Thin Line Between Civilian & Military Atomic Programs

The Thin Line Between Civilian and Military Nuclear Programs

By WILLIAM J. BROAD
Published: December 5, 2007
NYTimes

For years, American intelligence agencies contended that Iran had a clandestine nuclear weapons program. But even as Tehran continues to enrich uranium, which could fuel a bomb, the agencies have reversed themselves, saying the Iranians halted their weapons program in 2003.

All of this raises the question: When is a nuclear program a nuclear weapons program?

The open secret of the nuclear age is that the line between civilian and military programs is extraordinarily thin. That is why the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna has teams of inspectors constantly sweeping through nuclear centers around the globe, looking for cheaters.

But thin as it may be, there is a line.

One threshold is enriched uranium. Enriched to low levels, uranium can fuel a reactor that produces electrical power — which is what Tehran says it wants to do. But if uranium is purified in spinning centrifuges long enough, and becomes highly enriched, it can fuel an atom bomb.

Another boundary between civilian and military programs is weapons design. Designing a nuclear weapon involves sophisticated mathematical and engineering work to figure out how to squeeze the bomb fuel in a way that creates the nuclear blast.

The new intelligence assessment released Monday, which is known as a National Intelligence Estimate, drew a distinction between Iran’s “declared civil work” on uranium enrichment and “nuclear weapon design and weaponization work.”

The document states “with high confidence” that Iran is now hewing to the civilian side of the line.

The history of the atomic age, however, suggests that for a country with an advanced civil nuclear program, crossing the line into bomb work is relatively easy.

After the United States, the Soviet Union and Britain became the first three countries with atom bombs, all the rest hid their military programs to one extent or another behind the mask of peaceful nuclear power. That includes France, China, Israel, India, South Africa and Pakistan.

Indeed, the most difficult part of building a bomb is not doing the secret military design work but rather the part of the process that is also crucial to civilian nuclear power — producing the fuel.

History illustrates the point.

During World War II, scientists working secretly at Los Alamos in the mountains of New Mexico were so sure of the reliability of their simple design that they gave it no explosive test before the bomb was made and dropped on Hiroshima. It worked to devastating effect.

But making the bomb’s highly enriched fuel required a vast industrial effort clouded by great uncertainty. In a race, three huge factories were built in the Tennessee wilds, each pursuing a different way of enriching uranium. One had literally millions of miles of pipes.

In the end, no technique worked well enough to be relied upon exclusively. So engineers blended the outputs. “All three methods contributed to Hiroshima,” said Robert S. Norris, author of “Racing for the Bomb” (Steerforth, 2002), a biography of the project’s military chief.

That history cast light on the question of whether Iran’s enrichment work today could represent a future military threat.

The new American intelligence assessment says Iran is “continuing to develop a range of technical capabilities that could be applied to producing nuclear weapons,” including “its civilian uranium enrichment program.”

And the enrichment effort, the assessment says, could give Iran enough fuel for a weapon sometime between 2010 and 2015 — a timetable essentially unchanged from previous estimates.

The report also disclosed that American agencies have accumulated a “growing amount of intelligence” showing that Iran engaged in covert uranium enrichment, adding that it “probably” was halted after 2003 and “probably” has remained frozen through the middle of this year.

For some, that uncertainty undercuts the assessment’s “high confidence” that Iran ended its weapons program in 2003 and will continue to stay on the peaceful side of the line.

“The danger,” President Bush said at the White House on Tuesday, “is that they can enrich, play like they got a civilian program — or have a civilian program, or claim it’s a civilian program — and pass the knowledge to a covert military program.”

A senior federal specialist with long experience in nuclear proliferation said it was quite possible that Iran made so much progress in 18 years of secret work that the halt in 2003 might have little practical effect in restricting it from getting a weapon. That is, if Tehran wants one, and if it can keep working openly to produce fuel.

But the intelligence agencies steered clear of assessing Tehran’s intentions, saying, “We do not know whether it currently intends to develop nuclear weapons.”