Iran's nuclear menace

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LONDON.

The myth of protection offered by global antiproliferation regimes -- including the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty and Fissile Materials Cutoff Treaty -- was shattered last month when investigators for the International Atomic Energy Agency began unraveling a clandestine nuclear black market network run by a Pakistani metallurgist, Abdul Qadeer Khan.

Iran, Libya and North Korea were primary recipients of Pakistan's nuclear technology. Other countries and terrorist groups may yet be exposed as clients of Mr. Khan's network.

But nowhere has the damage done by Mr. Khan's illicit activities been more apparent than in Iran, where sham elections two weekends ago returned hard-liners to power, and where now the real possibility exists of nuclear tests being conducted without political opposition.

Iran's mullahs have longed for nuclear bombs since coming to power in 1980. Their pacifying statements and superficial compliance with IAEA inspection teams are masking an unrelenting drive to buy time for their scientists to complete work on the first Shi'ite Islamic bomb.

There is not a minute to waste in stopping them. With centrifuge technology far more advanced than previously believed, Iran's scientists have been frantically working away on obtaining critical bomb fuel with as many as three separate programs. The first employs the P-1 centrifuges transferred by Mr. Khan's network, as well as the far more sophisticated P-2 centrifuges recently revealed to be in Iran's possession.

The second track makes use of Belarus-Russian filtering and high-temperature melting technologies for uranium enrichment. These facts were revealed by Ahmad Shirzad, a member of Iran's Parliament representing Isfahan, in late 2003 as he passionately argued Iran's children were starving while the mullahs processed uranium at secret underground facilities near Parchin (southeast of Tehran) and in the mountains between Qazvin and Karaj (northwest of Tehran).

The third program, in its early stages of development, uses Chinese chemical separation formulas to separate plutonium from Russian-supplied spent uranium fuel rods. Add to these three parallel enrichment programs recently uncovered evidence Tehran possesses Polonium, a key catalyst for fissionable reactions, as well as blueprints to build Chinese-style implosion nuclear devices and that the mullahs are hosting a large contingent of Georgian atomic scientists (first revealed by deposed President Eduard Shevardnadze late last year) and it becomes difficult to believe Iran's nuclear program is for "peaceful purposes only."

Strong measures are needed urgently to deal with the growing threat posed by rogue nations and nonstate actors to deal with the proliferation of radiological materials, or worse, when combined with sophisticated plastic explosives -- miniaturized "dirty" bombs.