Western strategists have long debated the specter of Iran “breaking out” - suddenly showing the ability to explode an atom bomb. But some see a “sneak-out” less visible to UN inspectors as a possibly bigger risk and world powers have calibrated their demands in negotiations with Iran to forestall any such outcome.
Under a “sneak-out” scenario, Western officials and experts say, Iran could build a uranium enrichment plant in secret to make bomb material unbeknownst to the UN nuclear watchdog, now empowered to visit only Tehran’s declared nuclear sites.
To counter this risk, they say, any breakthrough diplomatic settlement with Iran must grant the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) broader surveillance powers in this vast country crisscrossed by remote, often inaccessible mountains and desert.
“Under current circumstances, I believe that a ‘sneak-out’ from an undeclared enrichment facility is more a likely threat than a ‘break-out’ from a declared facility,” said Gary Samore, until last year the top nuclear proliferation expert on US President Barack Obama’s national security staff.
A US National Intelligence Estimate in 2007 offered a similar view, saying the Islamic Republic “probably would use covert facilities ... for the production of highly enriched uranium for a weapon,” if it were to pursue nuclear arms.
Iran, with which six big powers resumed talks on the fringes of the UN General Assembly last week, says it is refining uranium only to lower levels for a future network of nuclear power stations. It rejects Western suspicions that its ultimate, underlying goal is high-enriched uranium for nuclear bombs.
A nuclear “break-out” is usually defined as amassing sufficient weapons-grade uranium for one bomb. Western nuclear analysts believe Iran can now make enough high-enriched uranium for one bomb in a few months’ time.
Any apparent Iranian dash for a nuclear bomb at a known site could well trigger military action by the United States and Israel - and risk a wider Middle East war - to try to prevent Tehran from irreversibly acquiring weapons of mass destruction.
But if Iran were to make fissile material for a weapon at a clandestine site, it could more easily escape detection before it was too late. Although Iran would need more time to compress high-enriched uranium into a missile cone for a workable weapon, this activity would be even harder to discover and prevent.
“If Iran successfully produced enough WGU (weapons-grade uranium) for a nuclear weapon, the ensuing weaponization process might not be detectable until Iran tested its nuclear device underground or otherwise revealed its acquisition of nuclear weapons,” the Institute for Science and International Security (ISIS), a Washington think-tank that has long tracked the Iranian nuclear program, said in a report.
Extent of inspection powers at issue
India tested its first nuclear weapon in 1974, stunning the world and triggering punitive international sanctions, and arch-rival Pakistan followed suit in 1998. But unlike Iran, neither country is a signatory to the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, which bans such doomsday arms. North Korea had quit the NPT by the time it conducted its first nuclear test in 2006.
If Iran also were to opt for weaponizing the enrichment process, “I think it would test in order to demonstrate its nuclear capability to the world and therefore deter military attacks,” Samore said in an email.
He said Iran is not now believed to have any covert site for refining uranium. But the IAEA cannot rule out the possibility of undeclared nuclear activity, unnerving Iran’s US-backed regional Arab rivals and arch-foe Israel, widely believed to have the Middle East’s only nuclear arsenal.
The main stumbling block in the negotiations between Iran and the United States, Russia, China, Britain, France and Germany remains the permissible future capacity of Iran’s enrichment program, with Tehran continuing to resist demands for its scope to be scaled back sharply.
After a two-month hiatus following the failure to reach a diplomatic settlement by a self-imposed July 20 deadline, the talks resumed in New York in mid-September with the aim of reaching a comprehensive, permanent solution by late November.
Iranian President Hassan Rouhani, a conciliation-minded pragmatist whose election last year revived diplomacy with the West after years of increasing sabre-rattling, said in a speech to the UN General Assembly on Thursday the negotiations had been marked by “seriousness and optimism on both sides” and he hoped for a deal in the “short amount of time left.”
But the Islamic Republic, he emphasised, remained committed to its current enrichment program.
World powers, however, will insist on “long-term significant constraints on Iran’s declared enrichment facilities and additional monitoring and inspection measures to help detect covert activities,” Samore said.
