Iran May Be Able to Build an Atomic Bomb in 5 Years, U.S. and Israeli Officials Fear
By Chris Hedges
Jan. 5, 1995
Iran is much closer to producing nuclear weapons than previously thought, and could be less than five years away from having an atomic bomb, several senior American and Israeli officials say.
"The date by which Iran will have nuclear weapons is no longer 10 years from now," a senior official said recently, referring to previous estimates. "If the Iranians maintain this intensive effort to get everything they need, they could have all their components in two years. Then it will be just a matter of technology and research. If Iran is not interrupted in this program by some foreign power, it will have the device in more or less five years."
The reassessment of Iran's nuclear potential is now described by Israeli officials as the most serious threat facing their country.
Senior Israeli officials say that if the program is not halted, they will be forced to consider attacking Iran's nuclear reactors, a tactic they used against Iraq in 1981, when Israeli warplanes bombed an Iraqi reactor.
"When we look at the future and ask ourselves what is the biggest problem we will face in the next decade," a senior Israeli military official said, "Iran's nuclear bomb is at the top of the list."
With a nuclear arsenal, analysts say, Iran could also try to dominate its neighbors on the Persian Gulf, including Iraq, which before the gulf war of 1991 had an advanced nuclear weapons program of its own. Such domination, they say, could lead to Iranian control of the flow and price of oil to the West.
And if Iranian oratory is to be believed, the Islamic Government would support a showdown with the Jewish state, whose very existence, it says, is an affront to the Muslim countries in the Middle East.
Reza Amrollahi, the president of the Iranian Atomic Energy Organization, has repeatedly denied that Iran is trying to build nuclear weapons. He says Iran's nuclear program is only for peaceful purposes. But other Iranian leaders have often stated that Islamic countries must acquire nuclear weapons to counter the American and Israeli arsenals.
Some of the current technology imported by Iran's civilian nuclear program can be used in a weapons program or can be upgraded covertly, Western officials say.'
The acceleration of the Iranian nuclear program represents a defeat for the Clinton Administration's drive to halt the spread of nuclear technology to Iran.
Iran, like Iraq, was to have been isolated by severe sanctions in a policy described by Administration officials as "dual containment." But senior Administration officials interviewed in Washington said their efforts had failed to halt the flow of nuclear technology to Iran.
The most active center for nuclear weapons research and production is in Bushehr, on the Persian Gulf 470 miles south of the capital, Teheran. It has two reactors under construction, each designed to generate up to 1,300 megawatts of electrical power, about as much as the largest reactors in the United States.
So far the Iranians have done little more than amass nuclear material and some equipment, including a neutron source reactor and an isotope separator. They have yet to build, as the North Koreans did, a nuclear reactor that can be used to develop nuclear weapons.
But the Americans and Israelis worry that if the scheduled building programs proceed, Iran will have all the components needed to build atomic weapons by the decade's end.
A prominent specialist on Iran, Dr. Shahram Chubin of the Graduate Institute for International Studies in Geneva, who is the author of a recent article on the Iranian nuclear weapons program, agrees that the Iranians could have nuclear weapons within five years. But he is less certain that Iran would be a serious threat at that point.
"How will a few weapons that can't be developed very far get them anywhere?" Dr. Chubin said in a telephone interview from Geneva. "Here is a country that can't make its own missiles. It has had a missile program for 10 years and still imports missiles with 1950's technology from North Korea.
"Any bomb they would make would probably be a greater threat to themselves than anyone else. No one suggests they have any major functioning installations today in the country, although no one questions their intent. If they would, they could go towards nuclear weapons in a systematic way."
In 1987, analysts say, Iran began an intensive campaign to develop and acquire nuclear weapons, centering on the two conventional power reactors in Bushehr.
The Bushehr project was begun in 1979 but interrupted several times -- by the Islamic revolution led by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini and by war damage inflicted by Iraq during the eight-year war the two countries fought in the 1980's. The Russians have agreed to come in and complete the job, but it is unclear if they have begun their work. The reactors are 80 percent complete, but their rehabilitation is at least two or three years away, the analysts said.
Iran, which spends $2 billion a year on arms, has thus far achieved its aims by buying, rather than developing, nuclear weapons technology. It has acquired nuclear technology from Russia, Pakistan, China, some European companies and former Soviet republics like Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan and Azerbaijan.
Iran is also believed to have recruited scientists from the former Soviet Union and Pakistan who work in Iran or serve as advisers.
The Iranians are also devoting considerable effort to researching the techniques involved in the enrichment of uranium and the reprocessing of plutonium, which can be used to make nuclear weapons. So far, Iran does not have a uranium enrichment plant or plutonium reprocessing plant.
"The problem is that with the prevailing situation in the former Soviet Union, we can't exclude more short cuts happening," said a senior intelligence official. "Then the time will be even less than five years."
The Iranians, in tandem with their effort to build a nuclear arsenal, have a surface-to-surface missile program, backed mostly by China, that when developed or modified could prove capable of delivering nuclear warheads in the region.
The Chinese are setting up an assembly plant in Iran to produce the intermediate range ballistic missiles, the M-9 and M-11, with a range of just a few hundred kilometers.
Iran is also scheduled to receive No Dong 1 missiles from North Korea, with a range of 1,000 kilometers, or 625 miles, meaning they could just reach Israel. Iran also has North Korean Scud-C missiles, with a range of 600 kilometers, or 375 miles.
"I agree that they are trying to develop nuclear weapons and acquire long-range missiles," Dr. Chubin said, "but I don't conclude that Iranians are putting nuclear heads on long-range missiles to aim at anyone else. I think it is more of a defensive thing."
The American Government has persuaded Argentina, India, Spain, Germany and France to prohibit the sale of nuclear technology to Iran's civilian program, believing that such equipment is also being used to further a covert atomic bomb program. In October 1992, Congress passed additional trade restrictions prohibiting American high-technology sales to Iran.
Russia has sold Iran two 440-megawatt power reactors, but construction has been delayed by financing difficulties. China has sold two similar power reactors and has provided two research reactors, but those projects have also been delayed.
China has sold Iran several calutrons, magnetic isotope separation devices that can be used to derive enriched uranium for an atomic bomb. The Chinese have also offered to sell or have sold light-water reactors to Iran. And Israeli officials say Pakistan may have signed an agreement to cooperate with Iran in the production of nuclear weapons.
In January 1992, a House Republican Research Committee reported there was a "98 percent certainty" that Iran had bought at least two Soviet-designed nuclear warheads. But inspectors for the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna were unable to discover the warheads during a trip to Iran.
Russia later said it had accounted for the warheads. But Israeli officials say the warheads may have arrived in Iran and been disassembled for study, in a process called reverse engineering.
The acquisition of the technology in the Soviet-designed warheads provided Iran with a short cut of four to five years in the development its own nuclear warhead, these Israeli officials say.
"The Iranian Government is not a terrorist organization," a senior Israeli military official said. "It is not just trying to get one or two bombs. It wants an arsenal. The warheads are not what they are after, but the technology. They want to be a superpower."
There are two principal centers for nuclear research in Iran. One is near Isfahan, where two small Chinese-built reactors have been installed; the other is in Bushehr.
The Isfahan site, which inaugurated its last reactor in June, is used primarily for research. It is considered too small to be of much use to a nuclear weapons program, and despite the inauguration ceremonies, it is not clear that it is operable.
