Potential attack on Iran nuclear sites would accomplish little, report says

Could the Bush administration or Israel accomplish anything with a surprise attack on the heart of what the United States contends is an Iranian nuclear weapons center?

Probably not, a Washington think tank -- and former U.N. weapons inspector -- contend, in a detailed report that has quietly cast a skeptical eye on a central focus of U.S. foreign policy and national security attention.

It is not an idle question. It continues to dog President Bush, with critics expressing the fear that he is determined to attack Iran before leaving office.

The little-noticed study published Thursday by the Institute for Science and International Security cast doubt on comparisons between potential attacks on Iran's Natanz enrichment plants and its Esfahan uranium conversion facility, on the one hand, and, on the other, the surgical strikes by Israel on a clandestine Syrian nuclear reactor in September 2007 and Iraq's Osirak reactor in June 1981. Those attacks set back efforts to produce a plutonium bomb by several years, the report noted.

But any analogy between an attack on the Iranian facilities and the Syrian and Iraqi sites "is grossly misleading," it said.

The report stated:

It neglects the important differences between a gas centrifuge uranium enrichment program and a reactor-based program, and fails to account for the dispersed, relatively advanced, and hardened nature of Iran's gas centrifuge facilities.

Besides, it said, Iran has purchased reserve stocks, in many instances, from abroad, and "an attack on Iran's enrichment program could not just rely on a single strike."

Among the authors is David Albright, the president of the Institute for Science and International Security and a former U.N. weapons inspector.

"Following an attack, Iran could quickly rebuild its centrifuge program in small, easily hidden facilities focused on making weapon-grade uranium for nuclear weapons," he said, in a Washington Post report.

Bush has said repeatedly that his focus on dealing with Iran is diplomatic -- built on trying to isolate the country on the world stage and increase the cost of what he says is its pursuit of nuclear weapons (and which Iran's leaders say is a civilian nuclear power program).

-- James Gerstenzang

Photo: Vahid Salemi / Associated Press

Comments

[Saint Michael Traveler]

Could someone who knows Farsi please provide the context for Iranian Muhammad Ali Jaafari’s statement?

Did he indicate that following attack on their territories, they will use all their resources to repel the attackers including their military resources in the region and blocking their access to the Persian Gulf waterway?

If someone attacks the United States; we will use all our resources to punish the attacker. Would Iranian people do otherwise?

[Brad Arnold]

The problem with America is that we are accustomed to solving tough international problems militarily (I guess if you have a big hammer, then every problem looks like a nail).

The problem with Israel is that they are accustom to regional military superiority, and equate it's loss as an existencial threat.

Mutually assured destruction has protected the world from a nuclear holocaust for more than half a century. On the other hand, a preventative attack by Germany started WWI, and layed the groundwork for the Holocaust in WWII.

In my opinion, the US and Israel ought to change their unproductive thinking, and instead accept Iran's control of the entire nuclear fuel cycle, instead of using it as an excuse to dominate and stifle Iran. Signatories of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty are guaranteed peaceful nuclear power, and the current international effort to renege on that benefit will predictably have far reaching negative effects.

[James Stellarose]

Iran has been threatened in the past 30 years by the West and before that it has suffered CIA coup and meddling. In the war that Saddam started against Iran the West helped Saddam and US and Britain stopped twice the Security Council from condemning Saddam for invasion of Iran and for its use of chemical arms against Iranian troops and Iraq's own Kurdish population. Iran lost upto a million of its young people in that war and tens of thousands are still suffering from those Iraqi chemical attacks. In the last stage of war US that provided arms and intelligence to Iraq upto that moment took directly part in the war against Iran, even shooting down one of Iran's Airbus passenger planes with 305 civilians on route a civilian flight in a recognized civilian air channel to Arab Emirate killing all. Iranians have little trust in any document that the West may sign with them. The signature is worth nothing to them because Iran doubts that the West will comply with its part of the bargain. So here we are dealing with deep-seated historical scepticism about Western intentions in Iran.

[Sam B]

What a sick world we live in! So much lies and deception just to control other people and their resources under such code names as "democracy", "liberation", "peace". Since when USA, the only country which has actually dropped nuclear bombs on cities full of people, has the moral authority to tell others not to even enrich uranium for electricity? Iran has been victim of our aggression for half a century. This madness needs to stop.