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Politics : Politics for Pros- moderated -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: LindyBill who wrote (103659)	3/8/2005 11:11:16 AM
From: LindyBill	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 793790

If this story from Spiegel Online is accurate, it's a bombshell, literally and figuratively: SPIEGEL ONLINE - March 8, 2005, 03:38 PM URL: spiegel.de The Mullahs Hatch a Plan Does Iran Have a Secret Nukes Agenda? A recent defector from Iran says the country's ruling mullahs have a secret plan to build one nuclear bomb a year under the nose of the UN and the world. Are the revelations helping to bring Europe and the United States closer in their efforts to stop Tehran from acquiring the bomb? Tehran's mullahs may be stating publicly that they have no nuclear ambitions, but privately, behind closed doors, they're singing a very different tune. An Iranian diplomat, who recently defected from Iran and is now holing up in an undisclosed Western country, alleges that the mullahs have secret plans to use the Bushehr nuclear power plant to develop nuclear weapons. The diplomat has cited intelligence reports as the source of his allegations about the Bushehr plant, which is being built with help from the Russians and is scheduled to go online later this year. According to the turncoat diplomat, revolutionary leader Ayatollah Khomeini personally created a special working group whose main responsibility is to find ways to deceive United Nations controllers from the International Atomic Energy Agency so that nuclear material can be secretly diverted from the reactor, which is being constructed for civilian energy production. With the plutonium garnered from the plant, the Iranians intend to use new techniques to produce at least one bomb per year. The intelligence reports document two plans -- the first coming straight out of a bad Hollywood script for a Cold War spy flick. Currently, Iran has a deal on the books to get its nuclear fuel rods from Russia. Once they have been used to produce energy, the spent fuel rods must be returned to Russia in order to prevent their diversion for the creation of enriched uranium that can be used to produce nuclear weapons. When that transport happens, the plant will have to temporarily shut down. When it does, the mullahs want to stage a power outage that would cause the IAEA surveillance cameras installed in the facility to temporarily go black. This would allow scientists to secretly smuggle out unenriched natural uranium -- that could be processed into weapons-grade uranium at another facility. If that fails, there's always plan B, which is to break completely from the IAEA and for the mullahs to thumb their noses at the international community and just openly transform Bushehr from a civil plant to one used to produce arms-grade plutonium. Indeed, the Iranians are also believed to have obtained the sophisticated software -- the so-called MCNP Monte Carlo N-Particle code -- needed to make the conversion. Officially, Iranian leaders say they have no interest in producing a nuclear bomb. Doubts about the veracity of such claims have been growing within the IAEA in recent weeks. The mullahs just handed over a paper this week that provides evidence of their negotiations with Pakistani nuclear scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan for black market nuclear equipment deliveries in 1987. But the mullahs have been anything but forthcoming -- they first came forward with this information after the IAEA confronted them with details of the meeting. And they're also refusing to allow UN inspectors to conduct a second inspection of a military-industrial complex at Parchin, which the US government, supported by satellite images and reports from defectors, suspects is part of a secret Iranian nuclear weapons program. But the revelations have also brought with them a ray of hope: Washington has indicated it now wants to support the difficult negotiations between the European Union troika of France, Germany and Britain and Tehran with small concessions. Last Thursday, US President George W. Bush discussed with his advisors the possibility of dropping US opposition to Iran's membership in the World Trade Organization -- if Tehran pledged to abandon its nuclear weapons program and agreed to regular inspections. Of course, Washington's new harmonious chords come at a price: In exchange for US support for the carrots the EU is offering Tehran, Europe would have to be prepared to turn the Iranian nuclear conflict over to the United Nations Security Council if it is unable to negotiate a solution with the mullahs.