Jamie Fly

WASHINGTON—The revelation on September 25 that Iran has been constructing a covert uranium enrichment facility near the holy Shiite city of Qom for several years complicates an already complex picture of Iran’s nuclear capabilities and intentions.

What does this new facility say about the status of Iran’s nuclear program, and what are the implications for the international community’s effort to dissuade Iran from developing a nuclear weapon?

To understand the status of Iran’s nuclear program, one must look at the three components required to develop a nuclear weapon.

The first component is the delivery vehicle. As Iran demonstrated just this week when it tested its Shahab-3 and Sajjil missiles, the country has a very active ballistic missile program, which has made significant progress in recent years. In testimony in June of this year, Lieutenant General Patrick O’Reilly, director of the Missile Defense Agency, stated that, “Iran has grown its short- and medium-range missile inventories, while improving the lethality, deployment capability, and effectiveness of existing systems with new propellants, more accurate guidance systems, and payloads.” He also noted that recent test launches had demonstrated “a capability to strike targets in Israel as well as southern Europe” and “demonstrated technologies that are directly applicable to the development of ICBMs.”

The second component required to deploy a nuclear weapon effectively is a warhead capable of fitting on a delivery vehicle. It must be the proper size and be correctly configured to produce the reaction required to initiate nuclear fission. Iranian scientists allegedly were working on a suitable warhead prior to the supposed halt of Iran’s military nuclear program in 2003. The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) continues to investigate this pre-2003 activity, but its requests to interview Iranian experts involved in this work have been denied by Tehran. The information that the IAEA can ascertain about this research is important because it has implications for Iran’s nuclear timeline. If Iran’s work prior to the halt was largely successful, Iran may not require much additional effort in order to have a warhead capable of fitting on a delivery vehicle. If the decision to halt the program came prior to completion of the work, then additional work will be required, even if Iran has the necessary fissile material for a nuclear weapon.

The third component is fissile material. This is where recent developments are the most troubling. Iran has a declared uranium enrichment facility at Natanz that, as of late August, had approximately 8,300 centrifuges installed, roughly 4,500 of which were spinning uranium hexafluoride (UF6) into low enriched uranium (LEU). In recent years, Iran has overcome significant technical difficulties with its centrifuges, and its rate of production of LEU has increased. Iran has successfully amassed a significant stockpile of LEU at Natanz, more than enough for one nuclear weapon if it was further enriched to highly enriched uranium (HEU).

In a positive development, Iran reportedly agreed on October, 1 during talks in Geneva, to allow much of its stockpile of LEU to be transferred to Russia and France for further processing into fuel rods for the Tehran Research Reactor. If Iran follows through on this proposal, it will significantly reduce the amount of LEU at Natanz.

Given that Natanz is under IAEA safeguards, to produce HEU at Natanz, Iran would have to kick out the IAEA inspectors, break seals, disable monitoring equipment, and reconfigure the infrastructure of pipes connecting the centrifuges. Such an action likely would be detected and could cause Israel or other countries to take military action. Most experts thus assume that if it made the decision to pursue HEU production, Iran likely would do so at a covert facility, such as the one revealed on Friday. That site, with a reported capacity of 3,000 centrifuges, is just the right size to produce roughly one weapon’s worth of HEU per year, if the centrifuges were properly configured.

Information about the site released by the Obama administration has been limited, but Iran is claiming that the site was for the production of LEU, not HEU, and regardless, because of a disagreement with the IAEA about Iran’s obligations for reporting new facilities, they were not required to report it until next year shortly prior to it becoming operational. Whatever the outcome of that dispute, if Iran were able to build one such facility, there very well may be others that are unbeknownst to Western intelligence agencies.

In sum, Iran has developed missiles capable of delivering a nuclear weapon to Israel and much of southeastern Europe. It is unclear how advanced their weaponization work was prior to 2003, when the U.S. intelligence community believes the program was halted, but Iran clearly has mastered centrifuge technology and could use that technology to produce HEU at a covert facility such as the one at Qom.

What are the implications of all of the above for policymakers?

The existence of the Qom facility raises questions about the conclusions of the U.S. intelligence 2007 National Intelligence Estimate (NIE). The NIE stated that Iran’s program had been halted in 2003. Even if the weaponization work was halted by Iran’s leaders, how should one construe President Obama’s statement that the new facility is inconsistent with peaceful purposes? Does this mean that the Iranian leadership has made a conscious decision to pursue a weapon, or that they are just keeping their options open?

Even if Iran has not formally restarted its push to develop a nuclear weapon, the status quo is just as dangerous. Iran might be building up the various capabilities that would allow its leaders to make a future decision to develop a nuclear weapon on short notice.

Jamie M. Fly is executive director of the Foreign Policy Initiative. He served in the Office of the Secretary of Defense and on the National Security Council staff from 2005 to 2009.