IAEA report: Iran tested advanced nuclear warhead design

By Arthur Bright

Christian Science Monitor

November 06, 2009

A daily summary of global reports on security issues.

The UN's nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency, has questioned Tehran about evidence that Iran has experimented with an advanced nuclear detonation technology. According to a new report by the Guardian, the technology would allow Iran to make smaller and simpler warheads than would be possible with first-generation nuclear weapons.

The very existence of the technology, known as a "two-point implosion" device, is officially secret in both the US and Britain, but according to previously unpublished documentation in a dossier compiled by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), Iranian scientists may have tested high-explosive components of the design. The development was today described by nuclear experts as "breathtaking" and has added urgency to the effort to find a diplomatic solution to the Iranian nuclear crisis. ...

Extracts from the dossier have been published previously, but it was not previously known that it included documentation on such an advanced warhead. "It is breathtaking that Iran could be working on this sort of material," said a European government adviser on nuclear issues.

James Acton, a British nuclear weapons expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said: "It's remarkable that, before perfecting step one, they are going straight to step four or five.... To start with more sophisticated designs speaks of level of technical ambition that is surprising."

The Guardian writes that while Tehran has dismissed much of the IAEA's evidence of Iranian nuclear-weapon technology, it did admit that it has experimented with creating multiple, synchronized explosions of the kind that could trigger a nuclear device. The technology that the IAEA's documentation indicates Iran is testing would be a step beyond such experiments.

According to a diplomat familiar with the IAEA documentation, the evidence also points to experiments with a two-point detonation system that represents "a more elegant solution" to the challenges of making a nuclear warhead, but it is much harder to achieve. It is used in conjunction with a non-spherical pit, in the shape of a rugby ball, or explosives in that shape wrapped around a spherical pit, and it works by compressing the pit from both ends.The IAEA has expressed "serious concern" about Iran's failure to give an account of the research its scientists have carried out.

Iran claims that its experiments with synchronized explosions are for civilian uses only, but Western scientists say that there are no civilian applications for such technology.

News of Iran's possible advanced warhead experiments comes as talks between Iran and the West have appeared to have stalled. The Washington Post reports that a senior European diplomat says Iran has demanded immediate delivery of substitute nuclear fuel if it agrees to surrender its own uranium, but the West is insisting the original deal be followed.

The diplomat, speaking on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitive diplomacy involved, said prospects for a breakthrough with Iran have narrowed dramatically since a high-level meeting in Geneva on Oct. 1, when Iran tentatively approved a deal to reduce its stockpile of enriched uranium and agreed to hold another set of talks by the end of October. Instead, the reactor deal appears to be falling apart, and there are no prospects for talks before the governing body of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) meets this month to consider whether Iran violated international obligations by building a nuclear facility near the city of Qom. ...

Major powers offered to convert a substantial portion of Iran's low-enriched uranium into the necessary reactor fuel at facilities in Russia and France. But according to the diplomat, Iran then said it would not ship its uranium out of the country until it received upfront all of the reactor fuel it needs for the facility. There is discussion of perhaps a third country holding Iran's stock under IAEA supervision, the diplomat said, but he expressed pessimism that the impasse could be broken.

The kind of simultaneous switch that Iran seeks would negate the whole point of the deal, IAEA head Mohamed Elbaradei told New York Times columnist Roger Cohen. The deal is meant to slow Iran's nuclear weapons research - by taking away the uranium they need to further it - so that a peace deal can be negotiated with Tehran.

"The issue is timing: whether the uranium goes out and then some time later they get the fuel, as was agreed in Geneva, or whether it only goes at the same time as the fuel is delivered." He added: "If it is simultaneous it would not defuse the crisis, and the whole idea is to defuse the crisis." ...

"There are a lot of ideas," ElBaradei told me. "One is to send the material" - Iran's uranium - "to a third country, which could be a friendly country to

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