The Annual Threat Assessment of the U.S. Intelligence Community is out, and it’s official: cyber is the new black.
(The version presented to the Senate is linked above. Here’s the basically identical House version.)
Judging by the many threats ably described in this report, life is short, so let’s skip to the good stuff. Pages 13-15 summarize the IC’s view of missile and nuclear developments in rogue states the Axis of Evil Iran and North Korea. Today’s topic is Iran. Tomorrow — barring the Apocalypse or unforeseen delays — we’ll consider North Korea.
[Update | Feb. 7, 2010. After a Snowpocalypse-induced delay, we have a North Korea post.]
Two areas are especially worth a look: the analysis of the Qom enrichment facility, and the handling of the 2007 National Intelligence Estimate on Iran, a subject of fierce public debate, probably for years to come.
Qom — What is it Good For?
After summarizing what the IAEA reports say about Natanz, we get to Qom, a.k.a. Fordow, a.k.a. FFEP. Let’s focus on a few points of interest:
Second, Iran has been constructing—in secret until last September—a second uranium enrichment plant deep under a mountain near the city of Qom. It is unclear to us whether Iran’s motivations for building this facility go beyond its publicly claimed intent to preserve enrichment know-how if attacked, but the existence of the facility and some of its design features raise our concerns. The facility is too small to produce regular fuel reloads for civilian nuclear power plants, but is large enough for weapons purposes if Iran opts configure it for highly enriched uranium production. It is worth noting that the small size of the facility and the security afforded the site by its construction under a mountain fit nicely with a strategy of keeping the option open to build a nuclear weapon at some future date, if Tehran ever decides to do so.
Deep under a mountain. This echoes the characterization of the senior administration official who spoke to the press on September 25, 2009: “a very heavily protected, very heavily disguised facility.” But as Geoff Forden pointed out shortly thereafter, the available images show a cut-and-cover facility, neither deeply buried nor heavily protected by anything but its camouflage (“very heavily disguised”) and local air defenses. Is there some misunderstanding at work here?
To preserve enrichment know-how if attacked. This is almost what the head of the AEOI, Ali Akbar Salehi, told reporters at the time, but not quite:
“This site is at the base of a mountain and was selected on purpose in a place that would be protected against aerial attack. That’s why the site was chosen adjacent to a military site,” Salehi told a news conference. “It was intended to safeguard our nuclear facilities and reduce the cost of active defense system. If we had chosen another site, we would have had to set up another aerial defense system.”
The stated point, it appears, was to keep centrifuges spinning. The potential non-military application for uranium enrichment (in a hidden location, no less) after declared nuclear facilities have been destroyed is somewhat elusive. Bureaucratic inertia, as some have argued? A desire to prevent the West from imposing a “suspension by other means,” even if it has to be kept a deep secret? Or, as the IC testimony appears to suggest, to keep personnel trained up on centrifuge operations until large-scale operations could resume?
If Iran opts configure it for highly enriched uranium production. On the morning of September 25, President Obama stated flatly that “the size and configuration of this facility is inconsistent with a peaceful program.” It appears that the IC has now walked back the part about configuration, perhaps on the basis of findings from IAEA visits. Does this mean that the President was misinformed or misspoke, or did something change at the site, perhaps in the three weeks that passed before the IAEA’s initial visit? [Update: Peter Crail of ACA points out that the language on this point in the ATA is consistent with a Q&A released last September.]
Keeping the option open. This bit tracks with the September 25 background briefing: “our information is that the Iranians began this facility with the intent that it be secret, and therefore giving them an option of producing weapons-grade uranium without the international community knowing about it.”
Reaffirming the 2007 NIE, Sorta
The ATA states,
Iran’s technical advancement, particularly in uranium enrichment, strengthens our 2007 NIE assessment that Iran has the scientific, technical and industrial capacity to eventually produce nuclear weapons, making the central issue its political will to do so. These advancements lead us to reaffirm our judgment from the 2007 NIE that Iran is technically capable of producing enough HEU for a weapon in the next few years, if it chooses to do so.
But what about the other judgments? This passage does comment directly on the contentious questions of whether Iran A) suspended research on weaponization in late 2003, as the NIE had claimed, and B) later resumed the work, a possibility the NIE considered but did not embrace.
This question was stirred up again by the appearance of the celebrated or infamous uranium deuteride document in the Times of London last December. In early January, the New York Times reported that “top advisers” to the President had reached the conclusion that the NIE had been mistaken about the weaponization question, a view said to be shared in Britain, France, Germany, and Israel. The NYT did not mention the views of the U.S. IC, but a few days later, DIA Director Ronald Burgess told Voice of America something close to a reaffirmation of the contested point, but not quite:
“The bottom line assessments of the NIE still hold true,” he said. “We have not seen indication that the government has made the decision to move ahead with the program. But the fact still remains that we don’t know what we don’t know.”
Newsweek‘s sources claimed that the IC was settling on a view that Iran had resumed research, but not development of nuclear weapons. The Washington Times went further, stating that the IC was poised to walk back the claim that Iran had suspended work in the first place.
The closest that the new ATA comes to remarking on weaponization is this seemingly anodyne observation: “We continue to judge Iran’s nuclear decisionmaking is guided by a cost-benefit approach, which offers the international community opportunities to influence Tehran.” This language echoes the 2007 NIE Key Judgments: “Our assessment that Iran halted the program in 2003 primarily in response to international pressure indicates Tehran’s decisions are guided by a cost-benefit approach rather than a rush to a weapon irrespective of the political, economic, and military costs.”
Readers will have to decide what that really means. After the warm welcome received by the Iran NIE Key Judgments back in December of 2007, we should not expect to see a similar release anytime soon. For clarification, we’ll probably have to settle for the forthcoming Questions for the Record.