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Message #51208 posted by Torog (Info) June 21, 2003 09:08:21 ET
Iranian Nuclear Weapons Challenges - A Serious Look at the Real Options
The Washington Institute ^ | 6.20.2003 | The Washington Institute
Iranian Nuclear Weapons Challenges
The Washington Institute M. Eisenstadt, M. Knights , J. White
Part I: The Challenges Of U.S. Preventive Action Part II: Operational Challenges Part III: How Might Iran Retaliate?
Iranian Nuclear Weapons, Part I: The Challenges Of U.S. Preventive Action
By Michael Eisenstadt
Having just fought a war to rid Iraq of weapons of mass destruction, and alarmed by fresh signs of dramatic progress by Tehran in the nuclear arena, the United States is pressing the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to declare Iran in violation of its commitments under the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) at the next meeting of the agency's board of governors on June 16. In the coming weeks, it will become clear whether there is a diplomatic option for dealing with Iran's nuclear program. Yet, U.S. policymakers have also likely considered preventive military action against Iran's nuclear infrastructure. Is prevention a viable option for the United States? If so, what are its risks and implications?
Iran's Nuclear Progress
Iran's nuclear program has made steady progress. The power plant at Bushehr is finally approaching completion and, according to Russian officials, may be ready for delivery of reactor fuel later this year. Although not ideally suited for the purpose, the plant could produce enough plutonium for dozens of nuclear weapons per year; moreover, its low-enriched uranium fuel could be diverted and enriched into weapons-grade material.
Iran is also completing a uranium conversion facility at Esfahan to produce uranium hexafluoride feed-stock for its centrifuge program; Iranian officials claim that the plant is nearly ready to begin production. Moreover, a February 2003 IAEA visit revealed that Iran is producing gas centrifuges. At a facility at Natanz, the agency found a small pilot cascade of 160 centrifuges, parts for 1,000 more, and plans to have 5,000 up and running within two years -- in a facility large enough to accommodate tens of thousands of centrifuges. If Iran tested these existing centrifuges before commencing mass production -- it seems implausible that they were not tested -- it may have violated its NPT commitments.
In short, Iran appears well on the way to attaining all of the elements needed to produce large quantities of fissile material by either the plutonium or uranium-enrichment routes. It could produce its first nuclear weapon in one to three years, turning out enough fissile material for dozens of weapons a year. Hence, the window of opportunity for effective preventive action (if such a window still exists) is more likely to be measured in months than years.
The Challenges of Prevention
Preventive action will not stop a determined proliferator as far advanced as Iran, though it could cause delays. The principal goal of U.S. action would be to delay Iran's nuclear program long enough to allow for the possible emergence of new leadership in Tehran that is willing to eschew nuclear weapons (which seems improbable) or that is more likely to act responsibly should it obtain such weapons.
Intelligence Challenges. To succeed, preventive action must inflict significant damage on key facilities associated with both Iran's plutonium and uranium-enrichment programs. Accomplishing this objective would require a rather complete picture of Iran's nuclear program, including knowledge about possible clandestine facilities. Recent experience in Iraq and North Korea is not encouraging; for years, both countries successfully hid large parts of their nuclear programs from the United States, which may have similar gaps in its knowledge about Iran's nuclear program.
Technical Challenges. The technical processes related to fissile material production create both vulnerabilities and challenges. Plutonium programs may be vulnerable to interdiction due to their reliance on large reactors that produce significant signatures. Destroying the reactor at Bushehr could set back Iran's plutonium program several years, provided Iran is not building or operating a clandestine plutonium production reactor elsewhere. The Bushehr reactor would have to be targeted prior to start-up to avoid exposing civilians downwind to fallout.
Centrifuge programs pose a more complex set of challenges. A large number of workshops and factories may be involved in producing and assembling centrifuges, and they can be widely dispersed and easily hidden. Centrifuge cascades can be housed in small, dispersed, nondescript facilities, as well as in huge plants such as the one at Natanz. If preventive action is to have a long-term impact, both production and enrichment facilities would have to be destroyed, which may not be practical. The uranium conversion plant at Esfahan may therefore be the weak link in the chain; destroying it could set back Iran's centrifuge program several years, provided Iran does not possess a pilot plant or duplicate facility elsewhere.
Political Challenges. There seems to be broad support in Iran for the government's efforts to acquire nuclear weapons. Thus, should it act preventively, the United States must ensure that such action does not poison the reservoir of pro-American goodwill among young Iranians, thereby complicating efforts to encourage political change and improve U.S.-Iranian relations. From a political perspective, overt U.S. military action would be the least desirable option. To resolve this dilemma, the United States might undertake covert action or encourage preventive action by its allies.
Other than Israel, few, if any, U.S. allies would be willing or able to carry out such an operation. Moreover, overt Israeli action would almost certainly be seen as inspired by Washington, and Iran might be tempted to strike back in ways that would heighten tensions between Israel and its neighbors and harm U.S. interests (e.g., encouraging Palestinian terrorism against Israeli or American targets; goading the Lebanese Hizballah -- with its 8,000-plus katyusha rockets -- to heat up the border with Israel). Israel may be willing to accept these risks in order to deal with a perceived existential threat.
Covert action would be the most politically expedient way to disrupt Iran's nuclear program, as it would reduce the risks of a political backlash and complicate identification of a target for retaliation. U.S. intelligence, however, would have to recruit well-placed assets in key facilities in both the plutonium and uranium-enrichment programs; for this reason, the prospects for success seem remote.
Overt military action (e.g., cruise missiles; strike aircraft) may offer the best hope for striking all of Iran's critical nuclear facilities at once. But overt action is politically problematic. It could prompt a backlash among Iranians formerly sympathetic to the United States, strengthen the hand of hardliners, and spur the regime to retaliate against U.S. interests in the Gulf or elsewhere. Should overt action be deemed necessary, Washington could best explain its intervention in terms that some of the many Iranians hostile to the country's hardline clerical leadership might understand: a desire to deny the hardliners -- who support repression at home and terrorism abroad -- access to nuclear weapons.
Conclusion
Successful U.S. prevention would require exceptionally complete intelligence; near flawless military execution; and deft poststrike diplomacy to mitigate nationalist/anti-American backlash, deter retaliation and, most important, catalyze political change in Iran. The complex, daunting, and somewhat contradictory nature of these challenges (e.g., successful prevention could harm short-term prospects for political change and complicate long-term prospects for rapprochement with a new Iran) only underscores the importance of exhausting diplomatic options before giving serious consideration to military action. Washington, moreover, must supplement these efforts with a serious push to prevent North Korea from emerging as a nuclear supplier to Iran and others. Time is short, and whether it chooses diplomatic or military tools, the United States must act soon, vis-a-vis both Iran and North Korea.
Michael Eisenstadt is a senior fellow at The Washington Institute.
Iranian Nuclear Weapons, Part II: Operational Challenges
By Michael Knights
This PolicyWatch is the second in a three-part series. Part I (PolicyWatch No. 760, "The Challenges of U.S. Preventive Action," by Michael Eisenstadt) examined the political and military challenges of preventing an Iranian nuclear breakout; Part III, by Jeffrey White, will examine potential Iranian responses to preemption.
Background
Counterproliferation strikes on nuclear sites are uncommon but by no means unprecedented. Germany's embryonic nuclear program was attacked during World War II, Iraq's Osiraq nuclear plant was bombed by Iran in 1980 and by Israel in 1981, and Iran's Bushehr reactor site was attacked by Iraq throughout 1984-1988. During the 1991 Gulf War, the United States set a precedent by attacking the al-Tuwaitha nuclear site while radioactive materials were present. In January 1993, the United States fired forty-four Tomahawk missiles at a suspected Iraqi uranium enrichment facility at Zafaraniyah. By the time Operation Desert Fox was launched in December 1998 with the aim of stunting Iraq's weapons of mass destruction (WMD) program, Baghdad had learned to disperse and conceal its WMD infrastructure within civilian dual-use industries. This forced the United States to strike indirectly at Iraqi WMD capabilities through military industries supporting the development of delivery systems. Iran appears to have learned the lessons of previous counterproliferation strikes; its nuclear program presents a difficult set of potential targets for U.S. forces to locate and attack.
Counterproliferation Targets
There are two fuels that can be used for nuclear weapons -- highly enriched uranium (HEU) and plutonium -- and Iran appears to be pursuing both routes. The HEU fuel cycle involves a chain of processes, each requiring facilities that may or may not serve as viable counterproliferation targets:
- Facilities for mining and milling uranium ore provide few targets; mine-heads cannot be permanently closed using conventional weapons, and milling facilities are relatively cheap to fabricate and easy to conceal.
- Uranium hexafluoride (UF6) conversion is undertaken at the Rudan Nuclear Research Center near Shiraz, which represents a primary target for counterproliferation strikes.
- Uranium enrichment facilities present another vital but problematic target set. The large site at Natanz may currently hold over 1,000 gas centrifuges, and it is scheduled to house 5,000 by 2005. Some of the buildings under construction there are partly buried and hardened with two-meter-thick walls.
- The industrial base of centrifuge production would need to be eliminated; otherwise, Iran could readily construct new enrichment facilities that are smaller and more nondescript. Specialized metallurgical design and manufacturing facilities (e.g., the National Iranian Steel Company; the Applied Research Center) are not required for centrifuge design, which involves relatively simple engineering techniques that have not changed since the 1940s. Finding and destroying all potential enrichment facilities would be a very daunting task.
- Fuel fabrication and bomb assembly facilities are required to weaponize HEU, but they do not have signatures that can be detected by satellites or aircraft; hence, it is unknown whether such sites exist in Iran.
As for the plutonium route, nuclear reactors remain the weakest link. Vulnerable, fixed, and highly visible on Iran's exposed southern coast, the Bushehr light-water reactor being constructed by Russia would be an easy target. Despite strong air defenses, the reactor halls and their vulnerable cores are essentially indefensible to stand-off precision-guided weapons. Preventing casualties among the 1,000 Russians working at the site could prove challenging. Because a pre-attack warning could spur Iran to deploy human shields, the best means of reducing the risk to foreigners would be careful timing of the strike outside their working hours.
A covertly assembled Iranian reactor would be difficult to detect during construction but relatively easy to locate once operational. The Arak heavy-water production plant -- a precursor to development of a heavy-water reactor -- is vulnerable, and future heavy-water production sites would be difficult to camouflage due to their distinct physical profile. If diplomacy or military action denied the Iranians the option of large reactors, they would be forced to either procure spent fuel rods from an outside source or scrape together spent fuel from their light-water research reactors -- a laborious process that would slow weapons development to a crawl.
Breaking the plutonium fuel cycle at the reprocessing stage would be very difficult. Iran is likely to favor parallel development of a number of smaller "disposable" reprocessing plants, as opposed to large sites with distinctive isotopic and heat signatures. Such plants could remain undetected for much of their short lives.
The Expanding Scope of Operations
The operational challenges of attacking Iran's nuclear program from the air are manifold. One approach would be to identify and target the most difficult element to replace, a strategy called "bottleneck" targeting. From what is known publicly, the key node in Iran's uranium-enrichment program is the Isafahan UF6 facility; in the plutonium program, it is the Bushehr reactor. To be sure, Iran could develop alternatives; for instance, smaller amounts of UF6 could be produced at the Physics Research Center at Sharif University of Technology in Tehran, and there may be covert sites as well. Nevertheless, attacks on the key nodes would delay Iranian nuclear weapons development by at least a few years.
Such bottleneck targeting would be a necessity if Israel chose to strike Iran's nuclear program. Israeli air forces would face a far longer and better defended route of attack than they did in the Osiraq strike, and regional states would be unlikely to support an attack on Iran (e.g., Turkey could refuse basing privileges; Arab states could deny overflight rights). Moreover, a manned aircraft strike would require massive refueling support, while the long-range strike capabilities of Israeli submarines remain uncertain, reducing the scope of an attack to a few targets in western Iran.
If the United States decided to preempt Iran's nuclear program, it could consider attacking a wider range of nuclear targets throughout the country, presumably including the Natanz centrifuge complex and, perhaps, the Arak heavy-water facility. Above-ground targets such as nuclear reactors could be attacked with cruise missiles, eliminating the challenge of securing basing rights and navigating air defenses. A wider strike would require the use of manned aircraft, however, which are much more capable of destroying buried and hardened targets. Although stealth aircraft could be used, their radar-defeating characteristics are typically supported with strikes on air defense systems. Iran's air defense system would require a substantial suppression effort, involving strikes on command centers, radar networks, and a largely unmapped web of mobile and fixed surface-to-air missile batteries. Because forward bases in the Persian Gulf and the Indian Ocean would probably not be made available to the United States, this larger effort would require intensive use of aircraft based on carriers, which could be vulnerable to Iranian antishipping attacks.
A U.S. preemptive strike would also have to take into consideration Iran's potential reaction (the subject of Part III of this series). The United States has security commitments to preempt Iranian retaliation against its Gulf bases, its Gulf Cooperation Council allies, and commercial shipping. That might require strikes on Iran's Shahab-3 long-range ballistic missiles, numerous mobile theater ballistic missiles, antishipping missiles, and certain Iranian naval and air units. Such commitments would draw considerably on those assets needed for strikes on nuclear targets, prolonging the length of any counterproliferation air campaign.
The bottom line is that the United States would find it difficult to limit an air operation against Iran to a small set of targets, as was done in the 1998 Desert Fox counterproliferation strike against Iraq. As a result, a preemptive strike against Iran could become a substantial operation.
Michael Knights is the Mendelow defense fellow at The Washington Institute.
Iranian Nuclear Weapons, Part III: How Might Iran Retaliate?
By Jeffrey White
This PolicyWatch is the third in a three-part series. Part I, by Michael Eisenstadt, examined the political and military challenges of preventing an Iranian nuclear breakout; Part II, by Michael Knights, examined the operational challenges of preemptive action.
A U.S. or "coalition" strike against Iran's nuclear program would be an exercise in high-stakes compellence. Although the physical results of such a strike (e.g., amount of damage inflicted; number of years by which the Iranian nuclear program would be set back) are uncertain, the consequences for U.S.-Iranian relations are not. Whatever the core purposes of the Iranian nuclear program -- defensive-deterrent or offensive-coercive -- attacking a program of vital national importance is tantamount to initiating long-term hostilities with Iran. Washington must assume that Iran would seek to punish its attackers. Its reaction to a strike, especially over the mid- to long-term, would be calculated, creative, and challenging for the United States and any participating allies. Iran would be prepared to wait to deliver punishment, maximizing its chances and effects through careful planning and execution.
Nature of the Attack
To a degree, the Iranian reaction would likely be contingent on the nature of the attack on its nuclear program. It is quite possible, however, that the Iranians would react to even a limited strike as if it were a general attack on the program, perhaps even on the regime and state. Given the broad scope of the Iranian program, the United States would have to mount a comprehensive attack aimed at several key facilities in order to significantly stunt its progress. Any such operations would need to be precise and effective. Key facilities and components would need to be completely destroyed or rendered useless, and this level of damage is not always easy to achieve.
To the extent that the United States could obscure its role via a covert strike, the Iranian reaction might be less focused. Yet, there is little chance that responsibility for a comprehensive attack, even if conducted by covert means, could be avoided for long. Indeed, Iran might react against the United States even if the attack were carried out by a U.S. ally such as Israel.
A direct U.S. attack with cruise missiles and manned aircraft would have the best prospects for setting back Iran's nuclear program. Yet, such an attack could evolve into a large and complex campaign, requiring significant support operations to suppress Iranian air defenses; provide combat search-and-rescue services; eliminate Iran's ability to retaliate immediately with air, missile, or naval units; and conduct "re-strikes" if the initial attacks were less successful than intended.
Reaction
Iran's reaction to U.S. strikes can be considered in three time frames: immediate, mid-term, and long-term. In the immediate period, including during the strikes themselves, Iran would undertake primarily defensive measures. It would mount the most robust defense it could with its air and air-defense forces. It would also attempt to attack any locatable launch points for the strikes. As the operation unfolded, Tehran would assess whether it represented a limited attack on the program or a comprehensive attack on the regime. Tehran would then place noninvolved forces on alert, disperse high-value assets (including leadership assets and missile forces), and implement contingency plans (including internal security plans) for a wider attack. It might also prepare to close the Straits of Hormuz, readying mines, small boats, and coastal defense missiles and reinforcing its presence on the Persian Gulf islands.
As the attack concluded, Iran would assess the damage done and assign responsibility. Significant losses to the civilian population from the release of radioactive material would be an especially dangerous situation, with Iran potentially reacting by employing chemical or biological weapons. Even if its immediate reaction were completely conventional, however, Iran could rapidly broaden its effect by involving other states in the region, striking at U.S. assets in reach, and threatening oil shipments through the straits. Hence, the United States would likely have to contend with a general Gulf crisis.
Mid-term Reaction. In the mid-term, and assuming the situation did not rapidly escalate to major hostilities, Tehran would adopt a more deliberate approach. Iranian decisionmakers would begin weighing options for a calculated and appropriate response. They would launch a political-diplomatic offensive in the hopes of characterizing Iran as the aggrieved party, Finlandizing or intimidating regional players, and establishing the basis for the resumption of its nuclear program. They would then take available defensive and punitive measures in the region consistent with their political strategy. More important, they would initiate planning for strategic, long-term retaliation.
Long-term Reaction. In the long-term, Iran would attempt to take steps that would insure itself against another attack on its nuclear program or a broader attack on the regime. Tehran would almost certainly rebuild the program, reflecting its status as a high-value national asset. Unless significant numbers of scientists and technicians were killed in the strikes, there is no reason why Tehran could not restart the program; as long as it possesses the necessary knowledge and skills, Iran will have the basis for such a program. Indeed, Iran would likely accelerate both its nuclear and long-range-missile efforts in order to achieve a measure of deterrence as quickly as possible. The regime would also increase security for the program by instituting or increasing hardening, dispersal, redundancy, and active defense measures.
In addition, Tehran would likely plan and then implement asymmetric attacks on high-value U.S. and allied targets. A number of such possibilities exist, including using Hizballah to attack Israel with long-range rockets from southern Lebanon; launching asymmetric attacks on allied forces or on the transitional government in Iraq; attacking U.S. allies in the Gulf; or sponsoring terrorist operations against U.S. interests abroad or on U.S. soil. By using proxy elements, Tehran probably has a better chance of successfully arguing for plausible denial (at least with some audiences) than Washington would for any attack on Iran. Finally, the regime would attempt to use the U.S. attack as a means of rallying domestic political support. Any political forces seeking accommodation with Washington would be put on the defensive, if not written off completely.
Implications
The implications of a U.S. or allied strike against Iran's nuclear program are considerable. The United States would have to be prepared for a long-term conflict with an Iran that would seek out and attack weak points. Washington must weigh the costs and benefits of facing a more overtly hostile Iran following a strike as opposed to a nuclear-armed Iran in the not-too-distant future. Washington will also have to weigh the short-term benefit of delaying Iran's nuclear program against the possible long-term consequence of undermining those forces in Iran that want to improve U.S.-Iranian relations.
In the wake of an attack on Iran, Washington would need to demonstrate "escalation dominance" -- that is, holding other high-value Iranian targets hostage while making clear that still-worse things could happen to Iran if it retaliated against important U.S. targets or interests. The United States must also be ready to defend any of its allies that are within Iran's reach.
Jeffrey White, a retired U.S. government intelligence analyst specializing in military and security affairs, is an associate of The Washington Institute.
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