Washington Post - 06.15.2001

 

 

The Washington Post

U.S., Russia At Odds on Iranian Deal

Bush to Raise Atomic Issues at Summit

By Michael Dobbs
Washington Post Staff Writer

The United States and Russia are at odds over American and Israeli allegations that Moscow permitted a shipment of high-strength aluminum to Iran that could be used to manufacture enriched uranium for use in nuclear weapons, according to U.S. and Russian officials.

The officials said the two countries exchanged a series of diplomatic messages after the United States and Israel alerted Russia to a suspicious aluminum shipment on a Russian boat that was headed for Iran via the Black Sea soon after President Bush took office Jan. 21.

According to the American version, Russian inspectors boarded the vessel and reported that the aluminum was intended for aircraft manufacture, an explanation not accepted by the United States. The shipment was allowed to proceed to Iran.

The precise origin of the aluminum is not known, but U.S. officials said the deal was arranged by a Russian metals trader. The officials said that the United States and Israel have evidence that the aluminum was delivered to Iranian institutions connected with what they suspect is Iran's nuclear weapons project.

The aluminum shipment is the latest in a series of nuclear proliferation disputes that have clouded U.S.-Russian relations in recent years. U.S. officials said Bush is expected to raise proliferation concerns with Russian President Vladimir Putin during their first face-to-face meeting Saturday in the Slovenian capital of Ljubljana without going into detail about specific cases.

"It's a big deal," said one well-placed administration official, referring to fears that Iran is experimenting with different ways of enriching uranium to produce bomb-grade material that would serve as the basis for a crude nuclear weapon.

U.S. officials said they suspected that the aluminum alloy delivered to Iran was intended for the manufacture of rotor blades used in gas centrifuges that separate out the enriched uranium that can produce a chain reaction for a nuclear explosion. U.S. experts say that Iran has been attempting to acquire centrifuge technology, as well as other technology for enriching uranium, for much of the last decade as part of a larger effort to build an atomic bomb.

Under heavy pressure from the Clinton administration, Russia agreed in 1995 to shelve plans to sell Iran a gas centrifuge plant. Boris Yeltsin, then the Russian president, subsequently promised Clinton that Russia would not provide Iran with uranium enrichment technology of any kind, although it would go ahead with a contract to complete a civilian nuclear reactor at Bushehr.

Several countries, including Pakistan and Iraq, have used gas centrifuges to enrich uranium and accumulate sufficient fissile material to build an atomic bomb. As a result of these efforts, Western governments devote a great deal of attention to attempting to prevent would-be nuclear weapons states from acquiring the high-strength, relatively lightweight materials that can be used to build centrifuges.

The challenge of combating nuclear proliferation is complicated by the fact that many of these materials can have such ordinary industrial uses as aircraft manufacture, and there is often legitimate debate about the purpose of a particular shipment.

Proliferators have become adept at disguising the identity of the end-user and producing fictitious billing statements. Evidence collected by intelligence agencies is often ambiguous and can lead to differing conclusions.

A Kremlin official responsible for export controls, Sergei Yekimov, said that Russia had made an "exhaustive" reply to U.S. concerns about the aluminum shipment, which left for Iran from the Russian-controlled Black Sea port of Sevastopol. He declined to provide further details, citing the sensitive nature of the issues involved.

According to U.S. officials, national security adviser Condoleezza Rice broached the aluminum case directly with her Russian counterpart, Sergei Ivanov, while he was head of the Kremlin Security Council before becoming defense minister. Ivanov provided her with written assurances that the aluminum was intended for aircraft manufacture. Putin gave then-Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak a similar answer in a telephone conversation shortly before Barak left office on March 7, the official sources said, while Secretary of State Colin L. Powell has raised the issue with Russian Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov.

The officials said that the shipment was arranged by a private Russian metals trader, suggesting the Russian government was not involved. U.S. officials are divided over whether the Russians deliberately misled their U.S. and Israeli counterparts over the nature of the shipment, or merely repeated erroneous information provided to them by subordinates.

Russian officials have often insisted in recent years that the government does not sanction the spread of materials to build weapons of mass destruction to such countries as Iran. But critics point out that the materials nonetheless appear to be leaking out of Russia, sometimes from state-run research institutes. In the most dramatic example, gyroscopes used in missile guidance systems were sent to Iraq in 1995 after being disassembled from Russian strategic rockets.

Nuclear experts say the acquisition of sufficient quantities of fissile material is the single biggest barrier faced by such countries as Iran in building a nuclear weapon. Iran's continuing attempts to acquire enrichment technology and relevant materials suggest that it has not been able to buy or steal fissile materials on the international black market, the shortest route to manufacturing a bomb.

In addition to centrifuges, Iran has displayed an interest in purchasing laser equipment that could be used to separate nuclear isotopes. Last year, according to U.S. and Russian officials, Moscow agreed to suspend plans to sell Iran laser separation technology that it had contracted to buy from the Efremov Institute in St. Petersburg, which reports to the Atomic Energy Ministry.

Russian officials said they had agreed to halt the sale as a "goodwill gesture" even though they did not believe it would have contributed in any significant way to the Iranian nuclear weapons program. While U.S. experts concede that the Russian equipment was capable of producing only tiny amounts of highly enriched uranium, they also feared that the Iranians might discover ways to use the equipment on a larger scale or as a "building block" for a more ambitious laser separation program.

In contrast to the laser separation technology, centrifuges are a proven route to acquiring significant quantities of weapons-grade uranium, and can be difficult to detect once they have been manufactured. However, nuclear experts say it is far from a simple matter for a country such as Iran to build a centrifuge plant without large-scale foreign assistance.

"We can assume that the Iranians have a workable centrifuge design, but it is still difficult for them to make the parts and get the centrifuges to run so they don't explode," said Gary Milhollin, of the nonprofit, Washington-based Wisconsin Project on Nuclear Arms Control. "They need to be very precisely balanced."

Milhollin added that Iran has not yet demonstrated that it can convert its plentiful uranium supplies to the uranium hexafluoride gas used to feed a centrifuge.

Most U.S. experts, both in and out of government, say that Iran is still in the research and development stages of building a gas centrifuge. To produce enough material for an atomic bomb, a country needs several thousand centrifuges linked together in a cascade. Centrifuges operate on the principle of centrifugal force created by rotor blades spinning at supersonic speeds, pushing the heavy uranium-238 molecules to the wall of the container and leaving lighter uranium-235 molecules in the center.

Because they spin so rapidly, the rotor blades must be made out of a light but high-strength material such as specialty steel or aluminum alloy. At the same time, they must be able to withstand the highly corrosive gases that feed the separation process. Aluminum is often used as a first stage for building centrifuges, as it is easier to work with than other materials.

The origin of the aluminum shipped to Iran is still unclear. Although most of Sevastopol's port is controlled by the Russian navy, the city belongs to Ukraine. However, U.S. officials appear to have accepted Ukrainian assurances that the material did not originate in Ukraine. Ukraine has a joint civilian aircraft project with Iran that U.S. officials say could have been used as a cover for nuclear procurement.

"The U.S. side was satisfied with our explanation," said Ukraine's ambassador to Washington, Kostyantyn Gryshchenko, adding that Ukraine does not produce the special aluminum alloys that U.S. officials allege were part of the shipment.