Iran indicates it is building another nuclear plant

By Nazila Fathi

Published: December 17, 2007

www.iht.com

TEHRAN: Iran confirmed on Monday that it had received the first fuel shipment for its nuclear power plant at Bushehr, but also indicated for the first time that it was building a second nuclear power plant.

The revelation came in comments by Iran's Atomic Organization, Gholamreza Aghazadeh, made to state-run television and reported by the semi-official Fars news agency. He was dismissing speculation that the arrival of the fuel would allow Iran to halt its uranium enrichment program, in Natanz.

"We are building a 360-megawatt indigenous power plant in Darkhovein," he said, referring to a southern city north of Bushehr.

"The fuel for this plant needs to be produced by Natanz enrichment plant," he added, Fars said.

Bushehr and Darkhovein were both projects planned before the 1979 Revolution. It was not clear how much construction had been done at Darkhovein. The location is also sometimes spelled Darkhovin, or referred to by other nearby place names, including Ahvaz, Esteghlal and Karun.

Aghazadeh said Monday that Iran needed to increase the centrifuges at the Natanz enrichment plant from 3,000 to 50,000, saying that with the current 3,000, it could only produce fuel for a 100-megawatt plant.

The White House had signaled on Monday that the arrival of the fuel could help convince Iran to curb its enrichment program. President George W. Bush that If Iran accepted the uranium for a civilian power plant, "there was no need for them to learn how to enrich," Reuters reported.

Aghazadeh said the shipment was made after an agreement was made between President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Russian President Vladimir Putin during his visit in October to Tehran.

Construction of Bushehr has been hindered by repeated delays. Earlier this year Russia delayed a fuel shipment expected in March, accusing Iran of tardiness in making its monthly payments of $25 million. However, Western officials said that Russia made the decision in part to help the West to pressure Iran into more openness on its nuclear program.

Last week, Sergei Shmatko, the director of Atomstroyexport, announced that Russia and Iran had ended their financial disputes over the project, though he failed to indicate a date for when the long-awaited opening would occur.

Esipova said the plant will be technically ready to operate no sooner than six months after all the uranium fuel rods needed to power the station are delivered.

Aghazadeh said Monday that almost 95 percent of the work at Bushehr was finished and it could produce power as early as the next Iranian year, which begins on March 21.

"The first phase of delivery has been completed," said Irina Esipova, a spokeswoman for Atomstroyexport, the Russian contractor on the project. "A small amount of fuel is already on the premises of the Bushehr station in a special storage facility." The company plans to deliver about 80 tons of nuclear fuel to Iran over the next two months, she said.

The Russian Foreign Ministry said in a statement that the fuel would be under the control of the International Atomic Energy Agency and that Iran had given written guarantees that the fuel would only be used for the nuclear power plant.

"All fuel that will be delivered will be under the control and guarantees of the International Atomic Energy Agency for the whole time it stays on Iranian territory," the Foreign Ministry said in a statement. "Moreover, the Iranian side gave additional written guarantees that the fuel will be used only for the Bushehr nuclear power plant."

The statement added: "After the Russian fuel is processed at the Bushehr nuclear power plant, it will be returned to Russia for further processing and storage."

The power station is at the heart of an international dispute over Iran's nuclear program. Iran insists that Bushehr is part of a civilian nuclear program. However, critics, particularly in the United States and Western Europe, have accused Tehran of secretly developing or planning to develop a nuclear bomb.

The United States released a National Intelligence Estimate two weeks ago concluding that Tehran ended its nuclear weapons program in 2003, undermining earlier claims by the Bush administration that Iran was actively developing a nuclear weapon.

Officials in Washington have nevertheless continued to insist that Iran remains a threat, sentiments which have been echoed by some European leaders. Iran considers itself to have been vindicated by the intelligence report. On Sunday President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad called the nuclear issue his "toughest battle and challenge" in recent years, but said the intelligence report had boosted Iran's international status, a statement on the website of Iran's Foreign Ministry said.

Michael Schwirtz contributed reporting from Moscow and Graham Bowley from New York.

Russia announces delivery of nuclear fuel to Iran

By Borzou Daragahi and Megan K. Stack, Los Angeles Times Staff Writers
8:47 PM PST, December 17, 2007

TEHRAN, Iran -- After years of delay, Russia announced Monday that it had delivered its first shipment of nuclear fuel to a reactor in southern Iran, a move Washington had long sought to delay to pressure Tehran not to pursue its own enrichment program.

Delivery of the nuclear fuel rods will ensure that the $1 billion power plant being built by Russia's state-owned Atomstroyexport Corp. in the southern port city of Bushehr will be up and running by next year, Gholam-Reza Aghazadeh, chief of Iran's Atomic Energy Agency, told state television.

He cast Russia's decision as evidence that Iran had convinced other countries that it was only pursuing nuclear power for peaceful purposes.

The United States and its allies suspect Iran of trying to produce fuel for a nuclear weapon, and the U.N. Security Council has twice imposed sanctions on the country because of its enrichment program. A new U.S. intelligence report released two weeks ago said Iran had frozen its weapons program in 2003.

But President Bush says Iran remains a threat because it continues to enrich uranium. At lower levels of enrichment, the fuel can be used to generate electricity; at higher levels it can be used to make a bomb. The Bush administration had pressed Russia to withhold further assistance to the Bushehr project, hoping that would signal international concern about Tehran's enrichment efforts.

U.S. officials said Monday that Russia's decision showed that Iran did not need to pursue its own program.

At an appearance in northern Virginia, President Bush said that "if the Russians are willing to do that -- which I support -- then the Iranians do not need to learn how to enrich. If the Iranians accept that uranium for a civilian nuclear power plant, then there's no need for them to learn how to enrich."

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said following a meeting with French President Nicolas Sarkozy in Paris that Iran should rely on nuclear fuel supplies from another country rather than producing its own.

Analysts said that U.S. officials appeared to be putting the best spin on a decision they had opposed. Robert Einhorn, a former top weapons proliferation official in the Clinton and Bush administrations, said Bush's comments were an attempt to "make lemonade out of this lemon."

Aghazadeh, chief of Iran's Atomic Energy Agency, said on state television that Iran would continue its enrichment activities at a facility in the central city of Natanz to provide fuel for another 360-megawatt reactor it plans to build in the southwestern town of Darkhoein (or Darkhovin) near the Iraqi border. Iran insists it wants nuclear technology to generate electricity in the event its oil reserves expire.

The U.S. and Israel suspect that the uranium enrichment facility in Natanz, a heavy water reactor in Arak and other nuclear facilities are building blocks for an eventual weapons program. For those activities, Washington hawks have suggested Iran could face U.S. military action.

No one suspects Iran of harboring a secret bomb factory at Bushehr. But some scientists say spent fuel from a light-water reactor could be used to create fissile material for a bomb.

Moscow's Foreign Ministry insists it won't allow the fuel to be diverted. "All fuel that will be delivered will be under control and guarantees of the International Atomic Energy Agency for the whole time it stays on Iranian territory," it said in a statement Monday.

"All our processed fuel is to be returned, gram by gram," said Sergei Karganov, chairman of the Council on Defense and Foreign Policy in Moscow. "It was actually kind of a political lever more than an actual concern that our fuel could be used for weapons," he said. "It can't be used for weapons under any circumstances. This is a fact of life."

Delivery of 80 tons of uranium fuel to Bushehr will take up to two months, said Irina Yesipova, an Atomstroyexport spokeswoman.

Russia has always insisted it delayed supplying the fuel rods for the Bushehr plant because of financial disputes with Iranian counterparts. But many analysts have said that Russia was concerned about the direction of Iran's nuclear program, which could pose a far greater threat to Eastern Europe than North America.

Bush administration officials also say they don't want Iran to gain advanced nuclear expertise. They mistrust Iran's government, pointing to Iran's 15-year clandestine program, which was exposed by a dissident group earlier this decade.

The U.S., along with France and the United Kingdom, had been steadily pushing for a third round of sanctions when the U.S. National Intelligence Estimate released this month concluded that Iran had halted its nuclear weapons program.

China and Russia, which wield veto power on the council, have balked at new sanctions. But with the release of the NIE reducing the threat of a U.S. attack on Iran, the two countries are closing a number of financial deals with Iran that they had put on hold.

"For us, the old information we got was that they didn't have a military program," said Karganov. "Now it has been confirmed by the U.S. intelligence. Thank God, because it has ended speculation that the Americans are preparing a massive attack."

Beijing signed a $2 billion energy deal with Tehran. Russia will sell Iran 130 Russian-made Tupolev passenger planes over the next 10 years, to upgrade Iran's aging fleet of Boeing and Airbus jets, according to Russia's Interfax news agency.

Russia's Industry and Energy Ministry said in a statement Monday that Lukoil Overseas will be resuming operations at an Iranian oil field that had been halted because of U.S. sanctions.

Russia's EuroChem Mineral Chemical Company was holding talks about building a factory with Iran's National Petrochemical Company in Moscow on Monday, according to Interfax.

Russian Defense Minister Mikhail Dmitriev and a high-ranking military delegation are scheduled to arrive in Tehran Wednesday to meet with Iranian counterparts.

And though the Bush administration has urged Russian President Vladimir V. Putin to curtail its multibillion-dollar nuclear trade with Tehran, Russia delivered the fuel to the Bushehr plant, which is being built by Russian scientists and engineers who live with their families in the Persian Gulf port city.

President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, in a televised interview Sunday, said Iran had reaped a harvest from the U.S. intelligence estimate, which undercut the possibility of U.S. airstrikes to halt or slow Iran's nuclear program.

"The nuclear issue, after a period of escalation reached a climax but now is in its anti-climax and de-escalation state," said Ahmadinejad, who departed for Saudi Arabia on Monday as the first Iranian president to receive a prestigious invitation to attend the pilgrimage to Mecca.

"I think the NIE report was a U-turn in the U.S. This U-turn is the result of internal disputes in the U.S. administration -- which I do not want to elaborate more on now -- and the steadfastness of the Iranian nation," he said.

Times staff writer Daragahi reported from Tehran and Stack from Moscow. Times staff writer James Gerstenzang in Washington, Paul Richter in Washington and special correspondents Ramin Mostaghim in Tehran and Sergei I. Loiko in Moscow contributed to this report.

Misreading the Iran Report

Why Spying and Policymaking Don't Mix

www.washingtonpost.com

By Henry A. Kissinger

Thursday, December 13, 2007; Page A35

The extraordinary spectacle of the president's national security adviser obliged to defend the president's Iran policy against a National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) raises two core issues: How are we now to judge the nuclear threat posed by Iran? How are we to judge the intelligence community's relationship with the White House and the rest of the government?

The "Key Judgments" released by the intelligence community last week begin with a dramatic assertion: "We judge with high confidence that in fall 2003, Tehran halted its nuclear weapons program." This sentence was widely interpreted as a challenge to the Bush administration policy of mobilizing international pressure against alleged Iranian nuclear programs. It was, in fact, qualified by a footnote whose complex phraseology obfuscated that the suspension really applied to only one aspect of the Iranian nuclear weapons program (and not even the most significant one): the construction of warheads. That qualification was not restated in the rest of the document, which continued to refer to the "halt of the weapons program" repeatedly and without qualification.

The reality is that the concern about Iranian nuclear weapons has had three components: the production of fissile material, the development of missiles and the building of warheads. Heretofore, production of fissile material has been treated as by far the greatest danger, and the pace of Iranian production of fissile material has accelerated since 2006. So has the development of missiles of increasing range. What appears to have been suspended is the engineering aimed at the production of warheads.

The NIE holds that Iran may be able to produce enough highly enriched uranium for a nuclear weapon by the end of 2009 and, with increasing confidence, more warheads by the period 2010 to 2015. That is virtually the same timeline as was suggested in the 2005 National Intelligence Estimate. The new estimate does not assess how long it would take to build a warhead, though it treats the availability of fissile material as the principal limiting factor. If there is a significant gap between these two processes, it would be important to be told what it is. Nor are we told how close to developing a warhead Tehran was when it suspended its program or how confident the intelligence community is in its ability to learn when work on warheads has resumed. On the latter point, the new estimate expresses only "moderate" confidence that the suspension has not been lifted already.

It is therefore doubtful that the evidence supports the dramatic language of the summary and, even less so, the broad conclusions drawn in much of the public commentary. For the past three years, the international debate has concentrated on the Iranian effort to enrich uranium by centrifuges, some 3,000 of which are now in operation. The administration has asserted that this represents a decisive step toward Iranian acquisition of nuclear weapons and has urged a policy of maximum pressure. Every permanent member of the U.N. Security Council has supported the request that Iran suspend its uranium enrichment program; the various countries differ on the urgency with which their recommendations should be pressed and in their willingness to impose penalties.

The NIE then highlights, without altering, the underlying issue: At what point would the nations that have described an Iranian military nuclear program as "unacceptable" agree to act on that conviction? Do they wait until Iran starts producing nuclear warheads? Does our intelligence assume that we will know this threshold? Is there then enough time for meaningful countermeasures? What happens to the growing stock of fissile material that, according to the estimate, will have been accumulated? Do we run the risk of finding ourselves with an adversary that, in the end, agrees to stop further production of fissile material but insists on retaining the existing stockpile as a potential threat?

By stating a conclusion in such categorical terms -- considered excessive even by the International Atomic Energy Agency -- the Key Judgments blur the line between estimates and conjecture. For example, the document says: "We judge with high confidence that the halt . . . was directed primarily in response to increasing international scrutiny and pressure resulting from exposure of Iran's previously undeclared nuclear work." It extrapolates from that judgment that Iran "is less determined to develop nuclear weapons than we have been judging since 2005" and that it "may be more vulnerable to influence on the issue than we judged previously."

It is to be hoped that the full estimate provides more comprehensive evidence for these conclusions. A more plausible alternative explanation would assign greater significance to the regional context and American actions. When Iran halted its weapons program and suspended efforts at enriching uranium in February 2003, America had already occupied Afghanistan and was on the verge of invading Iraq, both of which border Iran. The United States justified its Iraq policy by the need to remove weapons of mass destruction from the region. By the fall of 2003, when Iran voluntarily joined the Additional Protocol for Nuclear Non-Proliferation, Saddam Hussein had just been overthrown. Is it unreasonable to assume that the ayatollahs concluded that restraint had become imperative? By the fall of 2005, the American effort in Iraq showed signs of bogging down; the prospects for extending the enterprise into Iran were diminishing. Iranian leaders could have felt free to return to their policy of building up a military nuclear capability -- perhaps reinforced by the desire to create a deterrent to American regional aspirations. They might also have concluded, because the secret effort had leaked, that it would be too dangerous to undertake another covert program. Hence the emphasis on renewing the enrichment program in the guise of a civilian energy program. In short, if my analysis is correct, we could be witnessing not a halt of the Iranian weapons program -- as the NIE asserts -- but a subtle, ultimately more dangerous, version of it that will phase in the warhead when fissile material production has matured.

The NIE does not so much reject this theory; it does not even examine it. It concludes that "Tehran's decisions are guided by a cost-benefit approach rather than a rush to a weapon." But a cost-benefit analysis does not exclude a rush to weapons on a systematic basis. It depends on the criteria by which costs and benefits are determined. Similarly, in pursuing the cost-benefit rationale, the estimate concludes that a combination of international scrutiny along with security guarantees might "prompt Tehran to extend the current halt to its nuclear weapons program." That is a policy, not an intelligence, judgment.

A coherent strategy toward Iran is not a partisan issue, for it will have to be implemented well after the present administration has left office. I have long argued that America owes it to itself to explore fully the possibility of normalizing relations with Iran. We do not need to tranquilize ourselves to the danger in order to pursue a more peaceful world. What is required is a specific vision linking assurances for Iran's security and respect for its identity with an Iranian foreign policy compatible with the existing order in the Middle East. But it must also generate an analysis of the strategy to be pursued should Iran, in the end, choose ideology over reconciliation.

The intelligence community has a major role in helping to design such a vision. But it must recognize that the more it ventures into policy conjecture, the less authoritative its judgments become. There was some merit in the way President Richard Nixon conducted National Security Council discussions at the beginning of his first term. He invited the CIA director to brief on the capabilities and intentions of the countries under discussion but required him to leave the room during policy deliberations. Because so many decisions require an intelligence input, this procedure proved unworkable.

I have often defended the dedicated members of the intelligence community. This is why I am extremely concerned about the tendency of the intelligence community to turn itself into a kind of check on, instead of a part of, the executive branch. When intelligence personnel expect their work to become the subject of public debate, they are tempted into the roles of surrogate policymakers and advocates. Thus the deputy director for intelligence estimates explained the release of the NIE as follows: Publication was chosen because the estimate conflicted with public statements by top U.S. officials about Iran, and "we felt it was important to release this information to ensure that an accurate presentation is available." That may explain releasing the facts but not the sources and methods that have been flooding the media. The paradoxical result of the trend toward public advocacy is to draw intelligence personnel more deeply than ever into the public maelstrom.

The executive branch and the intelligence community have gone through a rough period. The White House has been accused of politicizing intelligence; the intelligence community has been charged with promoting institutional policy biases. The Key Judgments document accelerates that controversy, dismaying friends and confusing adversaries.

Intelligence personnel need to return to their traditional anonymity. Policymakers and Congress should once again assume responsibility for their judgments without involving intelligence in their public justifications. To define the proper balance between the user and producer of intelligence is a task that cannot be accomplished at the end of an administration. It is, however, one of the most urgent challenges a newly elected president will face.