Iran's Dangerous Nuclear Bluff

Forbes

President Obama’s historic phone conversation with Iran’s new President Hassan Rouhani sure made the meetings of the U.N. General Assembly exciting (Kurt Eichenwald, Newsweek). It’s finally calling a very serious bluff – that Iran has a nuclear weapon, or can build one quickly.

This is a very dangerous bluff, indeed. But it has certainly served a purpose. Countries having the bomb never seem to get attacked. But Iran doesn’t have one and is unlikely to ever get one. The only nuclear thing they have that works is a nuclear power program.

When A.Q. Khan was selling nuclear weapons information, the Ayatollahs thought ramping up their nuclear infrastructure to give them some options would be a good thing, especially after the chemical weapons assaults against them during the 1980s from our old friend and ally Saddam.

Iran kept going on resurrecting the Bushehr civilian nuclear power project with a 1000 MW reactor, which has gone very well, and about which we don’t care at all since you can’t make bombs with it. But they also wanted to build a nuclear deterrent, as a specter if not a reality. If they never got to weapons, they’d still have nuclear power as well as their own enrichment and nuclear manufacturing capabilities. It seemed like a good strategy.

But things change. Old orders are falling. The region is in upheaval and Iran’s theocracy has decided that the cost/benefit of maintaining an expensive, useless nuclear program that is still a long way from producing a reliable weapon, while being starved by a barrage of sanctions, on the heels of a global economic meltdown, has now gone into the too-much-cost-and-not-enough-benefit category.

It doesn’t take a genius to know when to change the game plan. The new overtures from Rouhani are real, and borne of a sufficient number of powerful men in Iran’s theocracy realizing that their survival requires maintaining their power. After all, they’re just strong-man oligarchs, not wingnuts like other rogues who shall remain nameless.

But let’s review the three stages to making a reliable nuclear weapon – weapons-grade material, weaponization, and delivery.

First, and most difficult, is the fissile (split-able) material, plutonium-239 or uranium-235. You need about 55 lbs of U-235, but only about 15 lbs of Pu-239, which is why Pu is better on missiles. Iran does not have this. North Korea does have enough Pu and has successfully tested a serviceable weapon.

The most difficult part of the whole process is making weapons-grade Pu-239 or U-235. You need a weapons-reactor for the first (not a power reactor, wrong isotopic mix among many other things) along with centrifuges (or the old-style gaseous diffusion) to make the original reactor fuel.

But you only need centrifuges for a U-weapon. Iran chose U as the fissile material as it is easier to just enrich, rather than produce Pu and reprocess it to sufficient purity. Besides, Khan gave them the technology for enriching U.

But both materials need to be almost pure, greater than 90%. I know everyone discusses 20% as a theoretical limit. 20% is technically highly-enriched, compared to the original 0.7% U-235 in the yellowcake produced from mining U-ore, but it needs to be >90% to be reliable in a weapon.

And you want it to be reliable, trust me. If you’re going to make the big decision to field a nuke, it better work. It’s why there’s so much testing associated with a weapons program.

But Iran doesn’t have even 20% enriched U-235. They have the ability to make it, although their centrifuges have not performed up to the level of their hype, but it seems like the rulers never decided to actually make a weapon, just to make everyone think they could.

The second step is you need to weaponize the U or Pu. This takes some sophisticated know-how, high-explosives, the correct shape, detonators, initiators, assembly and specific machining that are not trivial. It’s so hard, in fact, that only nine States have managed it. Last time I checked Russia had about 5,000 devices, the U.S. a few less (both down over 90% from their original inventories so now we can’t blow up the world anymore), France with just under 300, China only a few dozen less than that, Pakistan about 200, the U.K. 195, India 150, Israel 80, and the DPRK about 5.

Third, you need a delivery system, either a truck, plane, boat or, best of all, a missile.

Iran has not yet succeeded in these three steps, although their missile systems are not too bad. Unfortunately, North Korea has most everything but the missile system, and they are working very hard on that (of course, no one wants to talk about attacking the much scarier DPRK). What we really don’t like is Iran working with the DPRK.

So continued talking about bombing or attacking Iran is pretty foolish, it doesn’t accomplish anything useful, and the cost/benefit to the United States would really be in the negative. All-in-all, Rouhani’s willingness to talk is a very good thing, and should be encouraged by everyone, even Prime Minister Netanyahu.