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As the Enrichment Machines Spin On in Iran

[Economist-UK] If you are locked eyeball to eyeball with an adversary as wily as Iran, it does not make much sense to do something that emboldens your opponent and sows defeatism among your friends. But that, it is now clear, is precisely what America's spies achieved when they said in December that, contrary to their own previous assessments, Iran stopped its secret nuclear-weapons program in 2003. Ahmadinejad immediately called the American National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) a "great victory" for his country. Western diplomats are despondent and international efforts to get Iran to stop enriching uranium and working on plutonium have been thrown into confusion. Already difficult diplomacy has got harder as the NIE produced an abrupt softening in the positions of the Russians and Chinese. If Iran is out of the nuclear-weapons business, why the gloom and doom? Although the NIE talks of a halt to Iran's "weapons program," its conclusions relate only to the design and engineering effort and past hidden uranium experiments. But the weaponization work the NIE thinks was halted is easy to restart and easy to hide. Hence the fury of some of America's closest European allies at the NIE's selective and mangled message. Unchanged is the suspicion hanging over Iran's nuclear intentions. Ahmadinejad has never been able to explain convincingly why Iran is the first country to have built a uranium-enrichment plant without having a single civilian nuclear-power reactor that could burn its output (the ones Russia has all but completed at Bushehr will operate only on Russian-made fuel). Although the 3,000 fast-spinning centrifuge machines it has up and running at Natanz are enriching only to the low levels used in civilian reactors, running the material through a few more times, or reconfiguring the centrifuge cascades, could soon produce uranium of weapons grade.
2008-02-01 01:00:00
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