They
Lied About Iraq's WMDs;
They're Lying About Iran's
By Luciana Bohne
05 October, 2006
Countercurrents.org
"We have to date
found no evidence of ongoing prohibited nuclear or nuclear-related activities
in Iraq." Mohammed el Baradei, for the United Nations International
Atomic Energy Agency IAEA, 2003.
Iraq possesses "30,000
warheads, 500 tons of chemical weapons, 25,000 liters of anthrax, 38,000
liters of botulin toxin, 1 million pounds of sarin, mustard, and VX
nerve gas, tons of yellowcake uranium from Niger." from White
House webpage, 2002-03.
In
the pre-dawn hours of Saturday, 30 September, the US Senate approved
a bill, authorizing sanctions that target foreign countries continuing
[completely legal] nuclear cooperation with Iran. The bill stipulates
"not to bring into force an agreement for cooperation with the
government of any country that is assisting the nuclear program of Iran
or transferring advanced conventional weapons or missiles." Unmentioned
in the bill, the intended targets are Russia and China. The previous
day, the bill was approved by the House of Representatives.
Together with the suspension
of "habeas corpus," this congressional endorsement of Bush's
preparations for war against Iran should make it perfectly clear to
November voters that the US Congress is an illiberal and warmongering
institution in partnership with the policies of the Bush White House,
whether the Republicans or the Democrats are in power.
Lawmakers did add a caveat to the bill, warning that nothing in this
bill should be "construed as authorizing the use of force against
Iran." However, the president can ignore the caveat because he
has been granted the right to waive provisions of the bill if he finds
that US "national security" interests require it.
Furthermore, the bill comes
in the midst of ongoing diplomatic talks over Iranian uranium enrichment
for civilian use between Iran and the European Union, which the new
US sanctions clearly aim at sabotaging.
Let us be clear about one
thing: there is no evidence that Iran is anywhere near enriching uranium
to weapon-grade capacity at the rate and quantity required to produce
nuclear bombs that could effectively threaten the US or any of its allies
in the area within a decade. Nor is there any evidence that Iran is
capable of manufacturing plutonium bombs on the quick. Washington is
simply keen to start yet another war for "regime change" based
on lies intended to terrorize the US public into compliance.
Nuclear Reactors, Uranium enrichment, and the BombEnriching uranium
to 3.6% is needed to make "pellets" to fuel nuclear reactors
that generate electricity. This level of uranium enrichment is recognized
to be for civilian use. The troubling kind of uranium enrichment involves
intensively raising the enrichment level to over 90%--or enriching Uranium-235
to weapon-grade capacity.
Pakistan is said to own
up to 50 nuclear bombs. These are devices obtained by enriching Uranium-235
by 90%. Pakistan is said by scientific experts to be the only country
in the world using highly enriched uranium to produce fission bombs.
They have done so as a matter of preference, because A. Q. Khan, the
"father" of the Pakistani nuclear-weapons program, learned
how to produce weapon-grade uranium while employed at URENCO, the highly-enriched-uranium-production
plant in Europe. He mastered the technique of enriching uranium through
a "cascade" of centrifuges (explained below). As you probably
know, the aim of enrichment is to increase the proportion of fissile
Uranium-235 atoms within uranium in order to increase uranium's energy-release
potential as a result of nuclear fission--the process by which certain
atoms of uranium are split to cause a chain reaction. What becomes enriched
uranium-235 is mined as ore, pounded and converted into "yellow
cake," prepared for enrichment by dissolving "yellow cake"
in nitric acid. Then, it is subjected to a series of chemical processes
that convert it into a gas, uranium hexafluoride. This highly corrosive
gas is then processed at conversion plants, using pipes and pumps constructed
from aluminum and nickel alloys. The gas-centrifuge method of enriching
U-235 requires that uranium hexafluoride gas be spun in a cylindrical
chamber at high speed, which causes the slightly denser U-238 to split
from the lighter U-235. Extracted from the bottom of the chamber where
it gravitates, U-238 becomes depleted uranium, a heavy, radioactive
(said to be "slightly" radioactive by the military) metal,
capable of piercing tank armor and other munitions. Clustering at the
center of the chamber, U-235 is collected and fed into another centrifuge,
in a process repeated many times and known as "cascade." A
U-235 atomic bomb requires 20 kilograms of enriched uranium, and has
an explosive power of 50 kilotons. As previously mentioned, Pakistan
has 50 of these in its unregulated, unsupervised nuclear arsenal.
Pakistan's nuclear arsenal
has been accumulated in secret, without inspections or regulations because
Pakistan has not signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT, 1972).
Iran, of course, is a signatory of the NPT-an international courtesy
that the US is apparently eager to use against Iran's interests.
Now, even if we assume that Tehran is seeking to build a uranium nuclear
bomb, it would need a cascade of 1,500 to 1,800 centrifuges, processing
uranium round-the-clock to produce the twenty kilos of enriched U-235
needed to build a primitive uranium bomb (Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists,
Jul/August issue). At its uranium enrichment plant in Natanz, Iran already
has an operational cascade of 164 centrifuges and plans to build another
one. However, the latest UN International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA)
report reveals that at Natanz plans were behind schedule and a second
164-machine cascade was not up and running in August 2006.
The nuclear reactor at Natanz,
therefore, is clearly under-equipped to produce the volume and potency
of enriched uranium needed to build even one crude nuclear bomb in the
near future.
This obvious fact, however,
did not stop the House Intelligence Committee (HIC) from issuing a congressional
report on 23 August 2006, ominously entitled "Recognizing Iran
as a Strategic Threat: An Intelligence Challenge for the United States."
Seething with outrage and professional fury, the IAEA characterized
the report as "erroneous, misleading, and unsubstatiated information."
The IAEA letter singled out
the HIC's characterization of the enrichment facility at Natanz, which
is subject to IAEA inspections, including camera monitoring, as particularly
mendacious. The IAEA letter pointed to a sub-section in the HIC report,
entitled "Evidence for an Iranian Nuclear Weapons Program."
A photograph of Iran's enrichment facility at Natanz was captioned,
"Iran is currently enriching to weapons grade using a 164-machine
centrifuge cascade." The IAEA pointed out that the claim was false.
The small cascade at the Natanz enrichment plant had been enriching
uranium to the level of 3.6 % as required by Iran's stated goal for
producing nuclear fuel. As the IAEA caustically remarked, this hardly
qualifies as "weapons grade."
Heavy-water Reactors and the Plutonium Bomb
Israel secretly obtained
its nuclear arsenal via a different route from the one mapped out by
uranium enrichment. It has gone the heavy-water-reactor route and thus
has taken the plutonium option. [Like Pakistan, Israel is not subject
to inspections or regulations, not being a signatory of the NPT.]
A small amount of plutonium
(about 1%) can be obtained via the U-235 enrichment process that produces
fuel "pellets" (enriched to 3.6%) for nuclear-energy reactors.
Called "reprocessing," this routine involves stripping away
the metallic outer casings of used fuel rods in nuclear reactors before
dissolving them in hot nitric acid. What one gets from this reprocessing
of nuclear waste is some more if highly radioactive waste (about 3%),
uranium (96%), and plutonium (1%). This amount of plutonium obtained
from a reactor's nuclear waste, however, is a negligible and legitimate
by-product, which poses no weaponizing threat according to the scientific
community and the IAEA.
To make plutonium bombs,
there is a more productive route: the heavy-water-reactor route. Heavy-water
reactors derive their name from the use of so-called "heavy water,"
which contains deuterium. Heavy water is a modified form of hydrogen
with more neutrons in its nucleus, which makes it not only literally
"heavier" but also potentially more energetic or explosively
"fissile." Heavy-water reactors offer the advantage that they
can use unrefined natural uranium as fuel (and Iran has that uranium
to mine). In addition, a plutonium nuclear weapon is smaller in size
and weight than its uranium equivalent. The amount of plutonium required
to make a nuclear weapon is only 3.5 to 4 kilograms. Its explosive capacity
is 20 kilotons.
Iran's planned heavy-water
reactor at Arak is a small reactor, designed to replace another, outdated
reactor, on its last leg. The Iranians say that the Arak reactor is
used to produce radioisotopes for medicine and industry, which may be
accurate. But even if they were lying about its civilian use, the heavy-water
reactor, if used to produce plutonium for weapons, could produce at
most enough for a couple of weapons per year, under the best conditions-and
that might be sometime after 2009, the year the plant becomes operational.
Nuclear Double Standards
Now contrast the alarmist
hysteria over Iran's modest, underdeveloped, fully regulated and legal
nuclear program-a decade away from any production of very crude nuclear
weapons- to the nonchalance with which Washignton greets the frenetic
nuclear activities in Pakistan. No pre-dawn vote in Congress to threaten
with sanctions anyone at all! Well, to be perfectly honest, the US congress
feigned to be "shocked" when White House spokesman, Tony,
Snow, said the Bush administration had known all along that Pakistan
had plans to build a large, plutonium-production plant at Khushab's
nuclear site in the Punjab. Under construction since 2000 and possibly
several years from completion, the heavy-water reactor at Khushab will
be capable of producing approximately 200 kilograms of weapons-grade
plutonium each year-or enough for 50 bombs per year. Spotted by independent
analysts in commercial-satellite photos, Pakistan's heavy-water reactor
caused not a ripple of concern to the White House. "We discourage
military use of the facility," Snow unconvincingly declared. "Discourage"?
We're talking about over 200 kilograms of weapon-grade plutonium in
addition to the 10 kilograms (or two bombs per year) of plutonium per
year the small reactor at Khushab already produces!
And the Bush gang targets
Iran? Which has no heavy-water reactor and won't until at least 2009?
Whose uranium enrichment has been operated by small cascade-machines
to perfectly legal levels? Whose Busher's reactor is a light-water reactor
capable of yielding only negligible amounts of plutonium? Whom the IAEA
monitors and supervises with scrupulous zeal?
Clearly, Washington hasn't
the least concern about the proliferation of nuclear weapons. Indeed,
any country in the oil-rich region or its environs that is not seeking
to develop nuclear weapons is living in a fool's paradise. Washington
will crush militant nationalism whatever its nature and wherever it
raises its independent head, calling it "terrorist"-unless
it is armed with nuclear weapons. Call it the "blowback" correlative
of Bush's "nuclear posture review," or the law of inevitable
nuclear proliferation, seeking to insure mutual assured destruction-MAD-
but on a multi-polar global level.
But even in the MADness of
infinite confrontation, you would expect the US Congress to question
the motives of the White House in pressing for sanctions legislation
against Iran for its modest nuclear program while Pakistan, unsupervised
and unregulated, goes berserk with an aggressive program that plans
to add 50 plutonium bombs per year to the 50 uranium bombs it already
has! But that would be the congress of a functioning democracy which
this farcical nation no longer has-and hardly has had in matters of
foreign policy since the advent of Truman's National Security State
at the outset of that other bogus war, the cold one. This country--
its executive, legislative, and judicial bodies-- is so steeped in bloody
lies and malign hypocrisy that it hardly turns a hair at the prospect
of attacking yet another nation, whose people may justifiably and historically
resent the US but whose only wish is to keep its wolfishness out of
their national doors and be left in peace to solve their own problems
and manage their resources as they best see fit.
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