Ignoring the evidence of Iran’s infidelity

AS negotiations over Iran's nuclear program are about to resume in Moscow next Monday, Western leaders insist that Iran's Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has yet to make a decision about whether to build nuclear weapons, despite evidence that Iran has been seeking nuclear weapons ever since the beginning of its nuclear program, almost 30 years ago.

Far from being a sign of prudence, this attitude is akin to the story of a suspicious husband who decides to hire a private eye.

After a few days, the investigator reports back.

"Every day," he tells his client, "a distinguished gentleman comes to your home soon after you leave for work. After a few minutes, the lights go on in your bedroom. He walks in with your wife. She dims the lights. He gets undressed. So does she." Horrified, the husband asks: "what happens next?" "That I cannot say conclusively," says the private eye, "because at that point, Madam always shuts the window curtains." "We can't be sure then," says the husband, shaking his head.

The story is a metaphor for Western refusal to see through Iran's delaying tactics. On February 25, for example, the Director of US National Intelligence, James R. Clapper Jr, testified before the US congress that "Iran is keeping open the option to develop nuclear weapons, in part by developing various nuclear capabilities that better position it to produce such weapons, should it choose to do so." He added, "We do not know, however, if Iran will eventually decide to build nuclear weapons."

Three days later, US Secretary of Defence Leon Panetta repeated this view to congress: "They're developing a nuclear capability (but) our intelligence makes clear that they haven't made the decision to develop a nuclear weapon."

There is no reason to doubt the wisdom and knowledge of well-informed senior leaders and their watchful services - after all, their past record spotting nuclear proliferation early on, from Iraq to Syria, India to Pakistan, and Libya to North Korea, speaks for itself!

And yet, one cannot but notice that against their repeated reassurances that Iran has not made a decision yet, there's Iran's constant pulling of the curtain seconds before its cheating act is caught on camera.

Consider the following:

Iran pursued major elements of its nuclear program in secret for at least 18 years, in violation of its solemn Non-Proliferation Treaty obligations.

Iran procured much of its nuclear technology, including plans to build uranium metal hemispheres that can only be used for a nuclear device, from A. Q. Khan. The Khan network supplied Iran and other countries, such as Libya, with sensitive nuclear technology, including blueprints for a nuclear device. Iran never denied having received any of the above. On the contrary, it confirmed that it possessed the Khan documents.

Iran insists that it intends to enrich uranium to feed several nuclear power plants. Apart from Bushehr, however, work has not started on any other plants. And the uranium needed to fuel the Bushehr plant will come from Russia. But the 60,000 sq m centrifuge field at Natanz, constructed deep underground and protected by layers of reinforced concrete, is capable of producing highly enriched uranium for nuclear weapons.

All research centres involved in Iran's nuclear program have links to, or are an integral part of, the Iranian armed forces. This would be both inappropriate and unnecessary if the centres were designed for purely civilian purposes. The Revolutionary Guards play key roles in all matters relating to the nuclear program, while Iran's military industry manufactures the uranium-enriching centrifuges.

According to the International Atomic Energy Agency, "Iran had used undeclared nuclear material for testing and experimentation in several uranium conversion, enrichment, fabrication and irradiation activities, including the separation of plutonium, at undeclared locations and facilities".

Iran's scientists have conducted experiments with high explosives and special triggers that could work in a nuclear device; they have studied the geometry of implosion of the Trinity Test - America's first plutonium nuclear weapons test - and they have refitted long-range missiles to accommodate a non-conventional payload.

The program includes a heavy-water research reactor, whose structure and dimension suggest a military purpose - the enrichment of plutonium - given that Iran's power stations would ostensibly be fuelled by uranium.

Faced with pressure to open Parchin, a military site, to inspections due to mounting evidence of nuclear weapons-related military tests, Iran is trying to sanitise it, much like Syria did with the rubble of its undeclared nuclear reactor after it was destroyed in an Israeli air raid in 2007. As if all of this was not enough, there is the underground enrichment plant at Fordow, whose "size and configuration", as Barack Obama said in 2009, "is inconsistent with a peaceful program".

These are commendably blunt words. For a married woman to be naked in her bedroom with another man is also "inconsistent" with marital fidelity - but much like her husband, it appears that the US President, after exposing a key component of Iran's drive to produce nuclear weapons, insists that, "we can't be sure".

For those who will not be fully satisfied until Western intelligence produces a photograph of a sign saying "welcome to Iran's clandestine nuclear weapons factory", none of these facts will ultimately matter.

But the argument according to which Iran has not made a decision yet, weighed against the evidence of almost 30 years of dogged, relentless and stubborn pursuit of nuclear weapons, sounds like a betrayed husband choosing not to believe what everyone else already knows.