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Part Two of a two-part series on the 2010 Annual Threat Assessment of the U.S. Intelligence Community. See Part One.

Well, it’s been a long, snowbound weekend here in the Nation’s Capital and its general vicinity. There’s not much to do while waiting for the Super Bowl commercials — assuming that your home has power this fine evening — so why don’t we take a few minutes to consider the views of the U.S. Intelligence Community on North Korea’s military capabilities?

According to the IC’s Annual Threat Assessment, the North Koreans now have three kinds of weapons: those that no longer work, those that they may or may not have built, and those that they may or may not be working on anymore.

Let’s start with the first sort.

The Conventional Arsenal, Such As It May Be

The ATA contains what must be the toughest assessment on record of the combat readiness of the Korean People’s Army (KPA):

The KPA’s capabilities are limited by an aging weapons inventory, low production of military combat systems, deteriorating physical condition of soldiers, reduced training, and increasing diversion of the military to infrastructure support. Inflexible leadership, corruption, low morale, obsolescent weapons, a weak logistical system, and problems with command and control also constrain the KPA capabilities and readiness.

It’s been said that North Korea has long had the practical equivalent of a nuclear bomb in the form of massed artillery in range of Seoul. But how much of a threat can such a decrepit force pose? Certainly, it doesn’t sound like it could put up much of a fight, which brings us to the next point:

Because the conventional military capabilities gap between North and South Korea [never mind the U.S.! —JP] has become so overwhelmingly great and prospects for reversal of this gap so remote, Pyongyang relies on its nuclear program to deter external attacks on the state and to its regime. Although there are other reasons for the North to pursue its nuclear program, redressing conventional weaknesses is a major factor and one that Kim and his likely successors will not easily dismiss.

Because, as everyone knows, you don’t bring a knife to a gunfight. The implication? That North Korea is unlikely to move too far down the path of nuclear disarmament while it perceives any serious external threat.

But just how far has North Korea moved down the path of nuclear armament?

Which Brings Us To The Nukes

Let’s start with some definition of terms. On page 14, the ATA says:

The North’s October 2006 nuclear test was consistent with our longstanding assessment that it had produced a nuclear device, although we judge the test itself to have been a partial failure based on its less-than-one-kiloton TNT equivalent yield. The North’s probable nuclear test in May 2009 supports its claim that it has been seeking to develop weapons, and with a yield of roughly a few kilotons TNT equivalent, was apparently more successful than the 2006 test. We judge North Korea has tested two nuclear devices, and while we do not know whether the North has produced nuclear weapons, we assess it has the capability to do so.

There are a couple of dichotomies worth examining here.

First, nuclear test vs. probable nuclear test. The difference is radionuclides. In October 2006, ODNI announced that they were found:

Analysis of air samples collected on October 11, 2006 detected radioactive debris which confirms that North Korea conducted an underground nuclear explosion in the vicinity of P’unggye on October 9, 2006. The explosion yield was less than a kiloton.

In June 2009, as discussed previously here and here, the ODNI press release said nothing on this point:

The U.S. Intelligence Community assesses that North Korea probably conducted an underground nuclear explosion in the vicinity of P’unggye on May 25, 2009. The explosion yield was approximately a few kilotons. Analysis of the event continues.

The association of the word “probable” or “probably” with the second test can be traced directly to the silence on radionuclides.

Second, nuclear device vs. nuclear weapon. A device can go “bang” in a test shaft, but a weapon is something built for combat, implying that it would reliably achieve the expected yield, fits within a suitable casing, has a fuze, and so forth. The ATA says that North Korea is now able to make weapons, a possibility discussed recently here. But the text does not make clear whether the IC judges that these weapons could be mated to a suitable delivery system.

Dept. of Revisions and Ambiguities

There are two nagging little spots in the discussion of North Korea’s nuclear R&D. In one place, the IC appears to have tweaked a previous assessment — not a problem in itself, certainly! — but isn’t calling attention to the change. In the other place, it’s unclear whether or not the IC is adhering to a previous judgment. These estimates have a way of shifting around on you, if you don’t watch them carefully.

The first point is the reference to the IC’s “longstanding assessment that [North Korea] had produced a nuclear device,” as opposed to a nuclear weapon. As Jonathan Pollack of the U.S. Naval War College* observed in his memorable 2003 article on the demise of the US-DPRK Agreed Framework, IC assessments during the early years of the George W. Bush administration did claim that North Korea was in possession of nuclear weapons. Previous assessments didn’t go quite so far. For the details, see pages 12 and 13 — I’ll put the excerpt in the comments.

(*Around here, we call him “Pollack the Elder.”)

Second, the ATA’s discussion of North Korean uranium enrichment activity is somewhat vague. Mostly, it’s consistent with the reading of North Korea’s declarations that you could find here, and shrugs, “The exact intent of these announcements is unclear, and they do not speak definitively to the technical status of the uranium enrichment program.” Quite so.

So much for the open sources. Does other intelligence shed any light on whether North Korea is actually making any headway on enrichment? The ATA makes reference only to the past:

The Intelligence Community continues to assess with high confidence North Korea has pursued a uranium enrichment capability in the past, which we assess was for weapons.

It’s silent on the matter of what North Korea is up to now up to. Joe DeTrani, DNI’s mission manager for North Korea, made a bit of a stir back in March 2007, when he signalled a lack of strong consensus on whether meaningful work continued:

The intelligence in 2002… made possible a high confidence judgment about North Korea’s efforts to acquire a uranium enrichment capability. The Intelligence Community had then, and continues to have, high confidence in its assessment that North Korea has pursued that capability.

We have continued to assess efforts by North Korea since 2002. All Intelligence Community agencies have at least moderate confidence that North Korea’s past efforts to acquire a uranium enrichment capability continue today.

[Update: To avoid confusion, I’ve expanded the quote above.]

An August 2007 IC report (quoted here) put the pieces together like so:

We continue to assess with high confidence that North Korea has pursued efforts to acquire a uranium enrichment capability, which we assess is intended for nuclear weapons. All Intelligence Community agencies judge with at least moderate confidence that this past effort continues. The degree of progress towards producing enriched uranium remains unknown, however.

The February 2008 ATA contained a streamlined version of the statement above. The February 2009 ATA put a different spin on the lack of consensus:

The IC continues to assess North Korea has pursued a uranium enrichment capability in the past. Some in the Intelligence Community have increasing concerns that North Korea has an ongoing covert uranium enrichment program.

So, as you can see, the latest ATA returns to the language of the August 2007 report about the past, but leaves us hanging on the question of the present.

OK, then. You’ve read enough blogs for awhile — go back to shoveling snow, or to shoveling nachos while the Saints pound the Colts in the fleeting moments between commercials in sunny Miami.

Comment [4]

The Annual Threat Assessment of the U.S. Intelligence Community is out, and it’s official: cyber is the new black.

(The version presented to the Senate is linked above. Here’s the basically identical House version.)

Judging by the many threats ably described in this report, life is short, so let’s skip to the good stuff. Pages 13-15 summarize the IC’s view of missile and nuclear developments in rogue states the Axis of Evil Iran and North Korea. Today’s topic is Iran. Tomorrow — barring the Apocalypse or unforeseen delays — we’ll consider North Korea.

[Update | Feb. 7, 2010. After a Snowpocalypse-induced delay, we have a North Korea post.]

Two areas are especially worth a look: the analysis of the Qom enrichment facility, and the handling of the 2007 National Intelligence Estimate on Iran, a subject of fierce public debate, probably for years to come.

Qom — What is it Good For?

After summarizing what the IAEA reports say about Natanz, we get to Qom, a.k.a. Fordow, a.k.a. FFEP. Let’s focus on a few points of interest:

Second, Iran has been constructing—in secret until last September—a second uranium enrichment plant deep under a mountain near the city of Qom. It is unclear to us whether Iran’s motivations for building this facility go beyond its publicly claimed intent to preserve enrichment know-how if attacked, but the existence of the facility and some of its design features raise our concerns. The facility is too small to produce regular fuel reloads for civilian nuclear power plants, but is large enough for weapons purposes if Iran opts configure it for highly enriched uranium production. It is worth noting that the small size of the facility and the security afforded the site by its construction under a mountain fit nicely with a strategy of keeping the option open to build a nuclear weapon at some future date, if Tehran ever decides to do so.

Deep under a mountain. This echoes the characterization of the senior administration official who spoke to the press on September 25, 2009: “a very heavily protected, very heavily disguised facility.” But as Geoff Forden pointed out shortly thereafter, the available images show a cut-and-cover facility, neither deeply buried nor heavily protected by anything but its camouflage (“very heavily disguised”) and local air defenses. Is there some misunderstanding at work here?

To preserve enrichment know-how if attacked. This is almost what the head of the AEOI, Ali Akbar Salehi, told reporters at the time, but not quite:

“This site is at the base of a mountain and was selected on purpose in a place that would be protected against aerial attack. That’s why the site was chosen adjacent to a military site,” Salehi told a news conference. “It was intended to safeguard our nuclear facilities and reduce the cost of active defense system. If we had chosen another site, we would have had to set up another aerial defense system.”

The stated point, it appears, was to keep centrifuges spinning. The potential non-military application for uranium enrichment (in a hidden location, no less) after declared nuclear facilities have been destroyed is somewhat elusive. Bureaucratic inertia, as some have argued? A desire to prevent the West from imposing a “suspension by other means,” even if it has to be kept a deep secret? Or, as the IC testimony appears to suggest, to keep personnel trained up on centrifuge operations until large-scale operations could resume?

If Iran opts configure it for highly enriched uranium production. On the morning of September 25, President Obama stated flatly that “the size and configuration of this facility is inconsistent with a peaceful program.” It appears that the IC has now walked back the part about configuration, perhaps on the basis of findings from IAEA visits. Does this mean that the President was misinformed or misspoke, or did something change at the site, perhaps in the three weeks that passed before the IAEA’s initial visit? [Update: Peter Crail of ACA points out that the language on this point in the ATA is consistent with a Q&A released last September.]

Keeping the option open. This bit tracks with the September 25 background briefing: “our information is that the Iranians began this facility with the intent that it be secret, and therefore giving them an option of producing weapons-grade uranium without the international community knowing about it.”

Reaffirming the 2007 NIE, Sorta

The ATA states,

Iran’s technical advancement, particularly in uranium enrichment, strengthens our 2007 NIE assessment that Iran has the scientific, technical and industrial capacity to eventually produce nuclear weapons, making the central issue its political will to do so. These advancements lead us to reaffirm our judgment from the 2007 NIE that Iran is technically capable of producing enough HEU for a weapon in the next few years, if it chooses to do so.

But what about the other judgments? This passage does comment directly on the contentious questions of whether Iran A) suspended research on weaponization in late 2003, as the NIE had claimed, and B) later resumed the work, a possibility the NIE considered but did not embrace.

This question was stirred up again by the appearance of the celebrated or infamous uranium deuteride document in the Times of London last December. In early January, the New York Times reported that “top advisers” to the President had reached the conclusion that the NIE had been mistaken about the weaponization question, a view said to be shared in Britain, France, Germany, and Israel. The NYT did not mention the views of the U.S. IC, but a few days later, DIA Director Ronald Burgess told Voice of America something close to a reaffirmation of the contested point, but not quite:

“The bottom line assessments of the NIE still hold true,” he said. “We have not seen indication that the government has made the decision to move ahead with the program. But the fact still remains that we don’t know what we don’t know.”

Newsweek‘s sources claimed that the IC was settling on a view that Iran had resumed research, but not development of nuclear weapons. The Washington Times went further, stating that the IC was poised to walk back the claim that Iran had suspended work in the first place.

The closest that the new ATA comes to remarking on weaponization is this seemingly anodyne observation: “We continue to judge Iran’s nuclear decisionmaking is guided by a cost-benefit approach, which offers the international community opportunities to influence Tehran.” This language echoes the 2007 NIE Key Judgments: “Our assessment that Iran halted the program in 2003 primarily in response to international pressure indicates Tehran’s decisions are guided by a cost-benefit approach rather than a rush to a weapon irrespective of the political, economic, and military costs.”

Readers will have to decide what that really means. After the warm welcome received by the Iran NIE Key Judgments back in December of 2007, we should not expect to see a similar release anytime soon. For clarification, we’ll probably have to settle for the forthcoming Questions for the Record.

Comment [10]

As this penultimate year of the decade draws to a close, our thoughts naturally turn to all the changes we have seen. (Don’t ask me why this year and not next, there is just something special I suppose about seeing that tens digit change.) One thing that strikes me is all the convincing proof we had this year about the spread of sensors around the world. Sensors are becoming ubiquitous!

Nothing makes this clearer than the launch of the U’nha-2, North Korea’s third attempt to put a satellite into orbit. Not only did a high resolution photo-imaging satellite catch the actual launch, but it turns out that a vast array of GPS sensors spread over Japan sensed its passage through the upper atmosphere. I’m sure Wonk-readers can think of other examples that illustrate the spread of sensors around the world. (My favorite example involves Iraq, but I can’t really talk about that.)

But if the world has access to more and more sensors, it’s not clear we have the capability of analyzing all of the data. (I don’t mean the sort of brilliance Kosuke Heki, a geodesy specialist at Hokkaido University, displayed in analyzing the change in GPS signals the U’nha-2’s passage caused. That sort of creativity cannot be counted on as standard operating procedure.) It’s a lot like sitting down in front of Google Earth and simply scanning the Earth’s surface, looking for something interesting. You quickly find out you need to be clued into where to look. Dealing with this data overload will be the challenge for the next decade; when it starts in 2011.

Note: The figure above shows the dense GPS array with annual crustal strains.

Comment [12]

Thomas Fingar, the former Chairman of the National Intelligence Council, had some rather interesting things to say recently about the (in)famous November 2007 National Intelligence Estimate on Iran.

You might remember that the NIE, whose Key Judgments were released to the public in early December 2007, caused a real stir at the time. The judgment that Iran had halted its nuclear weaponization research in 2003 seemed to undercut the pursuit of a third round of sanctions in the Security Council. Some critics felt that the IC had reached this conclusion and then publicized it in order to hamstring the White House.

But according to Fingar, now a Distinguished Lecturer at Stanford, it was none other than the White House that ordered the document released:

This example is drawn from the highly contentious 2007 National Intelligence Estimate on Iran’s Nuclear Intentions and Capabilities. It became contentious, in part, because the White House instructed the Intelligence Community to release an unclassified version of the report’s key judgments but declined to take responsibility for ordering its release.

This comes as news.

Fingar also disputes the idea that the new conclusions about weaponization research were intended to box policymakers in. Rather, he says, it was part of an estimate designed to give policymakers “a timeline, a sense of urgency, and possible alternative ways to address the problem” — an approach consistent with the larger theme of his remarks, which is the importance of identifying both threats and opportunities.

Here’s where he translates the hidden message. Get out your secret decoder rings, kiddies:

In other words, the message it was intended to send to policymakers was, “You do not have a lot of time but you appear to have a diplomatic or non-military option.” Prior to the publication of this Estimate, the judgment of the Intelligence Community—and of many pundits and policymakers—was that there was no chance of deterring Iran from pursuing a nuclear weapon and that the only use of force—military options—could prevent Tehran from acquiring the bomb. The estimate also judged, and stated clearly, that Iran at a minimum had retained the option to pursue a weapon and that whether to do so would be a political decision that could be made at any time.

How those judgments could be construed as dismissing the idea that Iranian nuclear activities were a major problem continues to mystify me…

Read the whole thing.

Comment [22]

Reacting to last week’s Qom revelation, Andreas Persbo wrote that

National technical means combined with human intelligence, however, seems to have averted the worst outcome, the establishment of a parallel fuel cycle.

(See: Parallel Fuel Cycles, September 25, 2009.)

So was the Qom facility was intended as part of a larger system, isolated from the network of declared facilities? It’s possible. A broad hint appeared at the bottom of a story in Sunday’s New York Times, stating that the November 2007 NIE “listed more than a dozen suspect locations” in Iran.

Certainly, the idea is catching on. Earlier this week at the Foreign Policy website, Nima Gerami and James Acton wrote:

Unfortunately, the Qom facility might not be the end of the story. A centrifuge plant needs feedstock, uranium hexafluoride — a material derived from refined uranium ore and produced at a conversion plant. Iran would probably not risk trying to divert feedstock from its declared conversion plant at Esfahan, which is under the watchful eye of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). Iran could therefore have also set up a clandestine conversion facility, or have succeeded in procuring the material illicitly.

A somewhat similar observation was offered by Gary Milhollin and Valerie Lincy in Wednesday’s New York Times:

Clearly, the new plant makes more sense if it is one of many. [snip] Such a secret string of plants, however, would probably require a secret source of uranium. Intelligence agencies have been looking for such a source; the Qum discovery should be a signal to increase their efforts.

One place to look might be Iran’s two small uranium mining and milling sites, which aren’t subject to safeguards.

A Stand-Alone Breakout Factory?

Milhollin and Lincy also allow for an alternative possibility: not a parallel fuel cycle, but a plan for the sudden diversion of LEU stocks from Natanz to Qom. This would be a rather risky maneuver.

(Incidentally, this idea is not new; ISIS called it the most likely breakout scenario in an analysis back in March.)

Here’s a related, third possibility. The Qom facility — and perhaps one or more others like it — may have been intended to play a role after an Iranian withdrawal from the NPT. Because Natanz might be attacked under these circumstances, HEU production would instead be undertaken in one or more hidden locations.

This idea isn’t too far from what AEOI chief Ali Akbar Salehi told reporters earlier this week:

“This site is at the base of a mountain and was selected on purpose in a place that would be protected against aerial attack. That’s why the site was chosen adjacent to a military site,” Salehi told a news conference. “It was intended to safeguard our nuclear facilities and reduce the cost of active defense system. If we had chosen another site, we would have had to set up another aerial defense system.”

Natanz already has air defenses, so the cost efficiency that Salehi mentions is rather questionable. It’s also unclear if Salehi meant that burial at “the base of a mountain” would protect the centrifuge hall against attack; Geoff Forden concludes that it’s not buried deeply enough to matter much (see: Cut and Cover, September 29, 2009). In any case, from a defensive perspective, the obvious advantage of the Qom site was secrecy — a secrecy that was lost as soon as the site was acknowledged.

Iranian officials have often approvingly cited the rights that Iran enjoys under the NPT, but at times, others have threatened to withdraw. President Ahmadinejad has intimated that he regards the NPT as fundamentally unfair — see my latest column in the Bulletin for more on this point — and it is conceivable that Iran might someday exercise its withdrawal right, too, much as North Korea has. In such an event, a secret site like Qom would have provided some insurance en route to a tidy little HEU stockpile. That wouldn’t have required an entire parallel fuel cycle.

But this is just one possibility.

Comment [5]

It is difficult to understate overstate the severity of the present crisis. President Obama had it exactly right on Friday morning when he said,

Iran’s decision to build yet another nuclear facility without notifying the IAEA represents a direct challenge to the basic compact at the center of the non-proliferation regime.

Simply put, there is no credible explanation for the existence of the Qom facility—as described by Western officials yesterday—that doesn’t involve the option to produce future production of HEU-based nuclear weapons.

Obama walked a careful line in his remarks, reaffirming Iran’s “right to peaceful nuclear power that meets the energy needs of its people” and holding the door open to a diplomatic resolution, stating, “We remain committed to serious, meaningful engagement with Iran to address the nuclear issue through the P5-plus-1 negotiations.” It fell to French President Sarkozy and British Prime Minister Brown to threaten consequences. Sarkozy said, “If by December there is not an in-depth change by the Iranian leaders, sanctions will have to be taken.”

All three leaders refrained from even the least hint of a threat to resort to force. This choice seems aimed at providing a basis for action in concert with Russia and China, whose cooperation will be necessary for another round of UN sanctions in any case. But if there is no turnabout by Iran and no united front on the Security Council, then there’s also no guessing where this crisis could lead.

So here’s hoping the talks go better than Iranian rhetoric now suggests. If the Iranian side simply cannot be persuaded to accept an alternative to a national enrichment program, such as a national fuel stockpile, then the Forden-Thomson proposal really ought to take center stage.

Modified Code 3.1

At the risk of redundancy, let me spell out a few points in Andreas’s post a little more fully.

Iran-watchers have been concerned about the possibility of another, undiscovered clandestine enrichment site for years, basically ever since the exposure of the hidden facilities at Kalaye Electric (where Iran’s first known centrifuge enrichment work secretly took place) and the big underground halls at Natanz. An unnamed senior White House official put it this way:

Now, it was evident to everybody, both the United States and our allies, that if the Iranians wanted to pursue a nuclear weapons option the use of the Natanz facility was a very unattractive approach; because the IAEA inspectors were there, it would be noticed if Iran tried to produce weapons-grade uranium at that facility, or if they expelled the IAEA inspectors, everybody would assume that they were converting the facility to produce weapons-grade uranium.

So the obvious option for Iran would be to build another secret underground enrichment facility, and our intelligence services, working in very close cooperation with our allies, for the past several years have been looking for such a facility. And not surprisingly, we found one. So we have known for some time now that Iran was building a second underground enrichment facility. And as the President mentioned this morning, it’s located near the city of Qom, a very heavily protected, very heavily disguised facility.

He added:

The safeguards agreement between Iran and the IAEA requires Iran to declare nuclear facilities as soon as they begin construction. Now, in March of 2007, Iran unilaterally said it did not feel bound by that element of its safeguards agreement. And we know construction of the facility began even before the Iranians unilaterally said that they did not feel bound by that obligation.

The official is referring to Iran’s abrogation of an agreement with the IAEA known as “modified Code 3.1.” Iran’s insistence that they no longer needed to provide early notification of the construction of nuclear facilities appears to have been a risk-reduction measure: if they were caught building a secret enrichment plant (or, let’s say, a secret reprocessing facility), then they could point to this legal maneuver back in March 2007, claiming that they had done nothing wrong. That’s the scenario that’s playing out now.

The IAEA emphatically rejected the move at the time, and has continued to do so. Here’s how the Director-General’s report of May 2007 (GOV/2007/22) addressed the matter:

12. On 29 March 2007, Iran informed the Agency that it had “suspended” the implementation of the modified Code 3.1, which had been “accepted in 2003, but not yet ratified by the parliament”, and that it would “revert” to the implementation of the 1976 version of Code 3.1, which only requires the submission of design information for new facilities “normally not later than 180 days before the facility is scheduled to receive nuclear material for the first time.” In a letter dated 30 March 2007, the Agency requested Iran to reconsider its decision.

13. Iran has taken issue with the Agency’s right to verify design information which had been provided by Iran pursuant to the modified Code 3.1 concerning the IR-40 reactor at Arak. The basis for Iran’s contention is that, under the 1976 version of Code 3.1, to which it had “reverted”, the verification of such information is not justified, given the preliminary construction stage of the facility (described as “far beyond receiving nuclear material”) and the Agency’s previous activities at Arak.

14. In accordance with Article 39 of Iran’s Safeguards Agreement, agreed Subsidiary Arrangements cannot be modified unilaterally; nor is there a mechanism in the Safeguards Agreement for the suspension of provisions agreed to in Subsidiary Arrangements. Moreover, Code 3.1 is related to the provision of design information, not to the frequency or timing of verification by the Agency of such information. The Agency’s right to verify design information provided to it is a continuing right, which is not dependent on the stage of construction of, or the presence of nuclear material at, a facility.

Ironically, the attempt to rewrite modified Code 3.1 mainly served to alert Iran-watchers to look a little harder for new clandestine facilities — little did we know that the Intelligence Community had already found one. Today, we see our worst suspicions confirmed.

Comment [37]

Regular readers know that I have tried to accumulate all the information I can about the 2005 NIE on Iran’s nuclear program — it is interesting in its own right and as a predecessor to the much misunderstood 2007 NIE. (I did my best to create a detailed account in “NIE on Iran’s WMD Programs,” March 27, 2007.)

In addition to the information collected in that March 2007 ArmsControlWonk post, the only other details are available in the unclassified summary of the 2007 NIE, which contains a chart that compares the 2005 and 2007 versions (see below).

Now, in the September 18, 2009 edition of RL34544 Iran’s Nuclear Program: Status, CRS analyst Paul Kerr releases the name of the NIE, as well as some description of the 2001 NIE, down in footnote 86:

Although the 2005 NIE stated that “Iran currently is determined to develop nuclear weapons despite its international obligations and international pressure,” that assessment was somewhat qualified. Titled “Iran’s Nuclear Program: At A Crossroads,” the estimate stated that Iran was not “immovable” on the question of pursuing a nuclear weapons program and also addressed the possibility that Tehran may not have had such a program. Moreover, the word “determined” was used in lieu of “pursuing” a nuclear weapon because the authors believed the latter to be a stronger term. The NIE was issued as a Memorandum to Holders of NIE 2001-15HC, “Iran’s Nuclear Weapons Program: Multifaceted and Poised
to Succeed, But When?”

The name — “Iran’s Nuclear Program: At A Crossroads” — is actually kind of useful. Analysts within the IC often grumble about the focus on the phrase “Iran currently is determined to develop nuclear weapons.” Out of context, analysts argue, that phrase distorts the overall tone of the 2005 NIE, which was more ambiguous. I recall one meeting where an exasperated senior IC analyst complained that even the title — “At a Cross Roads” — indicated the contingent nature of Iran’s pursuit of nuclear weapons. (Don’t get me started on their view of “pursue” either.)

In case you are interested, here is the comparison chart from the 2007 NIE.

Key Differences Between the Key Judgments of This Estimate
on Iran’s Nuclear Program and the May 2005 Assessment

2005 IC Estimate	2007 National Intelligence Estimate
Assess with high confidence that Iran currently is determined to develop nuclear weapons despite its international obligations and international pressure, but we do not assess that Iran is immovable.	Judge with high confidence that in fall 2003, Tehran halted its nuclear weapons program. Judge with high confidence that the halt lasted at least several years. (DOE and the NIC have moderate confidence that the halt to those activities represents a halt to Iran’s entire nuclear weapons program.) Assess with moderate confidence Tehran had not restarted its nuclear weapons program as of mid-2007, but we do not know whether it currently intends to develop nuclear weapons. Judge with high confidence that the halt was directed primarily in response to increasing international scrutiny and pressure resulting from exposure of Iran’s previously undeclared nuclear work. Assess with moderate-to-high confidence that Tehran at a minimum is keeping open the option to develop nuclear weapons.
We have moderate confidence in projecting when Iran is likely to make a nuclear weapon; we assess that it is unlikely before early-to-mid next decade.	We judge with moderate confidence that the earliest possible date Iran would be technically capable of producing enough highly enriched uranium (HEU) for a weapon is late 2009, but that this is very unlikely. We judge with moderate confidence Iran probably would be technically capable of producing enough HEU for a weapon sometime during the 2010-2015 time frame. (INR judges that Iran is unlikely to achieve this capability before 2013 because of foreseeable technical and programmatic problems.)
Iran could produce enough fissile material for a weapon by the end of this decade if it were to make more rapid and successful progress than we have seen to date.	We judge with moderate confidence that the earliest possible date Iran would be technically capable of producing enough highly enriched uranium (HEU) for a weapon is late 2009, but that this is very unlikely.

Source: “Iran: Nuclear Intentions and Capabilities,” National Intelligence Council, November 2007.

Comment [4]

Plenty has already been said about last week’s missile defense announcement, with the diplomacy and the politics taking center stage. Now let’s see if we can’t tip the balance back just slightly towards the wonky. After all, that’s where President Obama put the focus on April 5 when he said, “As long as the threat from Iran persists, we will go forward with a missile defense system that is cost-effective and proven.”

That last word, “proven,” helps to explain the several mentions of testing in the White House’s fact sheet. Note the added emphasis in this description of current plans:

• Phase One (in the 2011 timeframe) – Deploy current and proven missile defense systems available in the next two years, including the sea-based Aegis Weapon System, the SM-3 interceptor (Block IA), and sensors such as the forward-based Army Navy/Transportable Radar Surveillance system (AN/TPY-2), to address regional ballistic missile threats to Europe and our deployed personnel and their families;
• Phase Two (in the 2015 timeframe) – After appropriate testing, deploy a more capable version of the SM-3 interceptor (Block IB) in both sea- and land-based configurations, and more advanced sensors, to expand the defended area against short- and medium-range missile threats;
• Phase Three (in the 2018 timeframe) – After development and testing are complete, deploy the more advanced SM-3 Block IIA variant currently under development, to counter short-, medium-, and intermediate-range missile threats; and

• Phase Four (in the 2020 timeframe) – After development and testing are complete, deploy the SM-3 Block IIB to help better cope with medium- and intermediate-range missiles and the potential future ICBM threat to the United States.

If you are wondering about that “current and proven” in Phase One, the manufacturer claims 15 successful SM-3 intercept tests. (Update: MDA has a test record fact sheet. CDI has a detailed rundown through June 2008. And here’s Wikipedia.)

By contrast, when the decision to deploy the previous version of a European defense system was announced in October 2007, not only had the system not been tested, but no plans for testing had been made; so stated an October 2007 report of the Pentagon’s Office of the Director of Operational Test and Evaluation (DOT&E). A test plan was later accepted at the insistence of Congress.

As much as anything else, then, the change from 2007 to 2009 expresses a different philosophy about the need for “proven” systems, meaning ones that have been tested.

In fairness, though, we don’t know what a similar DOT&E report would say today about the new “Phase One.” How fully applicable is past Aegis/SM-3 testing to the proposed deployment? It’s not entirely clear.

Testing Against What?

We’ll also have to wait and see just how rigorous the testing programs are for Phases Two through Four. A nagging problem in the BMDS test regime has been the absence of what MDA calls “complex countermeasures” from its midcourse intercept tests. (The midcourse category includes both GBI—the basis of the discarded European proposal—and SM-3.) David Wright of UCS alluded to this issue in his statement that the new system, like the old, “does not square with technical realities.”

UCS is well-known as a tough critic of midcourse defenses. The organization sponsored the Countermeasures report of 2000, which argued that midcourse systems, which intercept warheads above the atmosphere, can be flummoxed by the attacker’s use of certain technologies, including the creative use of balloon decoys.

MDA’s initial response to this problem was to argue that adversaries like North Korea actually were not yet capable of mastering this level of countermeasures technology. Later, it initiated development of the Multiple Kill Vehicle (MKV) system, designed to overcome decoy deployment with large numbers of interceptors.

Unfortunately, MKV is being canceled. According to the Secretary of Defense, it turned out to be “plainly unworkable, prohibitively expensive and could never be practically deployed.” This could be a problem, since surprisingly sophisticated missile developments in Iran, which have led to revised intelligence assessments, make it that much less likely (on the face of it) that challenging countermeasures are still many years away.

So what does the new intelligence estimate say about countermeasures? And how will this issue be reflected in future SM-3 development and testing? Something tells me that we’ll be circling back to these questions at some point.

Update. David Wright and UCS colleague Lisbeth Gronlund now have an essay in the Bulletin laying out the argument against an Aegis-based defense at somewhat greater length. It would be interesting to know what sort of defenses they would prefer for NATO Europe: terminal-phase systems like Patriot? Boost-phase systems like those advocated by Richard Garwin or Ted Postol? Both of these? Nothing at all? There are serious arguments to be made for any of these positions.

Comment [12]

I am working on a series of longer posts related to monitoring the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, but wanted to share an amusing paragraph from the March 2009 edition of Science & Technology Review, the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory’s magazine. (I love S&T Review, by the way.)

I sometimes joke that, if the intelligence community detected North Korea preparing to fire a nuclear-armed missile at the United States, the DNI would warn the President that preemption might compromise sources and methods. Furthermore, his analysts would be totally bummed about the radionuclide and weapons effect data they didn’t get to collect.

I kid because I love the IC.

But I’ve never seen the evil-deed-as-intelligence-bonanza phenomenon quite as clearly as I do in this very good article on monitoring clandestine nuclear tests by Katie Walter:

The most recent nuclear test took place on October 9, 2006, when the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea—North Korea—detonated a nuclear device. USGS and other organizations worldwide focused on analyzing seismic data from the test. Their aim was to quickly find the location—the epicenter, as it were—of the explosion and measure its size.

Livermore seismologists also analyzed data shortly after the magnitude-4 event but with a different purpose. The last nuclear experiments had been conducted eight years earlier in India and Pakistan. The North Korea test offered a rare source of valuable new data recorded at the seismic monitoring stations nearest North Korea, which the team could use to test its regional models and various calibration algorithms.

Only a seismologist could see calibrating a regional monitoring station as the silver lining to a North Korean nuclear test.

Comment [7]

I’ve never asked, but am willing to bet that the good folks at The Bulletin get a fair bit of grief over the Doomsday Clock. Seeing as we’ve been at five minutes to midnight since 2007 (the typical snide question presumably goes) just how it is that the world keeps turning?

That’s the problem with having a deterministic thing like a clock symbolize a probabilistic notion like risk. Either way, trying to shake people out of their complacency is a pretty good way to draw charges of sensationalism. Sometimes with justice. Sometimes not.

This brings us to Gal Beckerman’s analysis of the Iran nuclear clock in the Forward:

[E]arlier this month, it was revealed that the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research’s [INR] latest estimate has pushed that dreaded date back to 2013, when it posits that Iran will finally be able to produce highly enriched uranium [HEU], a key ingredient in any nuclear weapon…

What some see as the fine point of when exactly Iran gets the bomb is not inconsequential. The time frame for both diplomacy and a military response that would have serious ramifications hinge on this question. It is for this reason, a wide range of independent observers agree, that politics has played the most central role in how intelligence on Iran and its nuclear program is interpreted and packaged for the public.

“Clearly the fact that some of these assessments seem to change rather rapidly has fueled the suspicion that much of it is actually politically motivated,” said Trita Parsi, president of the National Iranian American Council.

Let’s not dwell on the fussy stuff, like the existence of fissile material other than HEU, INR’s position being a dissent from an Intelligence Community (IC) consensus, or this particular conclusion’s origins in the 2007 National Intelligence Estimate (NIE), not the April 2009 Questions for the Record (QFR) that Beckerman is thinking of. That would be, you know, fussy. Instead, let’s try to clarify a few key concepts.

First, what do these dates represent? Do they tell us “when exactly Iran gets the bomb,” as Beckerman puts it?

No. These dates refer to when Iran “probably would be technically capable of producing enough HEU for a weapon,” in the words of the 2007 NIE Key Judgments. Not when it will do so. This is a rather important distinction. Just for example, something we do learn from the 2009 QFR is that INR, at least, doesn’t think Iran is terribly likely to pursue this course. But that’s a topic for another blog post.

The bottom line is, it would be a mistake to imagine that we are destined to wake up one day between 2010 and 2015 (IC consensus) or between 2013 and 2015 (INR’s view) to learn of an Iranian nuclear test. Or at least, that’s not what the estimate conveys.

Second, is there any rational basis for these numbers? Aren’t they just plucked out of the air, as some would have us believe?

Documents are the greatest things. When you read them, you get information about stuff. Like what’s in the documents. In the 2007 NIE, it says:

We assess with moderate confidence that Iran probably would use covert facilities—rather than its declared nuclear sites—for the production of highly enriched uranium for a weapon.

And the recent QFR explains that INR thinks this capability is unlikely to be realized before 2013 because “Outfitting a covert enrichment infrastructure could take years.”

Now we know.

Third, why do estimates of when Iran will be able to produce fissile material tend to slide to the right as time passes? Isn’t it just a matter of serial sensationalism?

Some of the rhetoric of senior officials in the U.S. and Israel could be explained in those terms. But changes in more considered estimates like the NIE are probably better explained in terms of two other things: A) Having progressively more insight into the Iranian program and the difficulties it faces, which allows some easing back from worst-case estimates, and B) Changes in the facts themselves.

What sort of facts have changed in the last few years? Most obviously, Iran’s work on centrifuges was suspended for a couple of years, ca. 2004 to 2006. Little visible headway was being made at that time. More subtly, perhaps, some obstacles seem to have been thrown in Iran’s path along the way, especially since the end of that suspension. There are many examples of stories to this effect. Just look around...

All these matters are, I think, reasonably clear upon examination. But let’s entertain no illusions that reporters will stop tripping over them anytime soon.

Comment [26]