Officials say Iranians devised nuclear test shaft
WASHINGTON – Iranian engineers have completed sophisticated drawings of a deep subterranean shaft, according to officials who have examined classified documents in the hands of U.S. intelligence for more than 20 months.
Complete with remote-controlled sensors to measure pressure and heat, the plans for the 400-meter tunnel appear designed for an underground atomic test detonation that might one day announce Tehran’s arrival as a nuclear power, the officials said.
By the estimates of U.S. and allied intelligence analysts, that day remains as much as a decade away – assuming that Iran applies the full measure of its scientific and industrial resources to the project and encounters no major technical hurdles. But whether Iran’s leaders have reached that decision and what concrete progress the effort has made remain divisive questions among government analysts and U.N. inspectors.
In the three years since Iran was forced to acknowledge having a secret uranium enrichment program, Western governments and the United Nations’ nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency, have amassed substantial evidence to test the Tehran government’s assertion that it plans to build nothing more than peaceful nuclear power plants. Often circumstantial, usually ambiguous and always incomplete, the evidence has confounded efforts by policymakers, intelligence officials and allies to reach a confident judgment about Iran’s intentions and a diplomatic solution to the crisis.
Drawings of the unbuilt test site, not disclosed publicly before, appear to U.S. officials to signal at least the ambition to test a nuclear explosive. But U.S. and U.N. experts who have studied them said the undated drawings do not clearly fit into a larger picture. Nowhere, for example, does the word “nuclear” appear on them. The authorship is unknown, and there is no evidence of an associated program to acquire, assemble and construct the components of such a site.
“The diagram is consistent with a nuclear test-site schematic,” one senior U.S. source said, noting that the drawings envision a test control team parked a safe 10 kilometers away, or six miles, from the shaft. As far as U.S. intelligence knows, the idea has not left the drawing board.
Other suggestive evidence is cloaked in similar uncertainty. Contained in a laptop stolen by an Iranian citizen in 2004 are designs by a firm called Kimeya Madon for a small-scale facility to produce uranium gas, the construction of which would give Iran a secret stock that could be enriched for fuel or for bombs. Also on the laptop – obtained by U.S. intelligence – were drawings on modifying Iran’s ballistic missiles in ways that might accommodate a nuclear warhead.