Military strikes on illicit Iranian nuclear materials production sites likely wouldn’t destroy them, according to a new report by the Institute for Science and International Security, a Washington think tank.
The United States is concerned that nuclear materials Iran says it is producing for an electrical reactor actually will be used to produce nuclear weapons, adding to the threat posed by the burgeoning Iranian ballistic missile development program.
That is why the United States is proposing to construct a European Missile Defense system in the Czech Republic and Poland, to shield Europe and the United States from nuclear- tipped Iranian missiles.
Such a ballistic missile shield would be a hedge against the danger that no attack can kill the Iranian nuclear production program, which Iran refuses to halt.
While Israel last year scored a clear success in destroying a clandestine nuclear reactor in Syria, and also destroyed an Iraqi nuclear reactor at Osirak in 1981, the situation in Iran is different, according to the report by David Albright, Paul Brannan, and Jacqueline Shire.
They argue that any assumptions that a strike on Iranian nuclear processing facilities at Natanz and Esfahan also would succeed ignore some salient, and troubling, points.
“It neglects the important differences between a gas centrifuge uranium enrichment program and a reactor-based program, and fails to account for the dispersed, relatively advanced, and hardened nature of Iran’s gas centrifuge facilities,” the report argues.
“It also ignores the years Iran has had to acquire centrifuge items abroad, often illicitly, allowing it to create reserve stocks of critical equipment and raw materials, such as high strength aluminum, unmagnetized ring magnets, and special steels.”
There are a host of hurdles confronting Israel or the United States, in any attempt to knock out or substantially delay Iranian nuclear efforts, the report asserts.
It examines difficulties of a military strike on Iranian facilities, and explores what is known about Iran’s complex of facilities to make centrifuges and related equipment, noting that current knowledge of that complex is lacking. Without such information, an attack is unlikely to significantly delay Iran’s mastery of enrichment with gas centrifuges, the report concludes.
It can be read in full by going to http://www.isis-online.org/ on the Web.