Iran's Nuclear Option: Tehran's Quest for the Atom Bomb

Laborare est orare

Published by

CASEMATE

908 Darby Road, Havertown, PA 19083

© 2005 by Al J. Venter

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers. For additional information, contact Casemate Publishers, 908 Darby Road, Havertown, PA 19083.

ISBN 1-932033-33-5

Digital Edition ISBN 978-1-61200-050-3

Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available from the Library of Congress.

First edition, first printing.

PRINTED AND BOUND IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA.

CONTENTS

Preface

Foreword by Stephen Tanner

Introduction

Acronyms, Technical, Arabic, and Persian Words and Phrases

Acknowledgments

Notes

BY THE SAME AUTHOR

The Iraqi War Debrief: Why Saddam Hussein Was Toppled (Casemate, 2003)

The Chopper Boys: Helicopter Warfare in Africa

(Stackpole Book, US, and Greenhill Books, UK, 1994)

War in Angola (Concord Publications, 1992)

Where to Dive: In Southern Africa and Off the Islands (Ashanti Publishing, 1991)

Challenge: South Africa in the African Revolutionary Context (Ed., Ashanti Publishing, 1988)

South African Handbook for Divers (Ashanti Publishing, 1987)

Africa Today (Macmillan, 1977)

The Black Leaders of South Africa (Siesta, 1976)

Africa At War (Devain Adair, 1974)

Under the Indian Ocean (Harrap, 1973)

Portugal’s Guerrilla War (Munger Africana Library, California Institute of Technology, 1973)

Underwater Africa (Purnell, 1971)

The Terror Fighters (Purnell, 1969)

PREFACE

In a work such as this there is a compelling issue that needs to be addressed, since in today’s world, unfortunately, it increasingly clouds the ramifications of Islamic/Judaic/Western commentary. This is especially acute when a Westerner addresses matters that are religiously, culturally or even racially sensitive.

Anybody opposed to the barbarism of such mindless atrocities as suicide bombings or, for that matter, depictions on Al Jazeera of ten-and twelve-year-olds prancing over the bodies of mutilated Americans, is customarily deemed by the majority of Middle Easterners to be either Jewish or, more likely, a Zionist fellow-traveler.

This might be expected in a society where many regard any kind of association with an infidel–or any nonbeliever, for that matter–as akin to a social aberration. Consequently, in the minds of some of these faithful, it is simply impossible to countenance detached objectivity, nor can it be allowed to happen. By the same token, Jewish readers go quickly onto the defensive about anything negative concerning Israel. To some, such utterances are reflective of anti-Jewish sentiments. This places the reporter in an invidious situation, if only because pure facts are very rarely of his or her making.

I have many friends who are Muslim. I have seen conflict alongside and shared intimacies with a few of them. Having spent much time in the Arab world, I am not only accustomed to the inevitable clash of cultures but rather, I have always enjoyed my spells in places like Cairo, Beirut and Damascus. These are cities that can be at the same time both lethargic and utterly cacophonically disjointed. Similarly, I relish most forms of Arab cuisine. So too with Arab music, or at least some of it. But because I have also spent time covering hostilities from the Israeli side, this renders me suspect. It is a case of being damned no matter what, be you not of the right creed.

The same with my Jewish friends. I grew up in the distinctly Yiddish environment of Yeoville in Johannesburg, which, in its day, had a schul on just about every other suburban block. In a sense, though not Jewish myself (even if I seem to have been weaned on gefilte fish and gehakte herring) the Harry Lipschtzs’ Norman Levys, Dianne Ginsburgs and others of that ilk were, and still are, my people. My mother’s best friend was Dolly Sachs, husband of the late Bennie Sachs, the author and former aunt of Judge Albie Sachs in today’s vibrant New South Africa. I didn’t realize until years later, that with Dolly’s sister, Violet Weinberg, both women were prominent members of the Central Committee of the South African Communist Party.

This did not prevent me from being labeled a Jewbaiter when ever I pronounced something out of kilter in the Jewish homeland. For one, the Israelis never forgave me for predicting in an issue of Jane’s Defence Weekly not long after I returned to London from Lebanon–exactly a year before the event actually took place–that the IDF’s effort against Hizbollah was kaput. Indeed, I had the temerity to suggest that the Israeli Army would soon leave its exclusion zone in southern Lebanon and retreat behind its own fences in northern Galilee. The fact is, I reported the situation as I saw it and in the eyes of some of my Jewish friends it labeled me as biased, even anti-Semitic.

Then I compounded things by favorably reviewing Ha’aretz correspondent Amira Hass’ brilliant exposition of Palestinian travails under an IDF occupation force in her book Drinking the Sea at Gaza. Though the work was eventually nominated for the Robert F. Kennedy Award, the perception was that I had taken sides. In point of fact, I had not, but in the convoluted politics of the Near East–whether you are Arab or Jew–such actions can, and often are, construed as flagitious.

I am reminded here of Roy Fuller, a fellow countryman, complaining in the London of the 1930s that a Tribune reviewer had alleged that he was anti-Semitic. He was later reassured by one of his contemporaries that it was impossible to mention the Jews in print either favorably or unfavorably without getting into trouble. Thus, taking any kind of side in Iran is likely to produce the same kind of hypothesis, invariably disjointed and one-sided.

At the same time, it is pointless to maintain that had Israel not existed (or had been eradicated from the contemporary lexicon by Arab force), that Iran would never have contemplated building the bomb. The cold reality is that politics in Tehran are so tortuous and idiosyncratic that there is nobody on earth who could predict what path these single-minded fundamentalists might follow.

In such things, the religion of a man or, for that matter, of a nation (except if it is Islam, and then still qualified according to Sunni, Sufi or Shi’ite precepts) matters not a whit.

Writing this book was not without its moments. In fact, with its focus on Iran’s weapons of mass destruction programs, there had been a modicum of intrigue all along, compounded by my need to return to South Africa to examine the subject from another source.

I was still in South Africa in May 2004 when Geraldine Fraser-Moleketi, that country’s Public Service and Administration Minister, gave notice that Iranian civil servants were to be recruited to bolster the country’s administration. This was an odd decision since the two states have little in common, whether in culture, language, religion, historical tradition or even politics. Iran is a fundamentalist Islamic theocracy while South Africa is very much a democracy, though, with a two-thirds ruling majority in Parliament, it remains to be seen whether it stays one. In a sense, the Iranian/South African connection was almost like New Zealand recruiting Bangladeshis to help them run their country.

There were other reasons for concern, not least a new found coziness between Iran and South Africa in matters of defense, and the fact that South Africa had helped develop Iran’s missile program. There was evidence too, that I was being watched and I felt that I needed to go about my work very carefully while still in that country.

Shortly afterward my house was broken into, but few things of value were taken. One of the items pilfered was my laptop, and to my consternation, the robbers had further incriminated themselves by leaving my desktop on. After that I had a hard time getting into my emails, indicating that it had been tampered with. This has since been confirmed by an IT specialist.

The question that really bugged me was whether the Iranians–and in particular the Pasdaran–were involved. Significantly, prior to my return to South Africa to complete research for this book, I had been repeatedly warned by American friends that I was crazy to go back, even for a week. At the same time, circumstances surrounding the robbery are interesting, if only because such an event might just indicate the shape of things to come in a future South Africa.

The robbery itself was disorientating. For more than a week my wife and I watched our home being cased by a most organized band of thugs, every one of them dressed in identical blue workshop coveralls that, curiously, were spotlessly clean. That was our first indication that something was amiss, especially in a society where most vagabonds hanging around in the street outside can barely feed themselves, never mind afford new clothes.

They struck while we were out, the thieves targeting only a few specific items apart from the laptop. Just about everything else of value was left behind, including TVs, several beautiful sets of hunting knives, cameras, cassette recorders and a host of CDs and tapes–many of them current and popular–as well as almost all of my wife’s jewelry. Though they took one expensive item, much of what remained intact was of gold and silver, including a beautiful Ashanti bangle inlaid with pure gold an inch-and-a-half across. The robbers didn’t touch it. From that oversight one can only infer that they were after something else.

It was surreal. We’d been robbed and then in another sense, we hadn’t. Over several weeks that followed before I left the country, we knew we were being carefully observed. For instance, I would take my dog out after dinner and heads would duck behind the bushes above our house. But not before Lady, our alert Border Collie had warned me of the presence of intruders. This was especially disconcerting when you consider that South Africa today has the highest murder rate in the world and that the going rate for a hit in the townships is less than a thousand rand ($130). Frankly, it was tough on the nerves while it lasted.

What was most worrying was that all this activity was clearly linked to some of my writings which, by then, centered on both Iraq and Iran. Further, Tehran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) has been shown to have been responsible for the killings of Iran’s enemies across the globe (Chapter 13). Its tentacles spread everywhere that the mullahs have an interest, South Africa included, where the IRGC is responsible for Iran’s diplomatic security.

Even the U.S. is not immune. When David Albright and Corey Hinderstein planned a conference involving an Iranian dissident who had fled to America, some ISIS staff were at the receiving end of anonymous death threats. The conference was called off–and that was in Washington, DC.

More to the point, Tehran’s mullahs would have prevented this book from seeing the light of day were they able to do so.

What was really sad is that it is exactly this kind of clandestine activity that South Africa’s new Rainbow Government swore ten years earlier to eschew. To me, it was a reversion to a time when Apartheid ruled and security police swarmed everywhere you looked. Having been politically robbed was just one more manifestation of the new order.

There were some unusual anomalies that came with the heist. For instance, they took my Mini-Ruger carbine–complete with folding stock, thirty-round mags and aim-point sights. It wasn’t locked in a safe and the police who were called in to investigate the break-in afterward were furious to learn it had been stolen. Irrespective of the fact that the robbers had kicked in the front door–it was standing open when we arrived–they warned that I would be the one criminally charged, and that a heavy fine would be levied. But I never was, which, in a country that has become almost obsessively gun-conscious, was peculiar.

That the intruders left behind my desktop computer (usually one of the first things grabbed in burglaries because of good resale value, especially in South Africa) is also strange. There must have been somebody sitting at my desk going through my files, however, because they were tidily moved around, though this is something only I would have noticed.

Apart from the smashed-in door, the place looked like it had actually been cleaned. Some of my drawers hadn’t even been opened. There was a bunch of silver American dollars in one of the drawers and they weren’t taken either. Clearly, it wasn’t anything of value that the felons were after.

The crunch that the South African intelligence services were involved came when a member of the security services leaked the contents of a confidential letter that I had written to an American Embassy abroad, the contents of which could only have come from documents saved on the hard drive of my laptop. I was tipped off by several of my former Special Forces friends whose organizations, by then, had also been infiltrated by the country’s National Intelligence Agency (NIA) and South Africa’s Military Intelligence, largely because of the role these people were playing in illegal mercenary activities. South Africans are notorious for not being able to keep their traps shut, which, I suppose is just as well because it allowed me to know exactly who I was dealing with.

At the same time, things can hardly be rosy in a country that continues to maintain close ties with just about every government labeled rogue by the U.S. State Department. These include all of those dubbed Axis of Evil by American President Bush, about which, just then, I’d been writing a lot in several Jane’s publications including Jane’s Islamic Affairs Analyst and Jane’s Terrorism and Security Monitor. For this reason I am not in a position to publicly thank any of my more discreet South African sources.

While all this was going on, the news emanating from Iran was rarely off Page One. First, Iranian President Mohammed Khatami, and then Tehran’s energy minister went to great lengths to assure the West that Iran had no nuclear weapons ambitions. Meanwhile things inside the country moved ahead at a giddy pace. We had a London report, in late September 2004, that Iran had launched a Shahab3 intermediate range missile with a nuclear warhead design.

Western intelligence sources said that the Iranian Defense Ministry had redesigned the original Shahab3 warhead to accommodate nuclear weapons. It was also disclosed that the new warhead was more compact and designed as a bottleneck in a throwback to U.S. and Soviet intercontinental ballistic missiles of the 1960s. In fact, the new warhead was seen on Iranian television during a report on the Shahab3 the month before. Sources said the Shahab’s nose had been changed from a conical design to that resembling a baby bottle. It was also suggested that the reentry vehicle of the new Shahab3 design resembled that of the original Soviet SS-9, a 1960s-era liquid-fuel intercontinental ballistic missile launched from a silo and which contained a nuclear warhead.

What is worrying here is that the third generation atom bomb–of the type that Korea is known to have set its aspirations on–precisely fits on to the nose of this Shahab-3 prototype.

That was followed by the Israeli government taking a powerful, uncompromising stance on the issue on September 29, 2004. Jerusalem declared that should Iran persist in going ahead with its nuclear weapons program, the Jewish state would react accordingly. The trouble here is that it would be impossible for the Israeli Air Force to knock out all of Tehran’s weapons of mass destruction assets by conventional means. Or even be able to do so in a single strike, no matter how well co-coordinated.

And that, I fear, could mean only one thing…

FOREWORD

By Stephen Tanner

There’s an irony in the fact that among the military challenges the United States faces today, none poses greater peril than the prospect of atomic weapons in the hands of our enemies. This may seem like an odd situation for the nation that won the Cold War, a conflict in which both sides bristled with so many thermonuclear warheads that the fate of humanity itself was believed to be at stake. But the post–Cold War era, which began in 1991 with the promise of a peace dividend, greater global prosperity, and the very real prospect of a Pax Americana, expired after a tragically short life. It was abruptly replaced by the post–9/11 era, an age that unveiled new threats to our security, more unpredictable, and perhaps more dangerous, than those that had come before.

This new conflict, termed the War on Terror by the White House, and perhaps more accurately a clash of civilizations by Harvard’s Samuel Huntington, has required the United States to toss into the dustbin decades worth of carefully cultivated strategic thinking. Obsolete are such guiding principles as a balance of power, deterrence, and mutual assured destruction, the latter a bedrock of Cold War thinking that also possessed its most fitting acronym, MAD. Given the new opponents we face in the post–9/11 era–driven by religious fanaticism more than geopolitical pragmatism, embracing mass death rather than seeking to avoid it–the rulebook has been thrown out the window.

In this book, Al J. Venter looks through the door opened by 9/11 to inform us of even more devastating potential arising from the world of Islam: the development of a nuclear weapons capability by Iran. An experienced war correspondent who has spent years covering conflicts from Angola, Somalia and Sierra Leone in Africa, through the Middle East to the Balkans, Central America and elsewhere, Venter calmly analyzes the nature of Iran’s theocratic regime, its history of fomenting Islamic revolution through terrorism, and most importantly, its inexorable progress toward creating and deploying nuclear arms.

The author’s perspective is all the more valuable for the insights he provides into the weapons program of his native South Africa. Whereas to most Americans the concept of nuclear proliferation tends to appear abstract, forever rumored and over the horizon in its practical affect, Venter has witnessed the successful development of atom bombs in his own country. He has also interviewed key participants and is able to warn us of the new diaspora of nuclear scientists who today crisscross national borders, motivated by money, politics, or simply by resentment at the demise of their previous regimes. While the U.S. government correctly eyes former Soviet scientists, and more recently the covert spread of Pakistani expertise, Venter informs us of the equally dangerous fount of knowledge that springs from Africa.

While reading this book it is impossible not to view Iran’s nuclear program as the foremost gathering threat to the United States and its closest allies. North Korea, where a similar program has apparently reached fruition, is in the end a small fortress state, surrounded by larger, more prosperous powers that are active in providing an ameliorating influence. Pakistan’s rogue program has been grudgingly accepted by the West due to the surety that its missiles need to be aimed east to offset its huge traditional antagonist, India. Iran is the most dangerous case of all, because it is larger than its neighbors and capable of dominating its region. It also possesses the heritage of a great civilization and former empires, and its current revolutionary regime is the world’s most aggressive proponent of the manifest destiny of Shi’ite Islam.

There should also be no mistaking the fact that the possession of nuclear weapons by Iran would have a destabilizing effect far beyond its borders, rippling not only through the Middle East but causing shock waves throughout the world.

The country in most immediate danger would be Israel. After decades of vowing to destroy the Jewish state–albeit failing to do so with both conventional war and guerrilla tactics–the Islamic world would have the means to create a new Holocaust simply by pressing a few buttons. Israel, with five million people crammed into a slice of land the size of New Jersey, would be hard-pressed to withstand a first strike by Iran, which possesses over twelve times its population and thirty times its geographic area. Whereas during the Cold War the United States had a natural equivalency with its Communist opponents, Israel would be at a severe disadvantage the moment Iran went nuclear. It would be as if, during the Cold War, Britain alone had been forced to confront the Soviet Union.

Israel would feel an urgent need to wrest this Damocles Sword from the Iranian ayatollah’s hands with every means at its disposal. On the model of its preemptive strike against Iraqi nuclear facilities at Osiraq in 1981, the IDF would come under pressure to destroy Iranian nuclear weapons resources before they became operational. But Iran is harder to reach than Iraq, and Tehran, too, learned a lesson from Osiraq, taking care to disperse and conceal its nuclear facilities in the years since. What if this time an Israeli preemptive strike failed, instead initiating the full-scale exchange of destructive power it had meant to forestall? How would the United States and the rest of the world respond if Iran did not initiate a war but only reacted to an Israeli first strike?

As for the U.S. nuclear umbrella, which has traditionally been thought to cover Israel, the dilemma in Tel Aviv would be whether, if three hundred thousand Israelis were killed by an Iranian strike, a U.S. President would be willing to order the destruction of untold numbers of Iranian citizens in response, though they posed no threat to the U.S. homeland? In a country that still debates dropping the bomb on Hiroshima, America’s capability of such ruthlessness is open to question. In Tel Aviv the verdict would be that the Israelis had better rely on their own resources, or initiative.

At the minimum, the result of a nucleararmed Iran would be a revival of the Strangelovian scenarios that dominated strategic thinking on a larger scale during the Cold War. Premised by the fact that whoever struck first would have the advantage in an exchange, paranoia would reign foremost. Even if the Iranians intended their nuclear capability to serve a purely defensive purpose, the West, and most urgently Israel, could never be so sure. The slightest rustle in Iran–say the implementation of airraid drills in Tehran–would rouse suspicion that the mullahs were about to initiate the dreaded conflict. The responding rustle on the Western side could cause the Iranians to believe they were about to suffer a preemptive attack. If Tel Aviv sensed that Tehran sensed a strike was on the way, it may indeed have to launch a strike to counter the misguided Iranian reaction. It would be like a showdown with both sides using a mirror to look into a mirror, with neither side able to risk being the second party to act.

The second danger posed by a Persian bomb would affect the United States directly. Though, unlike Israel, its very existence would not be at stake, its ability to project power at the center of the world’s energy supply would be severely curtailed. Consider 2003’s Operation Iraqi Freedom, which was justified by Bush administration officials with the phrase, We don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud. If Iraq had already possessed a nuclear weapon, the United States would not have dared to forcibly overthrow Saddam Hussein’s regime; neither, in 1991, would the U.S. and its allies have been able to roll back the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. If the Islamic Republic of Iran were able to develop an atomic bomb, it would serve as a form of kryptonite against the superpower, providing a shield behind which Tehran could develop even more weapons and thence become a significant strategic threat.

The United States, of course, would always have the option to retire from the region, just as the British did after the Suez crisis of 1956. But while America draws far less a percentage of its oil imports from the Persian Gulf than does Europe and the Far East, it has long been the guarantor of the world’s primary source of oil. To abdicate this responsibility would create a vacuum of power that other great nations would fill, causing America’s status as the world’s sole remaining superpower to evaporate. Though still possessing the world’s greatest long-range destructive power, its ability to influence hearts and minds, encourage the spread of democracy, and guarantee the free flow of commerce would be lost.

The U.S. is better situated than other major powers to wean itself from Middle Eastern oil, but to allow those other powers to become stronger as a result would only create larger dilemmas in the future. It is not certain that an Iranian bomb would cancel U.S. conventional power in a confrontation, but the prospect that the sprawling U.S. airbase at Doha, for example, or a U.S. carrier task force in the Persian Gulf could go up in a blinding flash if the mullahs had their backs to the wall, would at least severely restrict our military options.

Aside from the dire danger to Israel and the curtailment of U.S. conventional flexibility, a nucleararmed Iran would comprise an additional problem, the most unpredictable of them all: the possibility that the theocratic regime in Tehran would pass weapons to fanatic terrorists, who have no state of their own but possess an abiding determination to kill as many Americans as possible.

One should have no illusions about how such an event would transpire. The bomb would not come stamped with a return address in Tehran, accompanied by a proud message from the ayatollah. Picture instead the port of San Diego suddenly obliterated by an atomic blast with no prior warning. After a lengthy investigation, the delivery vehicle would be pinpointed as a Malaysian freighter under Panamanian registry, which had previously stopped off in half a dozen ports from Dubai to Hong Kong. After a year of false leads indicating North Korea or Pakistan, Iranian fingerprints would be found, while by then the world would have been embroiled in a new war. Another confusing factor would be the inevitable presence of millions of Westerners in the streets arguing for peace rather than for the retaliatory execution of millions of Islamic citizens.

Several factors mitigate against the usefulness of deterrence, or MAD, in any nuclear standoff with Iran. In the case of Israel, even though it may possess a larger arsenal, it may simply be too small to survive an Iranian strike. The nation of Iran would be able to withstand an Israeli one, but its nuclear program, assuming the Israelis have correct targeting intelligence, would not. Thus the pressure on Israel to launch a preemptive attack, either through a massive use of conventional airpower or through tactical nuclear strikes, would become immense. Such a pre-emption would guarantee the survival of both states, while the Jewish state would find its very existence in jeopardy–in fact, hanging by a thread subject to the will of the Iranian ayatollah–if it failed to act first.

Second, as Al Venter describes in this book, radicals in the Islamic world have embraced martyrdom tactics, beginning most notably with the Shi’ite assaults on the U.S. Embassy and Marines in Lebanon. Since those 1983 attacks we have seen the martyrdom principle spread through the populations of Islam, culminating with the collective suicide of the 9/11 hijackers. During the Iran-Iraq War in the 1980s, Ayatollah Khomeini enlisted thousands of pubescent boys to lead human-wave assaults against Iraqi positions. He armed them primarily with little trinkets to hang around their necks, called keys to heaven.

If Iran were to acquire nuclear weapons it is unclear how the concept of martyrdom–now glorified in the Islamic world–would come into play. According to Cold War logic, the fact that America could react to a hundred thousand of its own dead by inflicting ten million on the enemy served as a sufficient deterrent to the other side not to attack. But against a culture that glorifies death in Holy War, the principle of deterrence dissolves. If millions of martyrs are created in order to eradicate the state of Israel, or severely damage the United States, they might be honored for having made the supreme sacrifice.

A tenuous aspect of any nuclear confrontation with Iran would be the value that each side places on human life. For the West, the object would be not to lose any at all. On the other side, death on behalf of Allah is often considered desirable. Add to this the factor that a U.S. president would naturally feel constrained from ordering mass revenge killings of civilians, and a lack of logical balance can be perceived. A nuclear standoff between a theocratic regime influenced by unknown depths of fanaticism and a stable democratic government would be inherently lopsided toward the less predictable party.

It’s a grim paradox that were an Iranian leader to develop and use an atomic weapon, the vast majority of victims of the subsequent conflict would be innocent Iranians. But we have already seen one case in modern history where an absolute ruler decreed the destruction of his own people. In the Spring of 1945 Adolf Hitler decided that the German Volk had failed him, and he ordered a scorched earth policy in his own country to deny the Allies the fruits of victory. Calmer heads in the German chain of command ignored his orders. But what if Hitler had possessed nuclear weapons, with controls exclusively held in the hands of his most fanatic followers in the Nazi SS?

In Iran, the Pasdaran (Revolutionary Guards) have risen as an ideological alternative to the regular armed forces, not unlike the SS or the Soviet NKVD during World War II. Both more fanatic and fully funded than the regular forces, their command structure remains unclear to the West and the possibility exists that, as opposed to the series of structural safeguards that allowed the superpowers to navigate the Cold War, an Iranian nuclear capability could be controlled by a small group or even a single fanatic. There are some who still take comfort in the fact that even if the Islamic Republic of Iran developed an atom bomb, the threat to the United States, which possesses thousands of easily deliverable, state-of-the-art thermonuclear warheads, would be negligible. But then one must consider which is more dangerous to one’s life and limb: a full division of heavily armed but well disciplined troops under firm command and control, or a single homicidal maniac with a loaded pistol?

To summarize the dangers that would be presented by nuclear weapons in the hands of the mullah regime of Iran:

Israel would find its very existence at stake, compelling it to strike first to eliminate the threat. If the IDF failed, the ancient Mideast could be thrust into the most destructive war in its history.

Second, the United States would find its strategic options for safeguarding the world’s energy supply severely restricted. No longer able to rely on its overwhelming conventional power alone, it would either need to expand its doctrine by fielding frontline tactical nukes (holding its heavy thermonuclear weapons in reserve) or by letting its forces become increasingly impotent in the region.

Third, America, Israel, European nations, and others would find themselves far more vulnerable to a type of terrorist attack that would make 9/11 look like a pinprick. While it is unlikely that the Islamic regime in Tehran would provide nuclear weapons to terrorist organizations such as Al Qaeda or to its own protegé, Hizbollah, the risk–whether it be one percent or forty-nine–could not be tolerated.

This is not to cast aspersions on the people of Iran, who, as the author describes in the following pages, possess a long and often glorious history. It is rather to say that a state in which supreme power rests in the hands of Islamic clerics, in an evolving system barely a quarter-century old, is inherently untrustworthy with the most devastating weapons known to mankind. On October 31, 2004, the Iranian parliament voted unanimously in favor of continuing to reprocess uranium, despite entreaties from France, Germany and Britain, and the UN’s watchdog agency to suspend the program. More worrisome was the chant that spontaneously went up in the parliament while the votes were being counted. It was Death to America.

Since at this writing Iran has not yet developed a nuclear weapon, now is the time for responsible nations, in concert with the UN, to bring full effort to bear against its gaining the ability to do so. Ideally this can be achieved through diplomacy, supported by a broader effort to gain peace and stability throughout the region. The object should be to convince Tehran that not only shouldn’t they destabilize the world by developing nuclear weapons, they won’t need to in a world that proceeds under firm, humanitarian principles. If peaceful persuasion fails to work, all that can be suggested is that the West consider other options while it can.

To acknowledge the elephant in the room, America’s 2003 invasion of Iran’s neighbor, Iraq, has introduced new variables into the equation. Together with Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, the U.S. occupation of Iraq has done little to convince Tehran to cease efforts to increase its own strategic capability. On the other hand, an ironic result of Operation Iraqi Freedom may become the empowerment of the Shi’ites of Iraq for the first time in history, thus providing Iran a large natural ally, and a Shi’ite swath in southern Asia of great power proportions. Along with standing behind the concept of increasing Iran’s immersion in the global economy, and providing security assurances that will preclude the mullahs’ desire to gain atomic weapons, the U.S. must solve its current position in Iraq, which may be inadvertently increasing Iranian power and influence.

So far in this new millennium, American Intelligence has not covered itself in glory. From its failure to interdict Al Qaeda’s operations on 9/11 and subsequent failure to capture its leadership, to the false assumptions that existed on either side of our military initiative in Iraq, we have not been well served by our essential front line in the conflict in which we are now engaged. In response to these failures, during the summer of 2004 the CIA saw a revolving door of three directors within three months, while the bipartisan 9/11 Commission has recommended overhauling our entire system.

It is not pleasant but nevertheless essential to realize that the slow march of the Islamic Republic of Iran toward acquiring a nuclear weapons capability comprises an even larger danger than the ones we have seen so far in this decade. For this reason we owe thanks to Al J. Venter, and the numerous experts, operatives and scientists who have provided him assistance, for the ability to assess this new threat and deal with it prior to its reaching culmination. With his wealth of facts, analysis, and invaluable international perspective, Venter has given us a vital, insightful work. Most important, its publication means that when and if the next crisis occurs, the United States need no longer be surprised.

Military historian Stephen Tanner has written numerous books, most recently The Wars of the Bushes: A Father and Son as Military Leaders, Afghanistan: A Military History from Alexander the Great to the Fall of the Taliban, and (with Samuel A. Southworth) U.S. Special Forces: A Guide to America’s Special Operations Units.

INTRODUCTION

The first question that needs to be answered by this book is how Iran managed, for almost two decades, to escape the attention of the West in its bid to acquire the wherewithal, skills and expertise needed to manufacture an atomic bomb. The mullahs are not yet there, but following some pretty intrusive detective work by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in late 2003 and early 2004, everything points to Iran acquiring a nuclear capability within the next few years.

That revelation emerged in October 2003, when Tehran–by then almost a year in denial following ever more thorough inspections by Vienna–admitted that it had secretly been producing small quantities of weapons-grade uranium as well as plutonium. Indeed, that country’s nuclear program is so advanced that on April 17, 2004, CNN ran a headline story titled Iran Rushing to Build Nuke Bomb. This stated that Tehran would complete its first nuclear bomb in between one and two years.

This is disturbing news. Certainly, it goes against the accepted wisdom that Iran is some years from testing a fissile device. Still more worrying is the report issued by the dissident National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI) which states that the nuclear weapons effort by a special military unit functioning secretly outside the Iranian Atomic Energy Organization remains under the personal supervision of the Ayatollah Ali Khamene’i, Iran’s supreme religious ruler.

What gives grist to this statement is that the NCRI is no fly-by-night, sensation-hungry group of publicists, even though the movement is on the U.S. State Department list of terror organizations. Also known as the People’s Mujahedeen of Iran, the NCRI has been active for years and has lost many of its operators–some crack leaders included–to Iran’s secret services. This is the same organization that originally tipped off the West about Iran’s secret nuclear weapons research activities at Natanz and Arak. Until then neither Washington nor London had any idea of what was going on.

Something that emerged before that, and then only grudgingly from official Tehran pronouncements, was that Iranian nuclear physicists were working in several nuclear facilities, some known to Western intelligence agencies and others that were hidden. In at least one of these establishments, an unknown number of centrifuge cascades used for uranium enrichment had been erected, some of Pakistani origin, the rest possibly North Korean. There was some speculation that there were Russian centrifuges involved in the program, though this has not been verified, or the IAEA is not telling.

This method of enriching uranium is an extremely complex discipline. It involves a process that separates gaseous isotopes by rotating them rapidly in a spinning cylinder or tube. The core of the centrifuge, the so-called rotor, runs at sixty thousand revsperminute or seven times the speed of sound and is hardly the sort of thing you are likely to find in your local Home Depot.

The engineering circumscriptions in developing this system are formidable, if only because stresses incurred in such operations place extraordinarily high demands on manufacturing. Here we’re talking about flow-forming maraging (alloy) steel as well as carbon fiber (or similar composite materials) until very recently all of it First World technology.

Centrifuges have become seminal to most Third World nuclear programs. Pakistan uses them. So does North Korea, and South Africa before that. We now know that Libya ordered a batch of several thousand.

Dr. David Kay, former Chief Weapons Inspector (Nuclear) with UNSCOM in Iraq, told the U.S. Congress at a time when United Nations weapons searches were still yielding results, that he was astonished at the level of sophistication encountered in the Iraqi nuclear program after Operation Desert Storm in 1991’s Gulf War. Though the UN was instrumental in destroying almost all that material shortly afterward, it is worth recalling his words, I will never forget, on my second mission (to Iraq), arriving at a facility called Al Ferat, which, had war not intervened, could have been the largest centrifuge facility in the entire European/Near Eastern theater. It was bigger than any in Western Europe, he declared, adding that only the Soviet Union had larger centrifuge facilities.

Tehran, having learnt a thing or two over the years from its belligerent neighbor, did its level best to follow the same path taken by Iraq to put weapons inspectors off the scent. While they initially cooperated to a remarkable extent after the Natanz and Arak disclosures, that phase was comparatively shortlived. It ended with Tehran obfuscating just about every IAEA bid to assess the sophistication, extent or size of its nuclear-related projects.

It would go something like this: on Monday morning, a spokes man for the Iranian Sazeman-e Energy Atomi or more correctly, the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran (AEOI) would agree to nuclear inspections by the International Atomic Energy Agency. Your people are welcome, ElBaradei would be told. They can go wherever they please.

In followup meetings a day or two later, the Iranian representative at the IAEA would express doubts as to whether the exercise was feasible. Or perhaps the timing would not be quite right, he would suggest. All sorts of reasons would be proffered, like the scientist responsible for a certain facility not being available on a particular day, or somebody was ill or there had been a leak of a toxic substance at the factory which first had to be cleared. Finally by Friday or perhaps a week later, Tehran would come down hard with an explicit no.

It is worth observing that the former Iraqi dictator used similar tactics to try to dissuade United Nations weapons inspectors from going over his own suspect installations. At one stage they even lost the keys to a huge industrial estate.

Things started to gel in the wrong direction in Iran late March, 2004 when reports emerged that senior Iranian officials were overseeing efforts to conceal key elements of the country’s nuclear program. One report, sourced to Western diplomats as well as an intelligence report carried in part by the Los Angeles Times¹ mentioned a committee having been set up late 2003 by the Islamic Republic to coordinate these efforts. That came after IAEA inspectors started to uncover evidence of this kind of activity, which is illegal, since Iran is a signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.

The report goes on: A diplomat, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said the committee’s most pressing tasks include trying to hide evidence at nearly three hundred locations throughout the country. With egg on the faces of many of those originally involved in the search for Saddam’s hidden weapons of mass destruction, one needs to be circumspect each time such large numbers are given as fact, and for good reason. It would be difficult even for an acknowledged nuclear power like Britain to have three hundred nuclear sites. A more likely Iranian tally would be a score or two, but no more. So far, the IAEA is aware of about a dozen.

The committee is said to be composed of senior officials of the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran who are responsible only to the highest ranking government officials within the office of the Supreme Spiritual Guide. It is significant that neither President Khatami nor his sizeable presidential entourage is directly linked to this sensitive cartel at the head of the archetypal religious oligarchy.

Iran has said that it will deny access to some suspect sites by international inspectors who are scheduled to continue their work today and cited a continuing New Year holiday as justification for barring the inspectors, said the report.

The article, by Times staff writers Douglas Frantz and Sonni Efron, added that Washington would probably portray any Iranian cover-up as smoking gun evidence of a nuclear weapons program. They also made the point that the intelligence on which the report was based originated from outside the United States. In itself, this is significant because it indicates a greater international awareness of the problem now facing the West.

What is astonishing is that it took so long for the West to finally nail Iran. Nor is it something new. Dr. Nic von Wielligh, the South African scientist who was involved in numerous meetings of the Board of Governors and the general Conference of the IAEA between 1992 and 2002, reckoned that Tehran was invariably near the top of the list at annual Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG) meetings. This was a weeklong occasion when the various nuclear powers–by invitation only–would compare notes as to who was doing what, legal or otherwise in this abstruse milieu. Iran always featured prominently, which, he said, meant that they were obviously up to something.

What would emerge was that the Americans, Russians, British and the rest were very much aware of what Tehran was trying to do, to the extent that they even had names, addresses and telephone numbers of those involved. They would share information about who to watch for if that individual ventured abroad. Or possibly, news that there had been orders for dualuse material with nuclear application having reached a Paris or Frankfurt or Kuala Lumpur factory. Once a pattern had been established, it wasn’t difficult to keep track, he explained, adding that while the NSG does not control the imports and exports of sensitive items that might or might not be linked to the proliferation of nuclear related material, the body does set common rules for those involved.

Obviously, the NSG has its detractors. Some Third World countries (like Egypt) have strong views that the group–originally known as the London Club–is an ultra-exclusive entity dedicated solely to prevent the spread of peaceful uses of nuclear technology. In a sense, Cairo is right. Certainly, von Wielligh concedes, the NSG is vigilant for those trying to dabble in such issues.

The South African nuclear program is included in this book because any nation intending to build a bomb of its own is likely to follow the same route. They would, from necessity, be using highly enriched uranium or, in the argot, HEU.

Let us then surmise that Iran is building the bomb. That being so, its likeliest option would be to follow the original South African pattern, which was abandoned not long before President Nelson Mandela’s government took over in Pretoria. Both South Africa and Iran–while regional forces in their own backyards–are small fry compared to the big powers. But there is also the raw reality that if Pretoria could get it right then so could Tehran, though not, mark you, without outside help. It is only a question of time.

More important, while we know that the Iranians have been dabbling with plutonium, it seems almost certain that Tehran would opt for the tried-and-trusted gun-type device (Hiroshima) over the more complex implosion bomb (Nagasaki). While simpler, quicker and cheaper, none of it is easy.

What worries America the most is that while the Iranian nuclear inspection issue launched by the IAEA in early 2003 started out well enough, things quickly went sour once Vienna began to make more explicit demands. Initially several nuclear-related facilities were made available. Granted, those concessions emerged only after the dissident Iranian group had blown the whistle, but it was a start. Then, as inspections became more intrusive, the Iranians took to their by now-familiar two-step routine.

Take one example: about nine months after the inspections had begun in 2003, Iran faced an October 31 IAEA deadline to allow nuclear inspectors full and free access to all its facilities. It then reneged a few weeks later with its representatives angrily walking out of an IAEA meeting where the authorities were trying to set new deadlines.

What is clear, said the Washington Post, is that the world now faces its own Iranian deadline, very much as it had to deal with numerous Iraqi deadlines while Saddam Hussein walked tall.

It went on: If work at the extensive nuclear facilities uncovered around the country (during the past year) is not frozen, the fundamentalist Islamic regime will soon have the capacity to manufacture the key elements of nuclear weapons. For their part, Israeli officials say this point of no return could be reached sooner rather than later. Jerusalem has already hinted that if the West allows a similar situation to develop in Iran (as the international community faced in Iraq prior to Operation Iraqi Freedom) then it might act unilaterally, as one Knesset member phrased it, to stop the rot. Time is running out for the Iranian program to be stopped by diplomatic or political means, he declared.

The Iranians perfectly understand this imbroglio, as evidenced by the manner in which they have stalled the IAEA. In all likelihood, they will continue to do so even if they formally agree to the agency’s demands. This obfuscatory strategy, says the New York Times, has a good chance of working unless the United States, Europe and Russia quickly start doing a better job of coordinating a common response.

What the Americans do concede is that transatlantic differences over Iran are not as great as those that frustrated just about everything that went on in Iraq. The United States and the European Union agree that the Iranian nuclear program is a serious threat. They also concur that Tehran’s acquisition of a bomb should not be permitted to continue. So too with Russian President Vladimir Putin who