Dickering Over Uranium
THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
One sign that an adversary isn’t serious about negotiating is when it rejects even your concessions. That seemed to be the case Friday when Iran gave signs it may turn down an offer from Russia, Europe and the U.S. to let Tehran enrich its uranium under foreign supervision outside the country. The mullahs so far won’t take yes for an answer. Tehran had previously looked set to accept the deal, which is hardly an obstacle to its nuclear program. A Democratic foreign policy shop called the National Security Network heralded the expected pact in a blast email this week as “Engagement Paying Dividends on Iran.” But now Tehran may be holding out for even more concessions, as Iranian news reports suggest Iran wants to be able to buy more enriched uranium from a third country to use in a research reactor for medical use—as opposed to shipping its uranium to Russia for a roundtrip. This may merely be the equivalent of last-minute haggling over the price of a Persian carpet, because the West’s enrichment offer is already a good one for Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Iran would give up one bomb’s worth—about 2,600 pounds—of uranium enriched at its facility in Natanz to the low level of 3.5%. Russia would then enrich the uranium further to 19.75% and someone, most likely France, would put the uranium into fuel rods for transfer back to Iran for ostensible use in a civilian nuclear reactor. Western officials say this would delay Iran’s efforts to get a bomb. There are a couple of problems with this theory. With the exception of the regime, no one knows for sure how much uranium Iran possesses. Given Iran’s long history of lying to the world and the discovery of covert enrichment facilities (most recently in Qom) that need uranium from somewhere, a fair guess would be that Iran has more than the 3,500 pounds it has declared to U.N. inspectors. Meanwhile, Iran insists it won’t stop enriching uranium on its own, in violation of Security Council resolutions. Aside from rewarding Iran for past misbehavior by letting it use illegally enriched uranium, this deal fails to solve the problem it is intended to solve. That’s because as long as the Natanz facility continues to enrich uranium at its current rate of about 132 pounds a month, Iran will produce enough low-enriched uranium within the year for a bomb. Make Natanz more efficient and the time could be cut in half. Claims by Western officials that Iran can’t convert the uranium enriched abroad for military use are less than reassuring. Though encased in a fuel rod in France, the more highly-enriched uranium returned to Iran would be simple to extract, using something as basic as a tin snipper to force open the fuel cladding, and enrich further. “With 19.75 enriched feed”—as opposed to the 3.5% that Iran now manages— “the level of effort or time Iran would need to make weapons grade uranium would drop very significantly,” from roughly five months today “down to something slightly less than four weeks,” says Henry Sokolski of the Nonproliferation Policy Education Center. Iran may also welcome the Russian-enriched uranium because its own technology is less advanced. The October 8 edition of the trade journal Nucleonics Week reports that Iran’s low-enriched uranium appears to have “impurities” that “could cause centrifuges to fail” if Iran itself tried to enrich uranium to weapons-grade—which would mean above 20% and ideally up to 90%. In this scenario, the West would be decontaminating the uranium for Iran. Along the way, Iranian scientists may also pick up clues on how to do it better themselves. The mullahs know that President Obama is eager to show diplomatic gains from his engagement strategy, and they are going to exploit that eagerness to get every possible concession. The one thing Iran has shown no desire to bargain over is its intention to become a nuclear power. This comment appeared as an editorial in The Wal Street Journal
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