Netanyahu's red line
Our understanding of Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s speech last week to the UN General Assembly is that he gave some ground, but not much.
Until his 30 September speech, the focus of concern was over what Defence Minister Ehud Barak termed Iran’s “zone of immunity”. This was interpreted as meaning the point at which Iran’s nuclear programme would become invulnerable to an Israeli military strike because, inter alia, the development of its deep underground facility at Fordow.
Netanyahu did not mention this in his speech to the UN, and some have seen this as a retreat. More likely it is an irrelevance given the definition that Netanyahu has now given to his red line. His new target is the point at which Iran has sufficient medium-enriched uranium to move towards the final enrichment phase. The point is, argued Netanyahu, that it takes many years to enrich uranium for a bomb, and to do so requires thousands of centrifuges operating in very big industrial plants. As Netanyahu said: “Those plants are visible and they’re still vulnerable”.
However, he argued, the facility needed to assemble a warhead “or a nuclear device that could be placed in a container ship” would be very small, and quite possibly impossible to locate even with the best intelligence. So, Netanyahu concluded, “the only way you can credibly prevent Iran from developing a nuclear weapon is to prevent Iran from amassing enough enriched uranium for a bomb”.
To make sure everyone understood, he said again: “The relevant question is not when Iran will get the bomb. The relevant question is at what stage can we no longer stop Iran from getting the bomb. The red line must be drawn on Iran’s nuclear enrichment programme because these enrichment facilities are the only nuclear installations that we can definitely see and credibly target.”
But how much enriched uranium is too much? In order to manufacture a nuclear weapon, Iran needs to have 25 kg of uranium enriched to 90%. To achieve this, it first needs 250 kg of uranium enriched to 20%. At the moment it is believed to have 190 kg of 20% enriched uranium. Given that Iran is currently enriching 15 kg per month to 20%, it could therefore have enough medium-enriched uranium to move on to the final stage within as little as four months. Even if, as has been suggested, half of the 190 kg of 20% enriched uranium is earmarked for conversion into research-reactor fuel, that would only stretch out the timescale to 10 months. From the moment Iran has the required stockpile of 250 kg of 20% enriched uranium, Netanyahu warned the UN, “it’s only a few months, possibly a few weeks, before they get enough enriched uranium for the first bomb”.
Having explained this, Netanyahu reiterated that the red line should be drawn “before Iran completes the second stage of nuclear enrichment necessary to make a bomb” - in other words possibly within as little as 4 months and not more than 10 months.
This is still very much earlier than is implied by the US commitment to prevent Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon. Iran will still need a considerable amount of time between amassing the required amount of enriched uranium and fashioning a deliverable nuclear weapon. According to the head of the Nuclear Weapons Project at the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, Shannon Kile, “we are talking about several years...before Iran could develop a nuclear weapon and certainly before they could have a deliverable nuclear weapon”.
A similar timescale has been put forward by a group of former senior US officials, including former national security adviser Zbigniew Brzeznski and former Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage, who said in a report published last month: “Additional time – up to two years according to conservative estimates – would be required for Iran to build a nuclear warhead that would be reliably deliverable by a missile.”
Much the same estimate has been put out by the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS), which points out that Iran will need time to convert uranium gas to metal, to design a nuclear triggering device, and to produce and fit spherical explosive lenses.
The point is that although Netanyahu did appear to backtrack a little at the UN, certainly to the extent of making an attack before the US election almost impossible, it was not by much – and his view of the ‘red line’ that must not be crossed is still considerably more aggressive than the US’s. Furthermore, he has now staked his reputation – and Israel’s credibility – on this threshold. Although other interventions short of military could extend the period, we would consider this to be a ‘red line’ to which subscribers should pay the closest attention. JdeC.
NOTE: If elections in Israel were held today, a poll published last week found that Netanyahu’s Likud would win 28 seats (compared with 25 in the previous poll and 27 at the last election), while Labor would win 20 seats (compared with 21 and 13).