Beyond Natanz: The Overlooked Path to an Iranian Bomb

The world may be witnessing a critical shift in how we think about Iran’s nuclear program. My guest argues that Iran’s more immediate path to a bomb may not be uranium at all, but plutonium. Henry D. Sokolski, executive director of the Nonproliferation Policy Education Center, is a former Pentagon official for nuclear policy who has been at the center of the nonproliferation debate for decades.

Q: Henry, everyone is focused on Iran’s uranium program. But you argue that we may be looking in the wrong place. Are we?

A: Uranium is a material that, if properly enriched, can be used to make the core of a bomb that can generate many kilotons of explosive power. It would be a mistake to say that’s not of any importance. But turning uranium hexafluoride into weapons requires converting it into a ceramic or oxide, which then has to be converted into a metal, and then be machined into a core. Those are a lot of steps.

We are obsessed with making sure that material doesn’t get turned into bombs. The Iranians have enough of it for about ten bombs. But if you are that focused on something that is that difficult to turn into a bomb, surely you would be also interested in plutonium, which you can find in the spent fuel pond of a major nuclear power plant in Iran called Bushehr. The Russians helped finish the plant and operate it. There are 210 tons of spent fuel sitting there.

One of the elements in that spent fuel, about 1% of it, is plutonium that can be used to make bombs.

Well, how much plutonium is in that 210 tons? Roughly enough plutonium to make not about 10 bombs, but 200. That’s a much bigger number.

Q: So how easy is it to make that material into bombs?

A: There are several steps that are required. You have to take the material out of the wet pond it is stored in. You have to crack the fuel rods open, because they are clad in metallic zirconium. Then you have to chemically strip out the plutonium, and then you have to take that and turn it into oxide. Then you have to turn it into a metal. Then you have to machine it.

But guess what? Removing the plutonium from the spent fuel pond and obtaining the uranium hexafluoride buried under the rubble of places like Fordow and Natanz would require roughly the same effort and time.

Now, am I saying that they’re going to make a bomb immediately and we have to worry? Or am I saying that should just focus on the plutonium thing and not the uranium? Not at all.

But what’s weird is that we’re not paying any attention to the plutonium option, which potentially is a much larger source for bombs than the uranium option.

Q: So why is there so much of this material left?

A: When the Russians created this plant, they promised that they would take all the spent fuel back. But they never actually did. It turns out it’s expensive to do that. The irradiated fuel assemblies are heavy and hard to handle.

The Russians should have removed the spent fuel every three to five years. Well, they ran the plant from 2011 to roughly until a few months ago when they began evacuating the site. They just decided, no, we’re not going to remove the spent fuel.

Now, you can look at motives and say that maybe they wanted to give Iran an option to do something nefarious. Who the heck knows? The bottom line is it’s there. And it’s an option.

International inspectors are not coming anymore. It would be pretty easy to walk into the spent fuel storage building and walk out with fuel assemblies and start the process down the road to an insertable implosion core.

So there are lots of questions. It seems to me that the United States or Israel or someone should be looking at that plant from space or drones or whatever to make sure nothing leaves the building.

Q: Wasn’t the International Atomic Energy Agency supposed to be monitoring this?

A: Yes. But it turns out that Iran refused to allow the agency to have near real-time surveillance of the spent fuel pond. The Iranians were forced to accept near real-time monitoring for their enrichment activities at Natanz. A digital camera takes pictures and relays what it sees once every five or ten minutes through fiber optic or secure satellite links to a remote location where inspectors can look at the pictures.

But inspections of Bushehr were done differently. There they had cameras that you couldn’t get to except when you visit, and you can only visit once every 90 days. That’s the standard period, more or less.

President Obama did not insist on near real-time monitoring on Bushehr when he cut the nuclear deal with Iran in 2015. To the IAEA’s credit, the agency asked Iran to allow it near real-time surveillance of Bushehr, but the Iranians said no and nothing more was done. From here on out, we need to stop being so accommodating.

Q: So that was a strategic mistake. The U.S. did not pursue that.

A: It certainly increased our risk by not nailing that down. Now, I actually briefed a pretty senior congressman, and he went and briefed President Obama. It went in one ear, nothing happened. And I think the reason is they didn’t want to upset the deal that they had already cut.

Q: You are warning strongly against striking Bushehr. Are we talking about a potential radiological disaster if that facility is hit?

A: When you bomb something like that, you have to be very careful that you do not encourage a loss of coolant to the core or to the spent fuel pond that would result in fires or meltdowns that would then result in the release of an enormous amount of radioactivity.

Are there ways to disable a nuclear power plant without running those risks? There are, militarily. But we shouldn’t be glib about this. It certainly would be a mistake to hit these reactors in the wrong way and release lots of radioactivity and force large evacuations.

Some say nuclear energy is just another way to produce electricity and boil water. But that’s not true. What makes power reactors different is that they produce weapons-usable plutonium that is not that difficult to extract to make bombs.

People say that these power reactors have never been used for that. Well, let’s examine that. It’s true that these reactors haven’t actually been used to make weapons plutonium, but they are used to make weapons tritium in the United States. Also, Ronald Reagan had a plan to use unfinished light water reactors in Washington state to make weapons plutonium. In addition, the Turks did a study in 1970 looking at whether they could use light water reactors to make weapons plutonium. They correctly concluded that they could.

So it’s kind of like a loaded gun. It hasn’t been fired, but there are risks to building these things. I don’t think people are thinking clearly about all of this.

They see nuclear power as some kind of attractive technology and they’re more than willing to subsidize it because it’s very expensive. And all of these downsides are handled in a gentlemanly way. I think we got to be a little bit tougher about all of this.

Q: If nothing changes in the situation now, if there is no deal that’s to be made, how real is the risk that Iran could pursue this plutonium path quietly and surprise the world?

A: Iran’s enthusiasm for inviting the International Atomic Energy Agency back to inspect this plant is not great. I think they are very wary. And they’ve said they’re thinking of leaving the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty altogether.

We do not know where all the material is. We don’t know if they have any of the other nuclear facilities necessary to make bomb cores. We’ve already destroyed a lot of them.

But do we know that that’s all they have or that they can’t rebuild it somewhere else? I don’t see how you ever can know unless you’re on the ground everywhere. Ultimately, you can only rest easy if you are dealing with a regime that decides they want to get out of this business – like South Africa, Libya, and Taiwan all did. But that hasn’t happened in Iran.

Q: They spent all this money on their nuclear project. And they’re fighting the world for it. It would be so hard for them to give up on that.

A: I am not an expert on Iranian politics. But the bottom line is you’d want to be very sure that any country that was making either enriched uranium or recycling spent fuel to use plutonium was a best friend and was going to stay that way forever.

The United States was extremely trustful of the Shah of Iran, and he wanted to get nuclear weapons. And we thought, as long as he’s in and we lean on him, we don’t have to worry. The idea that this can’t happen anywhere else in the Middle East ever? Well, it’d be nice, but I would not count on it.