More on the Opaque State of Iran’s Nuclear Weapons Program

Everyone should read Noah’s latest on the inconsistent positions the Trump administration has taken regarding both the casus belli for a potential attack on Iran and the state of Iran’s nuclear weapons development — the latter run the gamut from White House claims that the mullahs’ uranium enrichment program was decimated by last year’s strikes to (as Noah details) Steve Witkoff’s assertion that they are just a week away from “having industrial-grade bombmaking material.”

I want to throw one other thing into the hopper.

In the aftermath of the U.S. bombing raids back in June, I noted that the attacks by our forces and Israel’s had targeted Iran’s enrichment facilities but steered clear of that country’s only nuclear reactor at Bushehr.

There was logic to this. The principal concern regarding nuclear weapons development is uranium enrichment, not the operation of nuclear power plants. Uranium is already enriched (presumptively, to the low 3 to 5 percent level needed for civilian power generation) by the time it is used at a power plant. In the reactor, the irradiation process actually renders the uranium less useful for weapons construction, so the uranium byproducts, per se, are not a concern. On the other side of the equation, bombing a nuclear reactor could cause a meltdown or expulsion of radioactive material that could cause a disaster akin to Chernobyl (1986) or Fukushima (2011), which no one wants (and the fallout could affect other countries in the region). Ergo, an easy call: Don’t bomb a reactor.

But that’s not the end of the matter.

Nuclear reactors also create plutonium as a byproduct. Now, it’s not the grade of plutonium you’d want to start with if the objective was to construct weapons (that grade is called Pu-239). It is instead what the scientists call “reactor grade.” Nevertheless, experts concede that the reactor grade plutonium can be weaponized. It is much harder to do than it is to construct plutonium bombs through heavy water reactors, but it can be done.

That’s not a mere theory; it has been done. As I mentioned in the above-linked post, the first nuclear weapons produced by North Korea were generated from the plutonium produced at its Yongbyon reactor. (It later developed uranium enrichment capacity, too.)

I raise this, as I raised it eight months ago, to point out that this is a real vulnerability.

First, civilian nuclear programs provide cover for the development of nuclear weapons — the refinement process is not different in principle, just more intense. Our main assurance that rogue regimes are not camouflaging weapons activity as “peaceful” energy production is monitoring by the United Nations’ International Atomic Energy Agency. But Iran has been notoriously uncooperative with the IAEA — as was North Korea and as have been other regimes that covertly developed nuclear weapons while disclaiming the desire to have anything but civilian-use nuclear power.

Second, our other assurance that Iran is not using Bushehr as such cover is none other than Russia, the mullahs’ partner in the facility’s operation.

Seems problematic to me.