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Iran is obviously investing a lot of its political, intellectual, and financial resources into the Natanz enrichment center. But can we come up with a figure for how much it has cost Iran? Perhaps we can estimate it based on costs associated with Western equivalents. I have attempted to do this below. The result is simply a ballpark figure and I should warning you that making budget estimates, just as making sausages, is not a pretty sight!

Warning: What follows might not be suitable reading for the infirm or small children!

Centrifuge Production Know-how…$75 million
Industrial know-how, the techniques actually used by the shop-floor workers, is vitally important for the successful production of any sophisticated item. Unfortunately, it is determined by how much the market will bear. How then should we estimate it? I decided to look at how much Iraq paid (or, rather, was willing to pay) for the know-how to build an advanced solid-propellant missile, the Badr-2000 (aka the Condor II). This know-how cost is explicitly stipulated in the contract Iraq signed with its supplier state: $75 M, after correcting for inflation. It could be argued that Iran might be willing to pay considerably more for the know-how for centrifuge production but any such guess would be just that. (This, as I warned you, is the ugly part.)

Construction of the underground facility…$55 million
ISIS has done a great job in following the construction of the Natanz facility using satellite reconnaissance. Assuming that the holes dug for the “cut-and-cover” enrichment halls are 25 meters deep, then the excavation costs (at $3 per cubic yard) is $7 M. The concrete, at $70/cubic yard, (and assuming floors, ceiling, and walls are 2 meters thick), is then $37 M. Those do not add up to the $55 M but if you assume a 50% “penalty” for working in a desert, then that’s what you get. (Again, ugly.)

Centrifuge production…$140 million
Given that Iran bought the know-how and initial production lines (production equipment not included, ugly!), I am only estimating the cost per centrifuge here. That comes from the cost per centrifuge for URENCO centrifuges as being leased to France. (Ugly, ugly! Let me be clear before somebody takes offense: when I say ugly, I mean my method of estimating is ugly.) You could argue that URENCO centrifuges are more sophisticated and therefore should cost more. Or you could argue that cost is determined by the relative level of sophistication of the production line compared to the past experience of the producer. (That’s what I assume; ugly, ugly, ugly!) I then get a per centrifuge cost of $20,000. Seven thousand of them therefore means a total of $140 M. The one thing that does not make sense is to cost them per SWU; manufacturers produce centrifuges not SWUs.

Grand total cost = $270 million and counting

Comment [5]

Just a short note from Amman about the IAEA report on Iran …

In February, after the last IAEA DG report came out, I warned readers not to buy IAEA DG Mohamed ElBaradei’s analysis that “the pace of installing and bringing centrifuges into operation [in Iran] has slowed quite considerably since August…”

Quite the opposite. I hypothesized that Iran was accelerating installation by working on many cascades at once. That meant, in the short term, Iran might bring fewer cascades on-line, but that in the long-term they would bring cascades on-line in big bunches:

… I suspect the Iranians are actually scaling up their installation work. Here is my hypothesis:

Initially, the Iranians were building one cascade at a time, like a succession of small art projects. They had limited experience installing cascades and probably a small number of trained personnel. So, in the Board Reports, one would see a pattern: a few cascades, one or two under vacuum and a handful under installation. In the next report, the cascades under vacuum testing would have become operational, while a few more of the ones under installation had graduated to vacuum testing.

Now, Iran seems to have shifted to mass assembly. Installation on all the cascades in the second module has proceeded more or less simultaneously. So instead of small, but steady, increases in the number of centrifuges, I would expect the installation to resemble a step function in the future — with each increase being relatively large. Hence, the nine cascades about to brought into operation.

Looking at the IAEA report, and the chart I created, I think it is pretty clear that my hypothesis is correct: The Iranians are going faster now.

Comment [12]

I’ve been asked to try to express the significance of the Sejil launch. At first, I was given a choice for what was the most significant aspect, from a technical point of view:

-The staging?

-The fact that it was a solid propellant missile?

-A reportedly new guidance system?

All of those are, of course, very important. But I wanted to give a slightly different twist to them. In my opinion, the two most important technical “advances” represented by the Sejil are not readily apparent on the launch pad. Or perhaps I should say they are hiding in plain sight:

1) The launch of Sejil confirms, if we needed confirmation, that Iran has two major missile development groups; one a liquid propellant group and this one, a major solid propellant developmental group. Certainly these efforts share many assets and resources but they also require their own specialties. Iran has had a very active solid propellant unguided rocket program (think the Zelzal family of rockets) but the Sejil represents their debut, if you will, on the strategic stage. It is impossible to overstate the importance of Iran having these two trained cadres of experts.

2) The Sejil also represents a major advance in indigenous production capability. The Safir, Iran’s most advanced liquid propellant rocket, is clearly dependent on imported Russian technology (the second stage clearly uses Russian engines and turbopumps). Its possible that the only imported components of the Sejil are the jet vanes, and even those might be indigenously produced.

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Rocket	Country	Date	Propellant	Stages	Purpose	Note
Kavoshgar	Iran	4 Feb 08	Liquid	1	unknown	successful
Safir	Iran	17 Aug 08	liquid	2	satellite launch	failed during 2nd stage
Sajil	Iran	13 Nov 08	Solid	1 or 2	Solid propel. develop.	successful
Kavosh	Iran	26 Nov 08	Solid	1	Study stage separation	successful
Safir-2	Iran	3 Feb 09	Liquid	2	satellite launch	successful
Unha-2	DPRK	5 Apr 09	Liquid	3	Satellite launch	Failed after 2nd stage
Sajil	Iran	20 May 09	Solid	2	solid propel. develop.	successful

solid propel. develop. is solid propellent development.

The past “year” (slightly more, really; it stretches from February 2008 to now) has been a very active one for countries developing missile technology. I thought today’s launch of an Iranian Sajil solid propellant missile would be a good occasion to review all that has happened. So here is a table I’ve composed of “all” the rocket launches since the Kavoshgar launch in February 2008.

Comment [54]

Following up on Geoff’s apt reference to the technology campaign trail, here’s more on Iran’s Fuel Manufacturing Plant, or FMP.

We’ve got the wonkporn interior photos, including shots of equipment that happened to be next to politicians.

We’ve got statements to the news media about future plans.

We’ve got multiple assessments of the significance of the facility. Because context is always good.

Update: Here’s even more context.

And did I mention the interior photos? Come check ‘em out.

Comment [10]

If you haven’t seen it yet, you should check out the “Video Tours of Iran’s Nuclear Facilities” available at the ISISnuclearIran website. I frankly didn’t find them as interesting as the similar in appearance videos of Iranian missile production facilities. Too much waving flag, not enough detail. (Though the ISIS analysis is, of course, always worth reading.) But this brings up an interesting question: what’s going on here? Why are “we” being bombarded by all these interesting videos? There is, of course, a natural tendency to believe that they are intended for “us” in the West and to search for geopolitical reasons for Iran to demonstrate its technological progress. I think this is why the State Department seems to have challenged the veracity of the Iranian nuclear claims. However, a more realistic explanation is local politics: the Iranian presidential elections in June. These videos are pushing national pride and there is an undercurrent of “these indigenous advances did not take place before the current administration” that seems, at least to me, to clearly come across, whether or not its true.

Comment [10]

Saturn interstage falling off, click here to watch the complete video

I wish I knew what the 2006 Tae’podong-2 looked like. My guess is that it was very different, at least in the details, than yesterday’s Unha-2 launch. Why do I say that? Because I’m starting to see a pattern in North Korean and Iranian missile development programs that are more different than they are similar. Of course, my guess about the 2006 Tae’podong-2 is somewhat circular but nevertheless…

I posted a while ago about Why We Test Things and the upshot was that we, in the West, only flight test things if we are pretty sure how they are going to go. But a failure can usually be attributed to a single cause that most likely is associated with the integration of the entire weapon. For instance, the Trident shown on that post was apparently going in a crazy spiral because a wave slapped the nozzle as it left the surface of the water. The Falcon-1 failed, on at least one of its test flights, because fuel left in its regeneratively cooled engine continued to give a small thrust that sent the first stage careening into the second and broke the second stage engine. In both cases, I would venture, the developers made a small change to the system and flew it again with essentially the same rocket in every other respect.

Iran seems to follow a similar, very systematic, development path. The August 2008 Safir launch reportedly failed in its second stage. (My guess, based on very little information, is that it failed at stage separation/ignition.) The Iranians seem to have diagnosed the problem, made a correction to one part of the system, and flew essentially the same rocket in February 2009. And that followed at least one sounding rocket flight that seems geared to study staging separation.

What is North Korea’s record of responding to failures? It would have to be considered to respond to failures poorly. On top of a reputation of conducting very few flight tests, they also seem to always start over when they have a failure. (Perhaps they “change” project managers?) The Tae’podong-1, flown in August 1998, apparently failed in its third stage. Instead of correcting that failure and retesting, they built the Tae’podong-2. The Tae’podong-2 failed (probably spectacularly) in 2006 just 40 some seconds after launch. Now, the Unha-2 failed sometime after its second stage ignited. (I consider that a strange place for it to fail. A failure during separation, with all the pieces landing in the same spot as the first stage, would have been more understandable.) Did North Korea start over from scratch with the Unha-2? That’s why I’d like to know what the 2006 Tae’podong-2 looked like. Unfortunately, there is no real information on what it looked like in the public domain.

Update: (1:35 pm EDST) Reports are starting to come in that the Unha-2 failed after the second stage burn was complete with the second stage splash down inside the predicted zone. That makes a lot more sense to me than a failure somewhere in the middle of the second stage burn.

Update: (9:30 am EDST, 4-7-09) Here is an example of the printed reports that have started to surface, though I’ve been told less formally by others as well. I’ve plotted the “range” of the second stage as reported in these media stories here.

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The blog-o-sphere is all worked up over an op-ed (in German) by Hans Rühle claiming that Iran funded Syria’s Al Kibar reactor.

Central to Rühle’s stardom is the credence lent to his claims by his former position — he is the “former chief of the planning staff of the German Defense Ministry.” (He is the father of Michael Rühle, a senior NATO official.)

The truth is a little uglier.

First, Ruehle left the German Ministry of Defense in 1988. Whatever “inside” information Rühle had dates back more than two decades. His information about Al Kibar, therefore, is second hand. Second, by “second hand,” I mean plagiarized.

Most of Rühle’s article comes straight from Ronen Bergman’s book The Secret War with Iran, mainly the chapter “Ghost Raid.”

Let’s take a look.

Here is how Ruehle describes the raid against the Al Kibar reactor:

Am Morgen des 6. September 2007 starteten sieben israelische F-15-Jagdbomber nach Norden. Sie flogen entlang der Mittelmeerküste, streiften die Türkei und drangen nach Syrien ein. 50 Kilometer vor dem Ziel feuerten sie 22 Raketen auf die drei identifizierten Objekte innerhalb des Kibar-Komplexes ab. Die Syrer waren völlig überrascht. Als ihre Luftabwehrsysteme einsatzbereit waren, befanden sich die israelischen Flugzeuge längst ausserhalb ihrer Reichweite. Die Mission war erfolgreich, der Reaktor zerstört.

That translates roughly as “On the morning of September 6, 2007 seven Israeli F-15 fighter-bombers started toward the north. They flew along the Mediterranean coast, touched on Turkey and then penetrated Syria. 50 kilometers from the finish, 22 rockets were fired on the three identified objects within the Al Kibar complex The Syrians were quite surprised. By the time their air defense systems were ready for use, the Israeli aircraft were long beyond their reach. The mission was successful, the reactor was destroyed.”

This is almost word-for-word from Bergman’s book:

At 3 a.m. on the morning of Thursday, September 6, seven Israeli air force F-151s took off and headed north over the Mediterranean. … They flew very low along the Mediterranean coast and then over Turkey, before entering Syrian airspace. At a range of 50 kilometers, they launched twenty-two missiles at the three sites within the nuclear complex.

The Syrians were taken completely by surprise. Their air defense systems only detected the firing of the missiles, leaving no time for the sites to be evacuated. A few antiaircraft missiles were dispatched, but only after the planes were long gone. American and Israeli satellites hovering above Syria confirmed that the targets had been destroyed.

There are lots of other examples, like Rühle’s description of Ali-Reza Asgari’s defection and revelation about the Syrian project mirror’s Bergman’s, down to certain phrases: “Iran finanziere ein geheimes Nuklearprojekt von Syrien und Nordkorea” (translate) compared with: “Iran was financing a joint nuclear venture launched by North Korea and Syria.”

Ruehle also lifted Bergman’s description of the commando raid:

Mitte August flogen 12 Mann einer Kommando-Einheit in zwei Helikoptern zum Reaktorgelände al-Kibar, nahmen Bodenproben und fotografierten die Anlage. Die Auswertung ergab eindeutig, dass es sich um einen Reaktor nordkoreanischer Bauart handelte. (translate)

Compare that with

As a result, on a cloudy night in mid-August, twelve men from Israel’s Sayeret Matkal commando unit were flown into Syria in two helicopters. They did not penetrate the site itself, but took soil samples from beyond the vast concrete apron surrounding it. … The results provided clear-cut proof of the joint nuclear project.

There are just too many similarities to ignore.

Rühle’s apparent plagiarism creates a false “confirmation” of Bergman’s account — here is how the at the Associated Press described the report:

Ruehle, who did not identify the sources of his information, regularly publishes and comments on security and nuclear proliferation in different European newspapers and broadcasts, and he has held prominent roles in German and NATO institutions.

One is naturally encouraged to conclude the Rühle’s account is the official Geheimdienst version, filtered through a favorite source.

In the interest of full disclosure, I didn’t discover the plagiarism — Bergman is (rightfully) complaining about it to friends and colleagues. Moreover, I can’t read German — Josh Pollack, and Google Translate, helped out there.

Comment [10]

Cross-posted from TotalWonkerr.com.

As visitors to the White House website know, today is the Zoroastrian new year, No Ruz (“New Day”), which is celebrated by pretty much all Iranians. It marks the vernal equinox, the transition between seasons.

According to the Iranian Students News Agency, the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran (AEOI) plans to mark the occasion by formally inaugurating the Fuel Manufacturing Plant (FMP) in Isfahan. It’s already partly operational:

The plant is in a good condition and is able to produce nuclear fuel assemblies for Iran’s Arak 40-megawatt research reactor which is to be launched within the next two or three years, [deputy AEOI chief Abdullah Solatasana] added.

The Plant is able to produce nuclear fuel assemblies for Iran’s Bushehr and Darkhovin power plants respectively with 1000 and 360 megawatts capability, Solatasana said.

The Head of (AEOI) Gholam Reza Aghazadeh has already declared nuclear fuel tablets for Arak reactor have been produced according to global standards.

(On that last point, see also paragraph 10 of the latest IAEA report.)

Bad News and Good News

So where does this transition take the situation? It makes matters worse in the medium run, but if the Iranians play it smart, it could also ease the immediate atmosphere of crisis.

The bad news is, the Arak reactor is ideally suited for plutonium production, as Robert Einhorn has explained. Preparing Arak’s natural uranium (NU) fuel at the FMP moves events closer to the North Korea-style confrontation, ca. 1994 that hovers on the horizon.

The good news is, the same facility could be used to relax the already acute tensions over the enrichment of uranium. Scott Kemp recently pointed this out to the New York Times:

If Iran wanted to ease jitters, it could do something very simple: turn its enriched uranium into reactor fuel.

“We’d hope they’d do it unilaterally, and maybe they will,” R. Scott Kemp, a nuclear expert at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University, said in an interview. So far, though, Iran has foregone that step and keeps the door open to further enrich a growing uranium supply.

Now, nobody with intact critical faculties really thinks the so-called fuel enrichment plant at Natanz was originally meant to make enriched reactor fuel, and if the idea is energy production, there’s certainly little point in operating it today. Russia supplies the fuel for Bushehr, and completing the Darkhovin reactor hasn’t been a high priority, as Frank Pabian has pointed out. In any case, Iran lacks the uranium to fuel either of these reactors. But going ahead anyway and turning low-enriched uranium (LEU) into fuel rods would materially demonstrate what Iranian spokesmen have repeatedly asserted about the peaceful nature of the nuclear project. And that would buy time for everyone involved.

Comment [18]

Cross-posted from TotalWonkerr.com.

The Iran breakout debate has officially become tiresome.

Anyone bothering to read this blog will remember the instant analysis of the last IAEA report that ISIS put out. It got quite a bit of attention at the time.

Some of you might also have seen what Glaser and Kemp wrote in response.

Anyone on the ISIS email list certainly knows, because ISIS called them out yesterday, for some reason.

Kemp and Glaser made a quick reply.

Knowledge doesn’t grow without criticism and debate. I’ve certainly learned a thing or two from this exchange. But some of it seems waaaay too close to being a determined defense of a hasty analysis that grabbed headlines and caused confusion. This approach ill serves the cause of informing the public about science and policy issues affecting international security.

That is all.

Comment [1]