by CKR
Seymour Hersh has a new article out on Dick Cheney's desire to bomb Iran (h/t to helmut). Certainly one of the neocon mouthpieces has been beating that drum lately.
The scariest part of Hersh's article concerns the administration's propensity to base their wars on the unknown unknowns. If you don't know that a country has a nuclear weapons program, that can be construed to mean that they have hidden it very well. Some still believe that all of Saddam Hussein's WMD were carted off to Syria and will be found there when we invade. Then there's the famous North Korean uranium enrichment program, which may actually amount to three or four purchased centrifuges, or it may be an enormous installation hidden away under a mountain, if we are to believe the administration's speculations.
The CIA is well aware of the administration's propensity to develop hard justifications from a lack of evidence:
The C.I.A. assessment warned the White House that it would be a mistake to conclude that the failure to find a secret nuclear-weapons program in Iran merely meant that the Iranians had done a good job of hiding it.
Even though the IAEA has not picked up evidence of a serious nuclear weapons program and the CIA believes that Iran is far from having a bomb, Hersh tells us that information from "Israeli spies" is being used as a basis for believing in yet one more secret program.
...intelligence from Israeli spies operating inside Iran claimed that Iran has developed and tested a trigger device for a nuclear bomb. The provenance and significance of the human intelligence, or HUMINT, are controversial. “The problem is that no one can verify it,” the former senior intelligence official told me. “We don’t know who the Israeli source is. The briefing says the Iranians are testing trigger mechanisms”—simulating a zero-yield nuclear explosion without any weapons-grade materials—“but there are no diagrams, no significant facts. Where is the test site? How often have they done it? How big is the warhead—a breadbox or a refrigerator? They don’t have that.” And yet, he said, the report was being used by White House hawks within the Administration to “prove the White House’s theory that the Iranians are on track. And tests leave no radioactive track, which is why we can’t find it.” Still, he said, “The agency is standing its ground.”Aside from the provenance of this information, there are other things wrong with it. I respect Seymour Hersh's reporting greatly; this may be an exact quote. But much of it doesn't make sense. However, it could relate to some sort of reality.
Let's say that someone who doesn't quite understand what it takes to make a nuclear weapon knows something about what Iran is doing. The information is passed on to someone else, and so on. Nobody in the chain knows enough about the details to ask the right questions, and the information gets a little more garbled in each step.
The key word is trigger. It is used far too often in reference to nuclear weapons, for far too many components. In this case, the description is " 'trigger mechanisms'—simulating a zero-yield nuclear explosion without any weapons-grade materials. That could apply to the explosives or to neutron generators, it's that unclear.
As I look back at my old comment, I see that one of my links refers to information from the National Council on Resistance of Iran, one of the emigre groups that would be very happy to see the United States bomb Iran. In that link, they are talking about polonium-beryllium neutron generators. But testing such generators would leave radioactivity scattered around, and no polonium seems to have been detected. So probably Hersh's "trigger mechanisms" are the explosives.
It's a bit hair-splitting, but a "zero-yield nuclear explosion" is of no value to someone who wants a bomb. So there's no reason to simulate one. Zero-yield explosions, however, are used to determine the properties needed for a bomb. If it's zero-yield, it's not nuclear, so I'll leave that adjective out. I won't go into details on that just now. The important thing in understanding Hersh's article is that someone who knows what they're talking about simply wouldn't say it that way.
And it sounds very much like the "Israeli spies" could be recycling (or confirming?) the NCRI stories. We don't know what they are testing, and we have evidence of the radioactivity that would accompany testing of the NCRI-claimed devices. Clearly even more questions than Hersh raises need to be asked.
Supposedly confirmatory evidence that Hersh cites is still vaguer.
information about the trigger device had been buttressed by another form of highly classified data, known as MASINT, for “measuring and signature” intelligence. The Defense Intelligence Agency is the central processing and dissemination point for such intelligence, which includes radar, radio, nuclear, and electro-optical data. The consultant said that the MASINT indicated activities that “are not consistent with the programs” Iran has declared to the I.A.E.A. “The intelligence suggests far greater sophistication and more advanced development,” the consultant said. “The indications don’t make sense, unless they’re farther along in some aspects of their nuclear-weapons program than we know.”It is not possible to tell what this means.
On another front, Iran is sufficiently emboldened to request assistance from the IAEA in completing their heavy-water reactor, which will produce plutonium from unenriched uranium, the other potential route to a nuclear weapon.
This illustrates one of the weaknesses of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. If states are allowed to have the entire nuclear fuel cycle, they will be capable of producing nuclear weapons. The only correctives to this are being the 900-pound gorilla and smashing the programs of all those who you don't want to have nuclear weapons or changing the international dynamic in more basic ways. The latter is more likely to endure.
In that area, the United States could provide a lot more transparency into its destruction of its nuclear weapons, or it could be more assertive in removing nuclear weapons from its defense strategies. But it's easier to pull a wet noodle to push it.