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A Good Deal for Tehran

(Wall Street Journal Europe) Daniel Schwammenthal - In exchange for technical support and a few eased trade restrictions, the P5+1 demand that Iran, as a first step, stop enriching uranium to 20%; ship abroad its stockpile of 20%-enriched uranium; and close the underground Fordo enrichment facility. Faithfully implemented, such a deal would certainly delay parts of Iran's enrichment program. But it would not stop Iran's march toward nuclear-weapons capabilities, and might even offer certain advantages for its atomic plans. Particularly troubling is that Iran would be allowed to keep and even grow its stockpile of 3.5%-enriched uranium, only this time with de-facto international approval. That would be a significant political and military victory for the regime, since it would permit Iran to stay much closer to a bomb. As Olli Heinonen, the former deputy director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, has repeatedly pointed out, mastering low enrichment of 3.5% is 70% of the enrichment effort required for an atomic weapon. With 20%-enriched uranium, you are 90% there. By mid-May, Iran had accumulated enough 3.5% to fuel - if further enriched - at least four nuclear weapons. Critically, partly controlling Tehran's enrichment activities would do nothing to disrupt the other elements of the regime's nuclear-weapons development program, including triggers, computer simulations of nuclear explosions, ballistic missiles and fitting them with nuclear warheads. The writer is director of the AJC Transatlantic Institute in Brussels.
2012-06-13 00:00:00
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