Iran’s Second Covert Enrichment Facility

Iran’s President Ahmedinejad has a lot to keep straight. When he’s inside Iran, the Holocaust didn’t happen, but when abroad it did happen (no, may have happened?) – but is irrelevant to today’s world. Is it any wonder that it would have slipped his mind to mention to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) that Iran was building another uranium enrichment facility until, once again, Tehran was caught with its hand in the cookie jar.

This does answer a question that I’ve asked many times, which is how Iran intended to get from its current position to having a nuclear weapon without the intervening event of having its offending nuclear infrastructure bombed to smithereens. There were essentially two paths available to an Iran bent on having the bomb. The first was to build yet another covert facility (which is apparently what Tehran chose to do.) The second, and this is the one I’ve never heard a convincing explanation of the process by which it could succeed, would be a “strategic breakout” of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) regime. The idea of strategic breakout is to get all your ducks in a row, and then withdraw from the NPT and kick inspectors out of the country / remove surveillance equipment. The problem with this is that it is essentially saying “we’d like to build our atomic bomb now, please leave us in peace.” While it is true that they could get a lot of their affairs in order, there would seem to be plenty of time between their announcement and the production and machining of the requisite material to allow a country to bomb the facilities into oblivion, perhaps even with a Security Council resolution in hand.  The second covert facility was the only path I’ve ever suspected was workable, though there have been proponents of a strategic breakout scenario.

This building of covert facilities only to have them discovered has got to get prohibitively expensive at some point. I’m not saying Allah is trying to send you a message, Mr. Ahmedinejad, but maybe you should consider it a hint. Allah might just find an Iran with a nuclear weapon to be as disturbing a prospect as the rest of us do.