for
Strategic Studies (IISS), said Arak would potentially be able to produce one
bomb’s worth of weapons-grade plutonium a year.
It would thus, he said, be “one of the
key targets if there is ever a decision by Iran’s adversaries to employ
military force against the nuclear program”.
But Cliff Kupchan, Middle East analyst at
consultancy Eurasia Group, said it would be politically difficult to strike a
site that is monitored by inspectors from the International Atomic Energy
Agency (IAEA), the U.N. nuclear agency.
“My instinct is that … Israeli triggers
would relate more directly to intelligence that Iran is building or seeks” the
capability to reprocess atomic fuel, Kupchan said.
Iran says it does not have any
reprocessing activities – which would be required to obtain plutonium from
reactor fuel.
It already has one reactor, at the
Bushehr power station on the Gulf, but Western governments do not see that as a
military risk since it is of a type less suited to generating plutonium; Russia
helped build the plant, begun under the U.S.-backed Shah in the 1970s, and also
insists on taking back the spent fuel.
“AMBITIOUS” ARAK TIMETABLE
Tehran argues that it is Israel’s nuclear
arsenal – believed to have been assembled from plutonium produced at the
secretive Dimona reactor – that threatens regional peace and stability.
But Iran’s refusal to suspend nuclear
activity with both civilian and potential military applications in defiance of
U.N. Security Council demands and its lack of full openness with the IAEA have
fuelled suspicions abroad about its ultimate aims.
An IAEA report issued to member states on
May 22 showed Iran pressing ahead with the construction of Arak, including the
delivery to the site of the reactor vessel.
Stressing it was urgent that Tehran
provided it with design information about the plant, the U.N. agency said Iran
planned to commission the reactor with nuclear fuel in the first quarter of
2014 and launch it in the third quarter of next year.
“It is quite an ambitious timetable,” one
diplomat said.
Fitzpatrick said he did not expect the
reactor – located southwest of Tehran – to become operational until 2015.
Many experts have voiced doubt that
Israel’s conventional forces would be able to deliver lasting damage to Iran’s distant,
dispersed and fortified nuclear facilities.
But, asked if the above-ground Arak site
would be an easier target than Fordow and Natanz, former Israeli air force
chief Ido Nehushtan indicated that it may be:
“Obviously,” he said, “There is a big difference
in terms of the quality and quantity of targets.”
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