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THE URANIUM QUESTION
A mission to take the remaining partially enriched uranium from Iran's nuclear sites could put an end to the war
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I got to Washington in 1965 as a kid reporter for the Associated Press, just as the Vietnam war was heating up and President Lyndon Johnson, like the man in office now, was doing all he could to keep the bombs dropping and to avoid a settlement with the evil Commies from North Vietnam.
The Senate wasn’t much help on that issue. I remember an early visit as a Congressional reporter that I had with Senator William Fulbright, the often caustic Democrat from Arkansas who was the chairman of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations. He was running hearings about the defensive Anti-ballistic Missile System when the real issue, so I innocently thought, was the fact that the United States and the Soviet Union were working away on far more threatening Multiple Independently Targetable Reentry Vehicles, missiles capable of carrying and deploying as many as twelve separately targeted nuclear warheads.
I asked the chairman: why was he planning hearings on the ABM when MIRVs were a much more formidable threat? He did not know me but AP reporting was all over Arkansas newspapers and so he gave me an amused look and asked if it were so that I was called Sy. I said yes and he, in words I’ve never forgotten, said: “Well, Sy,” he said, slowly drawing out my name with a sigh, “I just got done educating the senators on my committee about a three letter acronym, and now you want me to teach them about a four-letter acronym?”
I got the drift. End of interview. We had leaders in the Senate then who were unafraid to defy a president from their own party. With few exceptions, that can hardly be said today.
So we now have a president who was still asking in a hard-to-fathom press conference yesterday why he did not win the Nobel Peace Prize this year, on the day after a joint American and Israel bombing attack bombs struck Sharif University of Technology in Tehran, the nation’s most prestigious scientific institution, often compared to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. No Iranian nuclear sites were destroyed, but the bombings across the country yesterday killed at least thirty-four people, including six children.
It has been widely understood and accepted that the United States would go to war as an ally of Israel if there was impossible-to-ignore evidence that Iran had mastered the process of enriching uranium and making the bomb. “We can’t let Iran have a nuclear weapon,” Trump said, embracing once again the position of US presidents and Israeli leaders—most avidly by Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israel prime minister—since the overthrow of the Shah of Iran in 1979.
That possibility was seen within years of the rise of the Islamic Republic as an existential threat to Israel, which had been nuclear-armed with the secret support of US presidents since the 1960s. The fear of an Iranian bomb has consumed Israeli leaders for decades, especially Netanyahu. Like his predecessors, Trump has repeatedly threatened Iran for its research into the bomb while never challenging Israel in its long-standing and often ridiculed policy of never denying or acknowledging that it is a nuclear power.
So here, for the record, is an update of where Israel is today, in terms of its knowledge of the Iranian nuclear program. I write as someone who published a book on the Israeli nuclear weapons program, The Samson Option, with Random House in 1991. Rights to the book were immediately purchased by a leading publisher in Israel and, when it appeared in Hebrew, it did not include a final chapter on the role of Robert Maxwell, the British publishing magnate, in the protection of Israeli nuclear secrets.
Most important, here is what is known about the location of Iran’s uranium ore that has been enriched to 60 degrees of purity, just short of the 90-plus degrees of purity needed to trigger a nuclear bomb.
Iran’s main enrichment center, deep inside a mountain at Fordow, one of three main nuclear weapons sites in Iran, was struck last June by a US air attack authorized by Trump in cooperation with Israel. I now understand that every three kilograms of uranium, once enriched at Fordow, would be stored in a heavy container and quickly shipped to one of the vast underground tunnels—depicted to me as “octopus” tunnels—beneath a second major Iranian nuclear weapons facility at Isfahan. Iran’s fleet of ballistic missiles and launchers were similarly stored, among other hidden sites, in the tunnels at Isfahan and at a third underground nuclear weapons facility at Natanz.
At this point, I learned, 390 kilograms of enriched uranium are known by Israeli intelligence to be stored at the underground nuclear facility in Isfahan, 25 to 30 kilograms at Natanz, and 15 kilograms at bombed-out Fordow. US and Israeli military teams have tracked locations and have been studying the question of how to fight their way into the tunnels and retrieve the enriched materials. The next step, so the thinking goes, would be to transport the canisters by helicopter to a covert US base in Azerbaijan.
All in all, I was told by someone with firsthand knowledge, there are at least 26 curving underground “octopus” tunnels throughout Iran used for the storage of ballistic missiles and launchers.
I was further told that Israeli intelligence estimated within the last two weeks that bomb and rocket attacks have destroyed 80 percent of Iran’s missile launchers and 90 percent of Iran’s ballistic missile arsenal. But the rockets keep coming, as does Iran’s huge fleet of drones.
Israeli intelligence now believes, I was told, that the incessant US and Israeli bombing of known tunnel entrances may have shielded entrances to underground Iranian missile and rocket depots that may have other, unknown exits. That would explain the continuing flow of accurately targeted Iranian rockets and missiles launched at sites in Israel and at other states along the Persian Gulf allied to the US.
I’ve been told that tens of thousands of US troops are in place and poised to invade the Kharg Island export terminal in the northern Persian Gulf that is tightly controlled by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard as well as other islands in the Strait of Hormuz controlled by Iran. The order has not yet been issued from the White House. If one does come, lots of blood will be spilled. (Today the US announced that it has attacked military sites on Kharg Island from the air.)
Not to fear. The president and his gung-ho secretary of defense will be cheering the boys on, with US and Israeli support in the air and Mossad’s ability to assassinate and create mayhem on the ground. But any ground war scenario also could involve a pre-emptive economic compromise on the flow of gasoline and natural gas through the Strait of Hormuz. The Iranian leadership could make things easier by publicly praising the president and awarding him a shiny gold peace medal—the bigger the better—and promising that his son-in-law Jared Kushner and one or both of the president’s elder sons will get a significant cut of the fees for tankers safely crossing the strait.
As the planning for escalation continues, there is another truth known to a few of those on the inside: that if American and Israeli forces can fight their way into the tunnels where the enriched uranium is stored—that information is known—and seize the materials, the nuclear threat to Israel from Iran would be over and the war would have no reason to go on, regardless of the status of the strait.
President Trump fired off a post on social media this morning with a dramatic—or is it desperate—threat for the Iranian leadership that continues to defy him:
“A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again.”
Can there any longer be a question about the president’s state of mind?