Eye on Iran: Iran’s Underground Nuclear Sites Not Immune to U.S. Bunker-Busters, Experts Say

For continuing coverage follow us on Twitter and join our Facebook group. Top Stories WashPost: "Western spy agencies for years have kept watch on a craggy peak in northwest Iran that houses one of the world's most unusual nuclear sites. Known as Fordow, the facility is built into mountain bunkers designed to withstand an aerial attack. Iran's civil defense chief has declared the site 'impregnable.' But impregnable it is not, say U.S. military planners, who are increasingly confident about their ability to deliver a serious blow against Fordow should the president ever order an attack... Yet as a matter of physics, Fordow is far more vulnerable than generally portrayed, said current and former military and intelligence analysts. Massive new 'bunker buster' munitions recently added to the U.S. arsenal would not necessarily have to penetrate the deepest bunkers to cause irreparable damage to infrastructure as well as highly sensitive nuclear equipment, probably setting back Iran's program by years, officials said." http://t.uani.com/yjz4T0 Bloomberg: "The cascade of U.S. and European sanctions imposed on Iran is crippling its ability to export oil and conduct trade, hitting the Gulf state's economy and stoking internal dissent, U.S. officials said. An array of restrictions on banking, shipping, insurance, ports, trade, commodities and energy transactions and ventures have severed or complicated many of Iran's commercial ties to the outside world. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton say there is limited time for sanctions to pressure Iran into giving up disputed nuclear activities before the U.S. or Israel may take military action. Noor Islamic Bank, whose chairman is a son of Dubai's ruler, said yesterday it severed relations with Iranian banks in December. Swift, the financial-messaging service for most cross- border money transfers, said last week it cut off more than 20 sanctioned Iranian banks and the central bank, according to two officials involved in the talks." http://t.uani.com/xlmHtp Reuters: "Western trade sanctions against Iran are strangling its oil exports even before they go into effect, a U.S. advisory body has found, amid warnings that any shortages will only push up crude prices and strain a weak global economy. With crude prices trading around 10-month highs and limited spare production capacity worldwide, the United States may offer Iran's biggest customers waivers from the oil sanctions, which take effect June 28. Iran is the world's fifth largest oil exporter and the second-biggest producer in OPEC after Saudi Arabia... The Energy Information Administration (EIA), an independent arm of the U.S. Department of Energy, said on Wednesday that Western insurers were declining to cover the trade risk on some Iranian oil shipments." http://t.uani.com/xxXEU5 Nuclear Program & Sanctions Bloomberg: "Obama administration officials are escalating warnings that the U.S. could join Israel in attacking Iran if the Islamic republic doesn't dispel concerns that its nuclear-research program is aimed at producing weapons. Four days before Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is scheduled to arrive in Washington, Air Force Chief of Staff General Norton Schwartz told reporters the Joint Chiefs of Staff have prepared military options to strike Iranian nuclear sites in the event of a conflict. 'What we can do, you wouldn't want to be in the area,' Schwartz told reporters in Washington yesterday. Pentagon officials said military options being prepared start with providing aerial refueling for Israeli planes and include attacking the pillars of the clerical regime, including the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and its elite Qods Force, regular Iranian military bases and the Ministry of Intelligence and Security. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because Pentagon plans are classified." http://t.uani.com/yMK08o WSJ: "The U.S. Treasury Department's point man on sanctions used a speech before securities industry participants to reflect on the past year or so... Concerning Iran, Cohen said that a major component of the administration's dual-track strategy of dealing with the country is sanctions, including the series of measures against the state shipping line, the finding that Iran is a 'primary money laundering concern' under the Patriot Act and the recent action against the Iranian central bank. Moreover, Cohen noted that the European Union and other countries such as Japan, Switzerland and Australia are joining the U.S in isolating Iran. 'This sustained, global effort has brought very substantial economic and financial pressure on the Iranian regime,' he said." http://t.uani.com/zUfkCh BusinessLive: "US organisation United Against Nuclear Iran has berated mobile phone company MTN for engaging in business in that country. According to the organisation's president and former as US ambassador to the United Nations, representative for UN Management and Reform, Mark Wallace, it was incumbent on the world's businesses to understand the gravity of the human rights situation in Iran and stop doing work there. 'Any company that does business in Iran is not only financially enabling the regime, but also risks having its products misused for nefarious ends,' Wallace said in a statement. 'For example, at any hour the regime could be using MTN cellular technology to monitor dissidents ...' MTN currently owns 49% of Irancell through one of its subsidiaries. Irancell, which has the second GSM licence in Iran, is 51%-owned and controlled by Iran Electronic Development Company." http://t.uani.com/yZWUYH Bloomberg: "Kuo Oil Ltd., the Singapore trader that the U.S. censured last month for trading with Iran, has booked a fuel-oil shipment from the Persian Gulf nation for loading in March, shipping data show. Closely held Kuo Oil hired the Mire to load 80,000 tons from Bandar Mahshahr on March 12 for delivery to Singapore, according to four shipbrokers, including a unit of Clarkson Plc (CKN), the world's largest. The Liberian-flagged vessel is anchored in the northern Gulf of Oman near the Strait of Hormuz, according to transmissions captured by AISLive on Bloomberg... Kuo Oil was sanctioned Jan. 12 for providing 'over $25 million in refined petroleum to Iran between late 2010 and early 2011,' the U.S. State Department said in a statement." http://t.uani.com/xAs1f3 WSJ: "U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has threatened Pakistan with sanctions if the country continues with plans to build a natural gas pipeline to Iran. The U.S. is moving to squeeze Iran financially in a bid to force it to drop its nuclear program. But Pakistan has been unwilling to line up behind the U.S., saying it needs Iran, a neighbor, to help it meet a massive energy shortage. Mrs. Clinton told a U.S. House of Representatives subcommittee Wednesday that sanctions could be triggered if Islamabad presses ahead. As Pakistan's economy already is in dire straits, the sanctions could be 'particularly damaging' and 'further undermine their economic status,' Mrs. Clinton said." http://t.uani.com/yLB3hd BBC: "'The smoke of the fire of sanctions gets in people's eyes,' says Ali Arsalan in a supermarket in Valiasr Square in the Iranian capital, Tehran. Mr Arsalan is stocking up on food for Iran's New Year celebrations in late March. Here, a litre of milk costs $0.65 (£0.41), a kilo of rice goes for $1.30 - the best rice sells for $1.94/kg - and a kilo of apples costs $1. Mr Arsalan buys his groceries as two new rounds of Western sanctions against Iran begin to take effect." http://t.uani.com/wQekD1 Domestic Politics WSJ: "Iran's parliamentary elections on Friday are shaping up as a contest by proxy between President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who seeks public endorsement of his efforts to wield broad authority, and Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who has struggled to keep his populist president in check. Efforts to tame the president have only dented his reputation, and he could cement a political comeback if his supporters win a decisive majority of parliament's 290 seats on Friday." http://t.uani.com/A4klcF NYT: "In the days leading up to Iran's parliamentary elections on Friday, the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and other top officials have been crisscrossing their country to issue stern warnings against a vast Western conspiracy, driven by panic, to undermine the vote. The official news media have amplified the campaign: 'U.S. Dreads Iranians' Turnout in Elections,' read one typical banner on Press TV, the state-run English-language vehicle. That may come as a surprise outside Iran, where the elections are widely ignored, or dismissed as a contest among an ever-narrower circle of archconservatives. But this is no ordinary election. It is the first one to take place since the presidential election of 2009, which set off widespread accusations of fraud, vast street protests and a bloody crackdown lasting months that effectively eviscerated any viable opposition. Now the Iranian authorities - who have long promoted voter turnout as an index of their government's democratic legitimacy - must lure people back to the polls." http://t.uani.com/zQlkWg Opinion & Analysis Amos Yadlin in NYT: "On July 7, 1981, I was one of eight Israeli fighter pilots who bombed the Iraqi nuclear reactor at Osirak. As we sat in the briefing room listening to the army chief of staff, Rafael Eitan, before starting our planes' engines, I recalled a conversation a week earlier when he'd asked us to voice any concerns about our mission. We told him about the risks we foresaw: running out of fuel, Iraqi retaliation, how a strike could harm our relationship with America, and the limited impact a successful mission might have - perhaps delaying Iraq's nuclear quest by only a few years. Listening to today's debates about Iran, we hear the same arguments and face the same difficulties, even though we understand it is not 1981. Shortly after we destroyed Osirak, the Israeli defense attaché in Washington was called into the Pentagon. He was expecting a rebuke. Instead, he was faced with a single question: How did you do it? The United States military had assumed that the F-16 aircraft they had provided to Israel had neither the range nor the ordnance to attack Iraq successfully. The mistake then, as now, was to underestimate Israel's military ingenuity. We had simply maximized fuel efficiency and used experienced pilots, trained specifically for this mission. We ejected our external fuel tanks en route to Iraq and then attacked the reactor with pinpoint accuracy from so close and such a low altitude that our unguided bombs were as accurate and effective as precision-guided munitions. Today, Israel sees the prospect of a nuclear Iran that calls for our annihilation as an existential threat. An Israeli strike against Iran would be a last resort, if all else failed to persuade Iran to abandon its nuclear weapons program. That moment of decision will occur when Iran is on the verge of shielding its nuclear facilities from a successful attack - what Israel's leaders have called the 'zone of immunity.' Some experts oppose an attack because they claim that even a successful strike would, at best, delay Iran's nuclear program for only a short time. But their analysis is faulty. Today, almost any industrialized country can produce a nuclear weapon in four to five years - hence any successful strike would achieve a delay of only a few years. What matters more is the campaign after the attack. When we were briefed before the Osirak raid, we were told that a successful mission would delay the Iraqi nuclear program for only three to five years. But history told a different story... Mr. Obama will therefore have to shift the Israeli defense establishment's thinking from a focus on the 'zone of immunity' to a 'zone of trust.' What is needed is an ironclad American assurance that if Israel refrains from acting in its own window of opportunity - and all other options have failed to halt Tehran's nuclear quest - Washington will act to prevent a nuclear Iran while it is still within its power to do so. I hope Mr. Obama will make this clear. If he does not, Israeli leaders may well choose to act while they still can." http://t.uani.com/Ans9Ze Amitai Etzioni in The National Interest: "Several years ago, I spent three days in Isfahan, Iran, at a conference organized by the reformers at the Center for Dialogue among Civilizations. Asked to visit the rest of the country, I met with Iranians in Qom, Shiraz, Kashan and Tehran. What struck me most were the little shrines I saw all over the country at the sides of the road and at the entrances and exits of towns and villages. They are dedicated to Iranians-about five hundred thousand-who died young during the eight-year war with Iraq. Pointing to these shrines, my hosts bemoaned their losses the way Germans talk about WWII and the Nazi era: as traumatic experiences that have shaped their psyche and whose repetition they are keen to avoid at almost any cost. The Iranians I met-granted, a few years back, in 2002-were very war allergic. I leave it to psychiatrists to decide whether the recent bellicose talk of those in power-threats to close the Strait of Hormuz and remarks by Ayatollah Khomeini that Iran would 'support and help any nations, any groups' fighting against Israel-is merely brave talk to cover up weak knees or the talk of a minority not backed up by a war-weary majority. The fact that every time the U.S. ratchets up its threats to use force, the Iranian government calls for negotiations (as has happened again recently) suggests to me that little has changed on this account. True, these offers to negotiate may be merely stalling tactics. However, they show that at least the mere threat of an attack commands the attention of Iran's government, and judging by the run from the rial, its people. Once, when the Iranian government felt especially threatened, it made an offer that was very favorable to the West. The time was mid-2003, a point at which the United States showed its military might by easily disposing of Saddam's army in weeks, and with few casualties-a feat Iran could not accomplish after fighting him for eight years. The fact that the Bush administration openly listed Iran as one of the three members of the Axis of Evil and otherwise indicated that it could be subject to military attacks alarmed Tehran. (Similar developments led Qaddafi to give up his program of WMD development in Libya.) In response, Iran sent the U.S. government a proposal in May 2003 that called for a comprehensive dialogue between the two countries that would address Iran's nuclear program, among other issues... There are two lessons here: Nothing is more likely to bring Iran to the negotiating table, not to win time but for a true give-and-take, than if the United States and its allies seem willing to make good on their repeated declarations that all options are on the table-that is, if serious preparations for a military strike take place. Second, such pressures, combined with sanctions and diplomacy, are much more likely to succeed if limited to demands to change behavior (halt the program to build nuclear arms or open up to sufficient inspections to prove that no such program is taking place) than if Washington and its allies insist on regime change." http://t.uani.com/ymcqKs Con Coughlin in WSJ: "It's election time again in Iran, and the bitter rivalries between the regime's leading political figures have delivered an upsurge in violence far beyond Iran's borders. Western intelligence directly attributes the recent spate of Iranian-sponsored terrorist attacks around the world, including a series of failed assassination attempts against Israeli diplomats, to Friday's parliamentary elections, when Iranians cast their votes to elect a new Majlis. According to senior Western intelligence officials, the attacks have been undertaken on the orders of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. The Supreme Leader looks to be trying to strengthen his appeal to Iranian voters at the expense of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Iranian opposition activists say Khamenei has ordered the Revolutionary Guard, which answers directly to him, to ensure that his followers in the United Front party win a majority of seats in the election. The Council of Guardians, which Khamenei also controls, has already carefully vetted the 3,444 candidates who will be contesting the 290 seats in the Majlis to ensure that they are committed to revolutionary Islamic principles. Now Khamenei wants to ensure that voters choose the right candidates. The Revolutionary Guard conducted a similar exercise during the disputed presidential election of 2009, to ensure that Ahmadinejad served a second term. Since then, Khamenei has fallen out with Ahmadinejad over their disagreements on the future role of the presidency in Iranian government, and is said to refer to the president's supporters as 'the deviant movement.' For his part, Ahmadinejad dubs Khamenei's circle a 'bunch of madmen.' Western intelligence officials believe this power struggle within the Iranian politburo has now manifested itself as a new campaign by the Khamenei faction to demonstrate his hard anti-Western line and show that he is the more effective guardian of Iran's Islamic Revolution. This effort was in plain sight earlier this year with Tehran's threat to close the Strait of Hormuz. Revolutionary Guard activists loyal to Khamenei are also suspected of having been involved in last year's plot to murder the Saudi Arabian ambassador to the U.S. at a Georgetown restaurant." http://t.uani.com/x6gzGj Eye on Iran is a periodic news summary from United Against Nuclear Iran (UANI) a program of the American Coalition Against Nuclear Iran, Inc., a tax-exempt organization under Section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code. Eye on Iran is not intended as a comprehensive media clips summary but rather a selection of media elements with discreet analysis in a PDA friendly format. For more information please email Press@UnitedAgainstNuclearIran.com United Against Nuclear Iran (UANI) is a non-partisan, broad-based coalition that is united in a commitment to prevent Iran from fulfilling its ambition to become a regional super-power possessing nuclear weapons. 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