After inspectors paid a visit to a once-secret Iranian nuclear facility near Qom, the Islamic Republic stuck to its guns: Hey, it's just part of our peaceful atomic energy program!
But after taking a close look at the technical specs on Iran's Fordow Fuel Enrichment Plant, two arms-control experts arrived at a different conclusion. Writing in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Ivan Oelrich and Ivanka Barzashka make a fairly persuasive case that this has to be one of a bunch of secret sites, designed to keep Iran's nuclear weapons program in case of an attack on Iran's main enrichment plant at Natanz.
"The facility's size and capacity would make the most sense if it were part of a network of clandestine nuclear facilities," they argue.
Worries about a covert site have been articulated by others before. And while Oelrich and Barzashka say that it's too soon to know how, exactly, Fordow might fit in with a weapons production program -- the facility's dimensions, they say, are "not ideal" for producing weapons-grade stuff -- they also note that Fordow is not a plausible site for large-scale production of nuclear fuel.
"In fact, it would take almost 90 years for the cascades at Fordow to fuel a single 1,000-megawatt commercial nuclear power plant for just one year," they write.
While there are always some caveats to add, it lends more strength to the argument that Iran, at some level, is pursuing the bomb. But what we are really waiting for is for Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to post some photos from Fordow on his website.
[PHOTO: President.ir]
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