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Iran Blunted
Posted by Ryan Mauro

The former director of Mossad, Meir Dagan, had good news upon leaving his post: Israel believes that Iran’s drive to acquire nuclear weapons has been delayed until 2015 at the earliest. A combination of bold covert operations, sanctions and other actions have now made it a real possibility that the nuclear program will crumble or the regime will fall before it can threaten the world with nuclear weapons.

Covert operations have done the most to undermine Iran’s nuclear ambitions, the biggest being the Stuxnet cyber assault that will be recorded as a defining moment in military history. The extremely advanced virus damaged both avenues towards building nuclear weapons, uranium enrichment and plutonium reprocessing. The steam turbine at the Bushehr nuclear reactor has been disabled and the site’s opening has been delayed. The rotations of the centrifuges at Natanz were quickly sped up and slowed down to damage them and the virus was able to hide these speed changes from the monitoring computers.

The creators of Stuxnet obtained the specifications of the centrifuges’ converters from the two companies that produced them, one of which was such a tightly-guarded secret that even the International Atomic Energy Agency did not even know about its existence. Only 4,000 of the 9,000 centrifuges have been used at once because of technical difficulties and the need to replace damaged units. The ones that did not break were only producing about half of the enriched uranium they should.

The Isfahan uranium conversion site appears to have been targeted by other operations. It was reported in 2005 that the plant’s equipment failed to remove impurities in the uranium. Should the uranium be inserted into centrifuges to begin being enriched to a level required for a nuclear bomb, these impurities would damage the units. Much of Iran’s nuclear equipment was purchased on the black market, fostering suspicion that Western intelligence services had sold the faulty equipment.

After all, the CIA and Mossad has been working since at least 1998 to sabotage the nuclear program through providing them technology designed to damage the centrifuges, such as through selling them rigged vacuum pumps. In 2006, an “accident” caused the destruction of 50 centrifuges, which the Iranians admitted had been caused by “manipulated” equipment. That same year, the regime arrested and later executed one of its citizens for causing “irreversible” damage by providing such technology on behalf of the Mossad. Another accident happened in 2009, after which the regime sacked the head of its Atomic Energy Organization.

Other covert operations also stalled the program. In January 2006, a scientist working at the Isfahan site named Dr. Ardeshir Hassanpour “suffocated by fumes from a faulty gas fire.” This is widely thought to have been an assassination. Other scientists have also defected or been killed, though there is debate whether some of them were targeted by the regime for their ties to the opposition. The defections of high-level personnel, the exposure of hidden sites by opposition groups, a shortage of raw uranium and a halt in some of the program’s activities for an unknown period of time in 2003 after the invasion of Iraq have also gone a long way in stopping Iran.

Current problems faced by the regime will make it much more difficult for the regime to sustain its nuclear program in the future. International sanctions on Iran are exasperating its critical gasoline shortage and have forced the regime to cut its budget for Hezbollah by 40 percent. If the regime is hard-pressed to finance one of its most important proxies, then it can be assumed it is also having problems funding its nuclear program.

These economic problems are quickly getting worse. Every day, domestic need for Iran’s oil increases. One study projected that Iran would have to end all of its oil exports by 2015 at the current rate, effectively bankrupting the regime. President Ahmadinejad’s cutting of fuel subsidies has reduced consumption by 20 percent, but it has also brought the country to a standstill and brought him another crisis to manage. As this internal dissent grows, it will stretch the resources of the government, especially the Revolutionary Guards, making the program harder to pursue.

There are various political conflicts ahead by 2015 that can further inhibit Iran’s nuclear ambitions by destabilizing the regime. Ayatollah Khamenei’s life will soon end, and it is highly doubtful that the competing factions will all agree to honor his son as his successor, setting off vicious in-fighting. There will be elections for the Majiles and the presidency, both of which will dramatically heighten political tension. And of course, an even greater percentage of the population will be of young age and demanding sweeping change in a more liberal Western direction.

This does not mean Iran won’t develop nuclear weapons, but it does mean it will come at a much greater cost and at a much later time than the regime had hoped. It is still possible that there are hidden nuclear sites or North Korea will help the Iranian regime make up for lost time, but these stresses on the nuke program will maximize chances that it will be foiled.

The media has speculated for years whether the West would attack Iran’s nuclear program. Now we know the answer: They already have. And as a result, the world won’t have to handle a nuclear-armed Iran until at least 2015.