The long series of "inexplicable" incidents in Iran

(To Maria Grazia Labellarte)
16/07/20

At least seven ships caught fire in the Iranian port of Bushehr, the Tasnim news agency reported yesterday, in what appeared to be the latest in a series of unexplained incidents since late June in Iran. In fact, during the period, there were several explosions and fires around Iranian military, nuclear and industrial facilities, including the well-known fire in Iran's underground nuclear facility in Natanz on 2 July.

At the heart of Iran's enrichment program is precisely this place, which Tehran would support "for peaceful purposes". Iran's top security body said on 3 July that the cause of the Natanz fire was not accidental. Some Iranian officials said it may have been cyber sabotage (v.articolo) and one of them warned that Tehran would take revenge on those responsible.

According to the Time of israel, Simon Henderson, belonging to the think tanks of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, allegedly claimed that the alleged attack succeeded in targeting a surface centrifuge assembly plant at the underground facility - therefore difficult to attack. Henderson, writing on the site The HillHe also warned this week that Iran could retaliate for the alleged assault on its nuclear program, with an attack on Israel's nuclear program. Israel's Channel 13 reported that the country was preparing for potential retaliation for the Natanz explosion, as well as a number of other mysterious explosions, fires in facilities across Iran, which many have speculated were caused by the state. Jewish.

Defense Minister Benny Gantz made his opinion on the subject known: in an interview with Israeli Radio last Sunday he said that "not all events that happen in Iran are related to the Jewish state".

Henderson said Israel likely believed that Iran was resuming production of the powerful centrifuges needed to enrich enough uranium to make a nuclear weapon. Centrifuges work by rotating rapidly - tens of thousands of rotations per minute - to separate the contents inside by weight. In the case of uranium, this means that the lighter uranium-235, which can be used in nuclear fission reactions, is separated from the heavier uranium-238.

Currently, Iran mainly has less advanced IR-1 type centrifuges, but these are unable to enrich uranium to the level necessary for a bomb. Since many of its new generation IR-2m centrifuges, which are capable of enriching uranium at weapon levels, have been put offline during the 2015 nuclear deal. Iran should have put these machines back into operation to continue its alleged run to the hypothetical bomb.

In 2018, US President Donald Trump ditched the deal and enforced new economic sanctions, prompting Iran to enrich uranium to higher levels and accumulate more of it than the deal allowed.

"The hypothesis is that Iran has restarted the large-scale production of the IR-2m centrifuges - or at least until last week"Henderson wrote.

Once assembled, the new centrifuges would actually operate at the Natanz facility, buried deep in concrete and steel, which would have made them incredibly difficult to hit with a bomb.

In 2010, the United States and Israel reportedly targeted Iranian centrifuges in Natanz with a cyber attack, the well-known Stuxnet, which caused some of them to rotate incorrectly.

According to Henderson, an expert in energy policy, the Natanz centrifuge assembly plant was probably the only Iranian facility capable of producing the most advanced IR-2m models. "Therefore, IR-2ms production has stopped and, from Israel's point of view, the likelihood that Iran will get enough highly enriched uranium for its first nuclear weapon has been postponed for months, perhaps even years.".

Iranian officials have regularly stated that they do not want to build a nuclear weapon; however, these claims have been largely discredited by Tehran's uranium enrichment to levels above those needed for civilian technology, as well as Iranian documents - stolen by Mossad in 2018 - showing plans to link a nuclear weapon to a missile.

On Tuesday, Nour News (Time of Israel always lets us know) an Iranian website close to the country's Supreme National Security Council, said the Natanz building was damaged in "a deliberate attack" in the first apparent public recognition of Tehran that the incident was not such. The precise method used to attack the aforementioned centrifuge assembly site is not yet known, but an (anonymous) Middle East intelligence officer reportedly told the New York Times that a powerful bomb was used and that Israel was the architect of the explosion.

Meanwhile, Iran admitted Sunday that Natanz suffered "considerable" damage from the explosion, as satellite imagery seemed to show the sensitive, devastated structure. Previously he had tried to minimize the damage caused by the fire by releasing a single image of the site which showed a small number of burn marks. New satellite images show much greater destruction that forced Tehran to reassess the extent of the explosion.

The building was built in 2013 for the development of advanced centrifuges, although work was halted in 2015, said the spokesman for the Iranian atomic agency Behrouz Kamalvandi.

Photo: IRNA