Israel Matzav

7,000 new centrifuges since 'moderate' Rohani's election (includes interview with Rohani)

Iran has brought some 7,000 new centrifuges online since the election of 'moderate' new President Hassan Rohani (Hat Tip: MFS - The Other News).

The installation of the new centrifuges, including 1,000 upgraded models with enhanced uranium enrichment capabilities, is proof , Netanyahu said during a tour of a cluster of new IDF bases to be built at the Hanegev Junction south of Beersheba, that Iran has not changed course.

“The Iranian president is trying to present a new face to the West, but progress on the nuclear program continues,” he said.

Netanyahu was blunter later in the afternoon before a meeting with a delegation led by US Rep. James Sensenbrenner (R–Wisconsin).

“I know that some [people] place their hopes on Iran’s new president. He knows how to exploit this and yesterday he called for more talks,” Netanyahu said.

“Of course he wants more talks. He wants to talk and talk and talk. And while everybody is busy talking to him, he'll be busy enriching uranium. The centrifuges will keep on spinning. This isn’t a secret. The new Iranian president boasts that that is his strategy. He says, ‘I talk and I smile and I enrich uranium.’”

In addition to accelerating its enrichment capacities, Iran was also pursuing an alternative route, “the plutonium route,” the prime minister said.

“Unhappily, the situation is not getting any better; it’s actually getting worse,” he stressed to his visitors. “Iran is determined to get the bomb, and we must be even more determined to prevent them from getting it.”

For the West to stop deluding itself that Rohani is a 'moderate' who is going to curb Iran's nuclear program, it needs to see interviews like this one, which I hope you will all tweet, post to Facebook and otherwise spread (along with the rest of this post, of course). It has had far too little exposure. In this videotape of a pre-election interview, Iran's new president, Hassan Rowhani, bragged about deceiving the West over the Islamic regime's illicit nuclear program and claimed credit for vastly expanding it. Video courtesy of Nasim Online - Translation: Reza Kahlili

Let's go to the videotape. 



Jennifer Dyer points out how the timeline in Rohani's interview shows that the IAEA was totally in the dark about Iran's activities, and cannot be trusted as a watchdog.

If he is telling the truth – and there is no obvious reason why he would lie about the timing he refers to – the timeline he outlines for bringing Iranian centrifuge cascades online in substantial numbers makes a poignant contrast with the reporting of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) at the time.

The contrast highlights just how in the dark IAEA was during this period, at least about the centrifuges.  (It’s also worth highlighting, in general, the timeline of what was going on during the EU-brokered negotiations Rouhani refers to in the video.)  Certainly, many in the West had an uneasy suspicion that, by the end of 2005, Iran may have accomplished more than IAEA was officially aware of. But, as late as February 2006, IAEA acknowledged the following decisive condition:

Due to the fact that no centrifuge related raw materials and components are under Agency seal, the Agency is unable effectively to monitor the R&D activities being carried out by Iran except at the [Pilot Fuel Enrichment Plant],* where containment and surveillance measures are being applied to the enrichment process.

* The Pilot Fuel Enrichment Plant, or PFEP, is a facility located at Natanz where Iran initiates new enrichment processes on a small scale.  The co-located main Fuel Enrichment Plant (FEP) houses the industrial-scale enrichment cascades, where Western analysts have assessed the bulk of the uranium enrichment to be done.

The IAEA was even more in the dark once Iran developed its own uranium mining capability and therefore did not have to report to the IAEA on how much uranium it had. And it gets worse. Iran has two underground facilities in Esfahan and Natanz which the IAEA has not visited since 2004 and ever, respectively.

In its February 2006 report, linked above, IAEA regretted the lack of transparency in the Iranian nuclear program, which made it difficult to resolve questions about its nature (emphasis added):

Without full transparency that extends beyond the formal legal requirements of the Safeguards Agreement and Additional Protocol — transparency that could only be achieved through Iran’s active cooperation — the Agency’s ability to reconstruct the history of Iran’s past programme and to verify the correctness and completeness of the statements made by Iran, particularly with regard to its centrifuge enrichment programme, will be limited, and questions about the past and current direction of Iran’s nuclear programme will continue to be raised.

IAEA basically had its November 2004 baseline for centrifuges at the PFEP to work with during this period.  It did not have a good handle on what was going on in the larger FEP, nor did it have the slightest idea what was going on in the underground facilities at Esfahan, where extensive tunneling activities were revealed in late 2004 IAEA visited an underground chamber at Esfahan in November 2004, but it was empty at the time. IAEA has not visited Esfahan’s underground complex since, nor has it ever been allowed to visit the vast underground network identified at Natanz by 2007.

Jennifer Dyer concludes:

Certainly, if Rouhani referred in the video to operational centrifuges in 2005, his totals are between 1,536 and 2,836 more than the baseline of operational centrifuges known to IAEA in 2005.  We may never know for sure how many there were operational then.  Among other things, that means we may well not know how many there are operational today.(We have other reasons for not being certain about that, of course.)

One thing we do know, however, in our little universe of known knowns about the Iranian nuclear problem, is that the uranium enrichment curve has continued to accelerate. It may have accelerated more than we know, but it has accelerated at least as much as we know.

There's much more. Read the whole thing. 

It certainly doesn't sound like we have a lot more time to stop this.

Labels: centrifuges, Esfahan, Hassan Rohani, Iranian nuclear threat, Natanz

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 8:28 AM