by CKR
Forty years ago, more or less, the United States was very worried about the possibility of nuclear weapons proliferation. The subjects of that worry were, primarily, China and Israel. Avner Cohen has written a political history of Israel’s acquisition of the bomb, Israel and the Bomb and has made background documents available on line.
Cohen is primarily concerned with the development of Israel’s “opacity” with regard to its nuclear weapons program, but the history is instructive in many dimensions. I’m particularly interested in implications for US interactions with Iran. There seem to me to be several; I plan to present them one per post in several posts.
Acquiring nuclear weapons was in the minds of Israel’s leaders from the formation of the country in 1947. Nuclear weapons offered a path toward military superiority against numerically superior enemies, and a scientific program in pursuit of nuclear weapons was begun early in the country’s history. Scientists were trained in countries that had nuclear programs, and research was continued within Israel.
The step that was, in retrospect, unambiguously toward a nuclear weapons capability, was the acquisition of a heavy-water reactor from the French, constructed at Dimona in the Negev desert. Construction began in 1958 and plutonium production started in 1963; the Israeli history of the project is still classified, so those dates have been surmised by Cohen and others. By the 1967 war, Israel was able to assemble two nuclear weapons quickly.
Israel, a nation with many competent scientists, required nine years from beginning the construction of a plutonium-producing reactor to the assembly of nuclear weapons.
Israel moved steadily toward nuclear weapons. A couple of serious accidents at the Dimona complex slowed progress by a few months to a year. From the time of plutonium production, it was four years to nuclear weapons ready to assemble.
Today’s situation in Iran is not too different from Israel’s in the late 1950s. The Shah began nuclear research in Iran with US help; many Iranian scientists have studied in countries with active nuclear weapons programs, including the US. There are suspicions that A. Q. Khan helped Iran in its nuclear program, but the extent of that help is not known. Enrichment by centrifuge is less demanding of space and materials than enrichment by gaseous diffusion, the only workable method at the time Israel was developing its bomb. Whereas Israel took a single path to a nuclear weapon via the plutonium-producing Dimona reactor, Iran is moving ahead on two possible nuclear-weapon paths, via uranium enrichment and the Arak heavy water reactor.
In order to make use of the plutonium produced in the Arak reactor, Iran will also need a reprocessing plant. No such plant has been reported at Arak. However, Israel managed to conceal its reprocessing facilities from American inspectors. Reprocessing facilities do not require such obviously unusual buildings as do nuclear reactors and enrichment facilities. Although some of the experiments that Iran did not report to the IAEA involved reprocessing, the scale at which they were carried out would not be feasible for weapons production.
The bottom line is that, if we consider Israel’s experience a fast track to nuclear weapons, the estimates of three years or more for Iran to develop nuclear weapons are reasonable. I’ll agree with Micah Zenko: it would be useful to understand how the government developed its estimate. Did they include a historical comparison to Israel or other countries?