Pentagon plans to derail Iranian atomic bomb
test
Sun. 12 Feb 2006
The Sunday Telegraph
Philip Sherwell in Washington
Iran has drawn up designs for a deep underground tunnel with
remote-controlled heat and pressure sensors as part of what Western
intelligence officials believe are preparations for a secret atomic
test.
The plans, which American and British intelligence conclude are
genuine after studying them on a laptop computer smuggled out of
Iran by a defector, appear to be the latest evidence that Teheran
is conducting a clandestine nuclear weapons programme.
The existence of the sophisticated sketches for a 400-metre long
subterranean test shaft was made public last week in The Washington
Post. The welter of documents and disclosures provides what Western
governments believe is an overwhelming circumstantial case that
Iran is seeking an "Islamic bomb".
Washington and London won International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA)
support last weekend for Iran to be reported to the United Nations
Security Council, after the clerical regime resumed banned
centrifuge research work at its Natanz uranium-enrichment
plant.
Publicly, even American hawks such as Vice-President Dick Cheney
are backing the diplomatic track to resolve the showdown over
Iran's nuclear programme, which Teheran claims is for peaceful
energy purposes. But the Sunday Telegraph has learnt from a senior
Pentagon adviser that, as the crisis deepened in recent months,
military strategists have been updating plans for "last-resort"
military strikes on Iranian nuclear sites. The raids would be
ordered if President George W Bush is advised that they are the
only remaining option to prevent the Islamic republic from
acquiring atomic weapons.
Jack Straw, the Foreign Secretary, has consistently made clear that
Britain opposes a military solution. He fears that even the threat
of bombing will sabotage any hope of securing a united
international diplomatic front against Teheran - as well as again
splitting the Labour Party. British diplomats highlight the chaos
that Iran, if attacked, could unleash in the region through its
Shia surrogates in Iraq, Hizbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in the
Palestinian territories.
A high-powered British diplomatic delegation visited Washington
last week to discuss tactics with Nicholas Burns, the State
Department's number three. They want to increase co-operation with
Iranian exiles and make better use of satellite television channels
and the internet to spread the message inside Iran that the West's
opposition to Teheran's nuclear programme is not an imperialist
anti-Islamic plot, as the mullahs claim.
Britain is hoping that the threat of action by the Security
Council, including possible financial sanctions, will expose
differences within the regime on how far to push its game of
nuclear brinkmanship. But there is a growing belief in Washington
that it will be impossible to win the required Chinese and Russian
support at the UN for any significant measures that might inhibit
Iran's nuclear ambitions.
The review of the Pentagon's contingency plans follows the stream
of recent discoveries of Iran's secret nuclear operations and the
virulent rhetoric of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad since he was
elected last year. Iran is still thought to be anywhere between
three and 10 years away from physically producing a nuclear weapon.
But the West and Israel believe the "point of no return" - when
Iran's scientists acquire the technological know-how and experience
to make an atomic bomb - could be reached much sooner.
The Pentagon adviser told the this newspaper: "We will have reached
the point of no return in the next couple of years. If diplomacy
hasn't worked by then, Iran will be a long way down the line to
acquiring a nuclear weapon. We're talking about choosing the least
bad of a series of bad options. President Bush will also be nearing
the end of his term and have to decide if he trusts this issue to
another administration or wants to use the B2s." In a separate
interview, Richard Perle, a senior defence official at the time of
the Iraq war and who maintains close links to the military, said
that 12 B2 bombers, each carrying dozens of precision-guided
weapons, could deliver a serious blow to Iran's nuclear
ambitions.
"If the President were faced with the choice between Iran crossing
the line to become a nuclear weapon state and using force to
destroy or significantly delay that prospect, then I believe he
would use force," Mr Perle said. "That decision will be made at the
last moment but there is certainly strong contingency planning for
that. I think the decision-making elite in Washington would back Mr
Bush if that was seen to be his only choice."
Iran has been preparing by strengthening air defence systems and
building tunnels intended to hide atomic material and facilities
from a bombing campaign, Jane's Defence Weekly reported this
month.
The regime has spread its nuclear programme across several sites,
some of them underground, after drawing lessons from the 1981
Israeli air strike that wiped out Saddam Hussein's efforts to
produce an Iraqi plutonium bomb at Osirak. But United States
military strategists believe that by targeting certain key
"bottleneck" facilities - probably the Natanz uranium-enrichment
site, the Isfahan conversion plant and the Arak heavy water reactor
- they could hobble the whole programme for years.
"There may well be secret sites out there but a nuclear programme
is not that easy to hide," said Dan Goure, a Pentagon consultant
and vice-president of the Lexington Institute defence think-tank.
"You need large sites for uranium enrichment and manufacturing
plutonium. It's not like a biological or chemical warfare
programme: you cannot conduct research in a Petri dish."
Mr Perle and Dr Goure believe that America is better equipped to
carry out the attacks than Israel, whose F15s and F16s would
encounter refuelling problems. In a further signal that if strikes
were required the US would prefer to carry them out, Mr Bush said
last week that America would "rise to Israel's defence" if Iran
threatened it.
