Iran's nuclear map - much more than you knew about
There's a great map of Iran's nuclear facilities that's been posted here.
It's by Olli Heinonen, a senior fellow with the Belfer Center at Harvard
University's Kennedy School and a former deputy director-general for
safeguards at the IAEA, and by Simon Henderson is the Baker fellow and director of the Gulf and Energy
Policy Program at The Washington Institute, specializing in energy
matters and the conservative Arab states of the Persian Gulf.
If you click the link, you can even download a pdf version (which I did). I had no idea that there were this many facilities and I suspect that most of you didn't know either (I thought there were four or five facilities). Most of these facilities will remain intact if President Obama's agreement with Iran goes through and is implemented.
“We are aware of the announcement and are reviewing the details,”
said the official, who was not authorized to speak on record. However,
“in general, the construction of light water nuclear reactors is not
prohibited by U.N. Security Council resolutions, nor does it violate the
JPOA,” the official said.
The United States remains committed to ensuring the “peaceful” nature
of Iran’s nuclear program, which continues to progress in part as talks
continue through July 1.
“We have been clear in saying that the purpose of the negotiations
with Iran is to ensure that Iran’s nuclear program remains exclusively
for civilian, peaceful purposes,” the official said. “The talks that we
have been engaged in for months involve a specific set of issues
relative to closing off all possible pathways to Iran acquiring a
nuclear bomb. That remains our focus.”
In an email, the Israel Project points out that the JPOA is a total failure:
Diplomatically, new infrastructure gives the Iranians more leverage in negotiations. The more they have, the more they have to bargain with. The JPOA was supposed to freeze the Iranian program to prevent them from improving their position as talks proceeded. It failed. Instead the Iranians spent the last year building up their nuclear program - and their leverage - across all areas:
* Uranium - The JPOA allows unlimited enrichment from 0% to 3.5%, which is about 60% of the effort needed to get to weapons grade levels. Every day they've got 9,000 centrifuges spilling and building up their stockpile. The only caveat is they have to convert the newly enriched gas into oxide, a process that would take them a couple of weeks to reverse.
* Plutonium - The JPOA allows unlimited work on Iran's Arak plutonium factory as long as the Iranians don't touch the reactor at the site, and unlimited work on reactor parts off-site.
* Ballistic missiles - The JPOA allows unlimited work on ballistic missiles.
And now...
* Physical infrastructure - The JPOA allows allowed unlimited construction of full-blown nuclear reactors.
Kredo points out that Iran has now admitted that it is working on ballistic missiles.
Iran also has admitted to building advanced missile sites in Syria—where
it is fighting on behalf of embattled Syrian President Bashar
al-Assad—and has been accused in recent days of also building a
clandestine nuclear facility there.
Kredo goes on to add that Rohani is just embarrassing the Obama administration.
“Rouhani went out of his way to humiliate the Obama administration,”
said one senior foreign policy hand who works on the issue. “He picked
the day when negotiations were starting again and his declaration is the
literal definition of building new nuclear technology.”
“And instead of fighting back, the White House is again rolling over
and letting themselves be slapped around,” the source said. “They’ll do
anything—anything—to get a deal with Iran.”
Iran admitted a little boo-boo on Monday: There's been a 'malfunction' at the Bushehr nuclear power plant.
The flaw at the Bushehr plant was not caused by recent earthquakes in Iran, Mahmoud Reza Sajjadi, Iran's ambassador to Russia, was quoted by the ITAR-Tass news agency as saying.
Sajjadi's comments raised speculation -- amid
recent reports of ongoing cyberwarfare between Iran and the West -- that
the generator's malfunction could have been the result of a cyber
attack.
Israel Hayom quoted Sajjadi as having said
Russian and Iranian experts were trying to fix the problem, without
saying when it occurred or whether it had led to the plant's shutdown.
Russia's state-controlled Rosatom nuclear agency, which built the plant, had no comment on Sajjadi's statement.
Iran has announced that it will continue to build nuclear plants along an earthquake fault line after a relatively lucky escape from an earthquake earlier this week.
Iran plans to build more nuclear power reactors in an
earthquake-prone coastal area, Iranian media said on Wednesday, a day
after a strong tremor struck the region close to its only existing such
plant.
Tuesday's 6.3-magnitude quake hit 89 km (55 miles)
southeast of the port of Bushehr, killing 37 people and injuring more
than 900 as it flattened small villages. The dead included eight
children under the age of 10.
But the nuclear power station 18 km
(11 miles) south of Bushehr was unaffected, according to Iranian
officials and the Russian company that built the facility.
Tehran has repeatedly rejected safety concerns about Bushehr, which
is located in a highly seismic area on Iran's Gulf coast and began
operations in 2011 after decades of delays.
The head of the
Islamic state's Atomic Energy Organization said hours after the
earthquake that more reactors would be built there.
"This
earthquake had no impact on the Bushehr nuclear power plant
installation," Fereydoun Abbasi-Davani told state television late on
Tuesday in comments published by the semi-official Mehr News Agency on
Wednesday.
"Not only was the power plant not producing electricity
or sending it to the grid at the time, but even while operating the
Bushehr power plant has been designed to withstand earthquakes of more
than 8.0 on the Richter scale," he said.
Breaking: Earthquake near Iran's Bushehr nuclear power plant
God has smitten Iran.
An earthquake measuring 6.3 on the Richter scale has just struck near the Bushehr nuclear power plant. Three people are confirmed dead and more are likely to follow.
People on social media have felt the quake across the Gulf in Dubai, Abu Dhabi and Bahrain.
...
The USGS said the quake struck at 11:52 GMT at a depth of 10km (6.2 miles).
Iran's seismological centre in Bushehr province, linked to
Tehran University, registered a 6.1 magnitude quake close to the town of
Kaki, some 60 miles south of Bushehr.
More than five aftershocks have been felt so far, the strongest being a magnitude of 5.4.
This is not a coincidence. It is an act of God. Thank You God!
"Based on contracts
signed with female Russian employees at the Bushehr [nuclear] power
plant, they receive a hijab payment," [Iranian MP Mehdi] Mousavinejad reportedly told the
Iranian Students' News Agency.
Mousavinejad accused the female
employees of not "properly observ[ing]" their contractual obligations
and called on them to uphold their "commitments."
He did not how much money was being paid to the female technicians.
I wonder if the Iranians check what they're wearing underneath the hijab too.
Iran is holding a major air defense drill in preparation for a war with Israel according to Iranian media reports.
Iran will hold a large-scale military drill involving all its air defense systems next month, an Iranian commander was quoted as saying on Saturday, one of a number of military simulations it has carried out this year.
The air defense drill will include fighter jets and simulate emergency situations, said Farzad Esmaili, commander of the Iranian army's air defense force, according to Iran's English-language Press TV.
The drill will include both the army and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, Esmaili said, and follows a series of large-scale military simulations such as the "Great Prophet 7" missile exercises in July.
Israeli leaders' warnings that time is running out to halt Iran's controversial nuclear program have raised concern they may order an attack on Iranian nuclear sites, though Israel has come under growing international pressure not to act alone.
...
"Today our systems are prepared in a serious way for modern air threats, such that the performance of the systems compared to the previous profile has improved," Esmaili was quoted as saying on Friday by the Iranian newspaper Hamshahri.
"The army air defense command's mission, with the development of the national defense mission and coordination between the armed forces, is to undertake appropriate operations against the threats of the enemies," he said, without mentioning any country by name.
Iran's Bushehr nuclear reactor reached 100% power for the first time on Friday night.
An Iranian F-14 fighter jet mysteriously crashed shortly after takeoff on Thursday morning. Near Bushehr.
An Iranian military plane crashed in the early hours of Thursday near the Gulf coast, the semi-official Fars news agency reported, saying no reason had yet been given for the incident.
"An F-14 crashed three minutes after take-off at 4:30 a.m. (8 p.m. ET) near the city of Bushehr," Fars reported, citing a local government official.
Hmmm.
Admittedly, Iran has problems maintaining its planes and therefore this may not have even been sabotage. But hmmm....
Israel Radio reports that both pilots were killed.
Video: Interview with Iranian nuclear scientist who defected
Here's an interview with an Iranian nuclear scientist who defected, and who is now hiding out somewhere in Europe. The interview is in Hebrew, but I will give you a brief summary at the end for those who are Hebrew-challenged. The interview starts around the 3:10 mark of this video (sorry about the ads in the middle).
Let's go to the videotape.
There are three main points to the interview with the nuclear scientist, who worked in a nuclear plant until a year ago:
Iran is running a secret program at Busher Reactor not properly protected against military strike and earth quake Iran will use nuclear weapon against countries who threaten the regime
The opening of the Bushehr nuclear power plant has been delayed once again. Maybe even the Russians have realized that allowing Iran to have nuclear weapons is a danger to the world? (Hat Tip: Challah Hu Akhbar).
The reformist Aftab daily on Monday quotes Asgar Jalalian, a member of the parliament's special committee on the plant, as saying that Iran has already paid at least twice the expected costs for the 1,000 megawatt plant. Russia's Rosatom is building the facility.
Jalialian says the committee doubts the plant will come on line by August, as promised.
Moscow and Tehran signed a US$1 billion contract to start building Bushehr in 1995. Its 1999 completion date has been repeatedly pushed back.
In June, Deputy Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov said the plant was finished and could begin generating electricity in August.
...
The Bushehr plant has faced repeated delays, angering Tehran and fuelling speculation that Moscow has used it as a lever in diplomacy over Iran's nuclear program, which the United States and others say they fear is a front for weapons development.
Five Russian nuke scientists who worked on Bushehr die in plane crash
Five Russian nuclear scientists, who were involved in Iran's Bushehr nuclear power plant, were killed in a plane crash in northern Russia on Thursday.
Technical failure of the plane has been ruled out. Five Russian scientists who assisted in the design of Iran's Bushehr nuclear power plant were among the 44 fatalities of Monday's Russian plain crash, Moscow's International News Agency RIA Novosti reported Thursday.
The Tupolev-134 plane broke up and caught fire upon making an emergency landing outside the northern city of Petrozavodsk. A preliminary investigation ruled out the possibility of a technical failure.
Three of the experts – Sergei Rizhov, Gennadi Benyok, and Nicolai Tronov – were among the atom facility's designers. Andrei Trokinov, a top Russian nuclear technological expert, was also killed, as was Valery Lalyn, another nuclear expert.
The five worked at Bushehr and were to ensure the facility would withstand natural disasters.
The five were employed by Hydropress, a member-organization of Russia's State Nuclear Corporation. Hydropress is one of the main companies involved in the construction of the Bushehr nuclear power plant, and is also involved in projects in China, India and Bulgaria.
The crash was described as a 'great blow' to Russia's nuclear industry.
While the world plods along doing less than nothing, Iran continues its inexorable march toward nuclear weapons. On Wednesday, Iranian foreign minister Ali Akbar Salehi told Iran's Press TV that the Bushehr nuclear plant is operational.
"As we have previously announced, Bushehr power plant has reached the criticality stage, meaning it has been successfully launched," Salehi reportedly said.
Criticality is the stage in a nuclear reaction when the fissile material is self-sustaining.
"This stage lasts for two months. We hope the plant will gain some 40 percent of its power within the next one or two months," Salehi added.
The Iranian foreign minister also said that the Bushehr plant is one of the safest in the world.
Last week, a senior Russian diplomat said that the Bushehr, a Russian-built plant, will be fully operational within weeks.
Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov spoke two days after the company that built the plant, a politically charged project that faced repeated delays, said the reactor had begun operating at a low level for tests before bringing it on line.
Meanwhile, Barack Obama continues to try to get Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Ayatollah Ali Khameni to take his phone calls.
An internal report issued by Iran's intelligence services warns that due to the Stuxnet computer worm, attempts to start the Bushehr nuclear power plant could lead to the country's entire electronic grid being shut down. Iran is blaming the US and Israel.
The report, written by the Iranian Passive Defense Organization, chaired by Revolutionary Guards Gen. Gholam-Reza Jalali, states that Stuxnet has so thoroughly infected the operating systems at the Bushehr power plant that work on the plant must be halted indefinitely.
If the Bushehr power plant were to go on line, “the internal directives programmed into the structure of the virus can actually bring the generators and electrical power grid of the country to a sudden halt, creating a “heart attack type of work stoppage,” the report states.
The report was obtained by the “Green Liaison news group,” Iranian journalists affiliated with presidential candidate Mir Hussein Mousavi, and was translated into English by Reza Kahlili, a former Revolutionary Guards officer who spied on behalf of the CIA for over a decade while inside Iran.
The report claims that Stuxnet “has automatic updating capabilities in order to track and pirate information,” and that it “can destroy system hardware step-by-step."
Gen. Jalali has held two press conferences in recent weeks where he has given tantalizing glimpses into the conclusions of his top-secret task force to analyze and defuse the Stuxnet computer worm.
At one, he blamed Israel for collaborating in developing the worm and claimed that his experts had traced “reports” sent by the worm back to Texas.
“Enemies have attacked industrial infrastructure and undermined industrial production through cyberattacks. This was a hostile action against our country,” Jalali said. “If it had not been confronted in time, much material damage and human loss could have been inflicted.”
Oh - remember that new worm called Stars I reported on last week? Here's a hint of what it might do....
On Monday, Jalali claimed that his intelligence unit, which merges computer analysts from the intelligence ministry and the Revolutionary Guards intelligence service, had found a new computer virus attacking Iran’s nuclear facilities called “Stars.”
He called “Stars” an “espionage virus,” and said that it copied government files and was difficult to destroy in its early stages.
The New York Times reports that the Russians have succeeded in diagnosing the problem with Iran's Bushehr nuclear reactor.
The Russian explanation seems far more prosaic, although experts cautioned that the full capabilities of the Stuxnet virus remain unclear.
The Russian statement on Monday said the trouble arose as pressure mounted in the reactor during tests. The pump vibrated and joints broke, the statement said. As a result, metal shards smaller than three millimeters — or less than a tenth of an inch — could have shot into cooling pipes and lodged in fuel assemblies.
“The joints broke down under conditions of high vibration and pulsing pressure,” the statement said.
“If metal particles are found on the fuel assemblies,” it added, “they will be washed, the body of the reactor cleaned, and after this the fuel will again be loaded into the reactor.”
The statement said the failed pump dated to the 1970s, when West Germans began building the reactor. The Russians, who took over in 1995, have said for years that integrating the old German equipment posed more challenges than initially anticipated.
An article on Monday in Nezavisimaya Gazeta, a Moscow newspaper, cited an unidentified Russian official as saying that in the worst case, if metal shards were found in the fuel assemblies, the delay would amount to no more than two months.
The Stuxnet worm is the real thing, and it's apparently got the Iranians tied up in knots.
Stuxnet was designed to take over the control systems and evade detection, and it apparently was very successful. Last week President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, after months of denials, admitted that the worm had penetrated Iran's nuclear sites, but he said it was detected and controlled.
The second part of that claim, experts say, doesn’t ring true.
Eric Byres, a computer expert who has studied the worm, said his site was hit with a surge in traffic from Iran, meaning that efforts to get the two nuclear plants to function normally have failed. The web traffic, he says, shows Iran still hasn’t come to grips with the complexity of the malware that appears to be still infecting the systems at both Bashehr and Natanz.
“The effort has been stunning," Byres said. "Two years ago American users on my site outnumbered Iranians by 100 to 1. Today we are close to a majority of Iranian users.”
He said that while there may be some individual computer owners from Iran looking for information about the virus, it was unlikely that they were responsible for the vast majority of the inquiries because the worm targeted only the two nuclear sites and did no damage to the thousands of other computers it infiltrated.
At one of the larger American web companies offering advice on how to eliminate the worm, traffic from Iran has swamped that of its largest user: the United States.
“Our traffic from Iran has really spiked,” said a corporate officer who asked that neither he nor his company be named. “Iran now represents 14.9 percent of total traffic, surpassing the United States with a total of 12.1 percent. Given the different population sizes, that is a significant number.”
Perhaps more significantly, traffic from Tehran to the company's site is now double that of New York City.
* At least four zero-day vulnerabilities were used. Remember, these were classified as "zero-days" once we found out about them back in June/July -- which means the folks that discovered the vulnerabilities could have been using them/testing them for 12-24 months(?) before we even knew they existed. Discovering a single previously unknown vulnerability and using it successfully against a target is impressive!
* Used "legitimate certificates stolen from two certificate authorities" to digitally sign Stuxnet code to be installed on target machines -- this was needed to prevent Microsoft Windows from alerting the computer user that a suspicious file is trying to install on the computer. This is huge! Imagine if someone was able to steal a genuine SSL/TLS certificate for YOUR online bank from VeriSign or Entrust and set-up a web site that was an exact clone of YOUR online bank. If you accessed the cloned web site -- your web browser would NOT alert you to any problems with the fake web site because the site uses a valid certificate -- the entire Internet online commerce model is based on this "trust" of Certificate Authorities.
Sound unrealistic … how about this … anyone else remember 10 years ago when VeriSign issued two Microsoft certificates to someone posing as a Microsoft employee? Imagine what they could have done with those certificates … perhaps create their own "special" Microsoft Windows patch … how many folks would download and install? We often trust major companies and our systems will trust the process if the source file is using a "trusted" Certificate Authority (VeriSign for example) security certificate to sign the files! To further highlight this issue … to this day the only two "Untrusted Publishers" certificates installed in our Internet Explorer browsers are for Microsoft from VeriSign!
* Numerous propagation methods -- USB drives, network shares, other peer-to-peer methods, etc. Interesting to see the Conficker vulnerability (MS08-067) was one of the Stuxnet propagation options. Depending on what type/version/patch level of Windows the worm is residing determines which propagation method it will use. (Amazing)
* Command and Control options -- via Internet or peer-to-peer if Internet access is no longer available.
* Very specific configuration of the target environment is needed to activate the Stuxnet payload (manufacturer, specific product type, and unique product configuration are examples) … the intelligence and reconnaissance needed of the target must have been incredible.
* The goal does not seem to have been destruction -- rather interruption/delay. The payload modified the speed of very specific high speed motors and at seemingly random intervals. How many people knew weapons-grade uranium enrichment requires long periods of constant high speed motor action?
How could Iran solve the problem? At the moment, it appears that they can't. This is from the first link again:
“Here is their problem. They should throw out every personal computer involved with the nuclear program and start over, but they can’t do that. Moreover, they are completely dependent on outside companies for the construction and maintenance of their nuclear facilities. They should throw out their computers as well. But they can’t,“ he explained. “They will just continually re-infect themselves.”
“With the best of expertise and equipment it would take another year for the plants to function normally again because it is so hard to get the worm out. It even hides in the back-up systems. But they can’t do it,” he said.
And Iran’s anti-worm effort may have had another setback. In Tehran, men on motorcycles attacked two leading nuclear scientists on their way to work. Using magnetic bombs, the motorcyclists pulled alongside their cars and attached the devices.
One scientist was wounded and the other killed. Confirmed reports say that the murdered scientist was in charge of dealing with the Stuxnet virus at the nuclear plants.
This is the best description I've seen yet of how the Stuxnet worm infiltrated the Iranian nuclear facilities. It's way too long to start dissecting, but the bottom line is good news.
Iran has adamantly stated that its nuclear program has not been hit by the bug. But in doing so it has backhandedly confirmed that its nuclear facilities were compromised. When Hamid Alipour, head of the nation’s Information Technology Company, announced in September that 30,000 Iranian computers had been hit by the worm but the nuclear facilities were safe, he added that among those hit were the personal computers of the scientists at the nuclear facilities. Experts say that Natanz and Bushehr could not have escaped the worm if it was in their engineers’ computers.
“We brought it into our lab to study it and even with precautions it spread everywhere at incredible speed,” Byres said.
“The worm was designed not to destroy the plants but to make them ineffective. By changing the rotation speeds, the bearings quickly wear out and the equipment has to be replaced and repaired. The speed changes also impact the quality of the uranium processed in the centrifuges creating technical problems that make the plant ineffective,” he explained.
In other words the worm was designed to allow the Iranian program to continue but never succeed, and never to know why.
One additional impact that can be attributed to the worm, according to David Albright of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, is that “the lives of the scientists working in the facility have become a living hell because of counter-intelligence agents brought into the plant” to battle the breach. Ironically, even after its discovery, the worm has succeeded in slowing down Iran's reputed effort to build an atomic weapon. And Langer says that the efforts by the Iranians to cleanse Stuxnet from their system “will probably take another year to complete,” and during that time the plant will not be able to function anywhere normally.
I am an Orthodox Jew - some would even call me 'ultra-Orthodox.' Born in Boston, I was a corporate and securities attorney in New York City for seven years before making aliya to Israel in 1991 (I don't look it but I really am that old :-). I have been happily married to the same woman for thirty-five years, and we have eight children (bli ayin hara) ranging in age from 13 to 33 years and nine grandchildren. Four of our children are married! Before I started blogging I was a heavy contributor on a number of email lists and ran an email list called the Matzav from 2000-2004. You can contact me at: IsraelMatzav at gmail dot com
