Reconsidering Iran's Nuclear Ambitions, or: Oh, Qom On!

Have you been reading about all that's going on with Iran lately? Here's the deal:

1. Three years ago, US, UK and French intelligence started picking up on activity in the mountains of Qom -- tunneling, digging, etc.


2. Although it wasn't publicized until after the G-20 address (see below), Tehran provided the IAEA with a dossier, four days before the UN Security Council meeting on September 24, revealing the location and activities of its second uranium enrichment plant in Qom (the first plant in Natanz is currently being carefully monitored by an Israel with a very itchy trigger finger -- but that's another matter altogether).


3. On September 25, at the opening of the G-20 summit in Pittsburgh, Presidents Obama and Sarkozy, along with Prime Minister Brown, jointly addressed the gathering of ministers and government officials, fully revealing all that is known about Iran's Qom operations and condemning Ahmadinejad's actions.


4. Caught with its pants down, and with the encouragement of the international community, Iran has agreed to transfer its low-enriched uranium from Qom to a third country, which will assist in further enriching to 19.75% -- the acceptable level for safe civilian nuclear reactor fuel. Russia and France so far are the leading candidates to provide that third-country assistance.

So what does all this mean? Could all these events really have transpired and been resolved so quickly? US and foreign agencies have been sitting on the Qom intel for three years, and nothing was said until just last week. Can we really believe that with Natanz under IAEA safeguards, Tehran decided to start up just one other facility? Surely, there have to be more scattered around the country. I'm not clear on the inner financial and infrastructural workings of Iran, but I imagine that if a country that ranks 84 on the UN Human Development Index can build a facility by tunneling into a cave in relative secrecy, it can do it again and somewhere else.

Who knows, maybe there's another one right now. Maybe intelligence agencies have been aware of it for a while. Maybe they're still sitting on it because "they are building the case so that they feel that they are in a very strong position when the time comes."

Whatever that means ...