Mark Jensen: Translations from the French
Commentary
French expert warns August is 'crucial month' for IranIn Friday's Le Figaro (Paris) Thérèse Delpech published the alarmist op-ed piece translated below, claiming that in "one and one-half months . . . Iran will have more than 60 tons of uranium hexaflouride, which can be enriched by Tehran in the name of its supposed 'right' to enrichment, a 'right' that is nowhere guaranteed in the NPT, especially for a country that violates its agreements, and the trick will be turned. Iran will have enough uranium-235 for several nuclear warheads." -- (A U.S. government web site asserts that the U.S. Dept. of Energy has 704,000 tons of uranium hexaflouride in stock, about 15% the weight of the Great Pyramid at Giza.) -- Its gist is that by postponing at least until the end of September U.N. Security Council consideration of the matter of its nuclear program, wily Iranians will have succeeded in evading the international community's effort to keep it from obtaining nuclear weapons. " Iran will therefore have its bomb," writes Delpech, "and all those -- European, Russians, and Americans -- who have declared that this was 'unacceptable' will have to face the consequences of the choices they made in August 2005." -- The argument appears aimed to drum up support for military intervention, though this possibility is mentioned nowhere in the article. -- Delpech also reports that when IAEA inspectors who went to Isfahan two weeks ago, "Europeans charged with negotiations discovered on this occasion that it was possible to resume the very first phase of conversion without the seals being broken"; we have not seen this claim, which implies that conversion may have been going on all along, made elsewhere (and note that she makes the odd assertion that it was "Europeans charged with negotiation" who "discovered" this, not the IAEA inspectors themselves). -- Thérèse Delpech is a researcher at CERI, a Paris think tank on the international political system funded by the French government. -- Delpech has about 20 years of experience in nuclear non-proliferation matters and has worked both for the French government (where she took up the post of director of strategic affairs for the Commissariat à l'Énergie Atomique ['Atomic Energy Commission'] in 1997) and for UNMOVIC. -- In evaluating her arguments, it should be remembered that in March 2003 asserted in formal testimony to a committee of the French National Assembly that Iraq had WMDs, and a few months later proposed that France should admit it had "gone too far" in opposing the U.S. effort to obtain a second U.N. Security Council resolution before the war. -- She is also said to have worked for the RAND Corporation and to have participated in the May 2005 Bilderberg group gathering. -- For years she has been warning for years that Iran is bent on acquiring nuclear weapons for the purpose of dominating the Persian Gulf region. --Mark
[Translated from Le Figaro (Paris)] Debates & opinions Nuclear
IRAN: AUGUST, THE CRUCIAL MONTH ** After the resumption of activity at the Isfahan plant **
Le Figaro (Paris) http://www.lefigaro.fr/debats/20050819.FIG0059.html?202853 The summer period is not a break for everyone. When the AIEA inspectors arrived in Iran on Aug. 8, they were taken directly to the Isfahan site in order to place with great urgency cameras and other means of surveillance preliminary to the resumption of uranium conversion activities. There, two surprises were encountered. First, the inspectors were surprised. Usually they need three days to accomplish this sort of operation, and they thought they had nothing decisive to do before the governning board met the next day in Vienna. But they had to face facts: the Iranians were in a very great hurry. Why? It is fair to ask this question, since the only Iranian reactor, at Bushehr, has a guaranteed fuel supply for ten years, thanks to two contracts signed with Russia in February 2005. It is hard to justify in terms of a civilian program the feverish resumption of this conversion, so briskly accomplished. The second, rather disagreeable surprise came when the Europeans charged with negotiations discovered on this occasion that it was possible to resume the very first phase of conversion without the seals being broken. Contrary to what they were expecting, there were no seals on the first machines that were restarted! Explanations have been demanded at Vienna. The answers have not always been as clear as the questions. This was the situation when the governing board met last week. Given that the resumption had taken place, it was up to the thirty-five governors to draw conclusions from a situation whose gravity they were all the better able to appreciate given that the Iranian matter has been a specialty of theirs since the fall of 2002. The resolution they adopted shows that they have decided, willy-nilly, oh well, to allow time to work in Iran's favor. All they produced, in fact, was one more demand for that the suspension be restored, along with a request that the director of the IAEA present by Sept. 3 a complete report on the inspections the agency has set up. There was nothing in the text about what would happen should Iran not obey. The late date for the report requested from the AIEA also raises questions, since the Isfahan machines have been working continuously since Aug. 8, and it's a real "race against time" that has begun. This expression was used in an interview granted to Le Figaro by Pierre Goldschmidt the day he left his job as IAEA's director of inspections.(1) Why did he do that? For one very simple reason. Conversion is certainly an early phase of the fuel cycle, since it precedes enrichment, but it's the most vulnerable point of the Iranian program, since the site of the Isfahan plant is known, and there is most probably no clandestine facility of this type on Iranian territory. On the other hand, once conversion is finished, the products can be stocked in the tunnels discovered by the IAEA but not declared by Iran, and the next phase, enrichment, is much harder to observe, because the existence of centrifuges assembled clandestinely on an unidentified site is the working hypothesis of all who are following the Iranian case. This hypothesis has been expressed publicly twice: the first time, when Col. Qadhafi's revelations in December 2003 permitted identification of an international network of Pakistani origin that had sold various needed elements of a military nuclear program not only to Libya but to other countries, including Iran. Tehran had to acknowledge in February 2004 that it had acquired from Islamabad plans for much more sophisticated centrifuges than those that had been declared earlier to the IAEA. What had Iran done with those plans since 1995? The question is still unanswered, but at the beginning of 2004, just before an IAEA inspection, six buildings were razed on the Lavizan site, and several meters of soil was dug up to prevent samples being taken. Clandestine centrifuges may have been located there before being moved elsewhere. The second time that the hypothesis of a clandestine set of centrifuges was made public occurred quite recently, in an interview with Hassan Rohani, the chief Iranian negotiator from the former regime. Summarizing what he had done, he claimed that negotiations with the Europeans had allowed Iran to gain precious time to make advances without interference in a certain number of key areas, and in particular to assemble "a great number of centrifuges." Now this is not at all in conformity with what is known to the IAEA, which only counts 164 working centrifuges. Tehran has perhaps been asked to explain this surprising statement, but if so it was with the utmost discretion. Yet the Iranian negotiator was admitting a clear violation of the Paris agreement. Today the issue is: how much time does Iran need for its conversion campaign? Estimates are one and one-half months. At the end of this period, Iran will have more than 60 tons of uranium hexaflouride, which can be enriched by Tehran in the name of its supposed "right" to enrichment, a "right" that is nowhere guaranteed in the NPT, especially for a country that violates its agreements, and the feat will have been accomplished. Iran will have enough uranium-235 for several nuclear warheads; it already has the means to deliver them. Of course, this presumes that important progress has been made in delivery. But that seems precisely to be the case: according to a recent Wall Street Journal article, Western intelligence agencies are in possession of detailed information on this subject, which they even shared with the IAEA in July. Thus key is not how the different permanent member of the Security Council will react to it possibly taking up the matter is not what really counts. The key is, above all, the date that this takes place. Transferring the matter to New York cannot occur before the beginning of the month of September. The U.N. summit devoted to reform of the institution is to take place shortly thereafter. Such an important subject should not be "polluted" by the Iranian affair. So nothing will be done before the end of September. It will then be too late to brandish threats that mean anything to Tehran, regardless of the determination of the various actors. Iran will therefore have its bomb, and all those -- European, Russians, and Americans -- who have declared that this was "unacceptable" will have to face the consequences of the choices they made in August 2005. --Thérèse Delpech is a researcher associated with CERI [Centre d'Études et de Recherches Internationales; in October she is publishing L'Ensauvagement: Le Retour de la barbarie au XXIe siècle (Grasset) ['Ensavagement: The Return of Barbarism in the 21st Century']. (1) See Le Figaro, June 30, 2005.
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