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A Minority Position On Iran?
Telegraph reports on Iran nuke claims - should say more about background
Earlier this month, Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad announced that Iran had begun enriching uranium on an industrial scale. Alarms sounded, warning that the Islamic Republic, whose leader has vowed to "wipe Israel from the map", was close to building a nuclear weapon.
However, analysts believe that much of Ahmadinejad's claims are bluster and that the Iranian weapons programme is facing "severe technical difficulties."
The Telegraph reports that some western experts believe Iran is four years from enriching enough uranium for a bomb and eight years from being able to deploy one.
It quotes Norman Dombey, emeritus professor of theoretical physics at Sussex University, as saying that enriching uranium is a very difficult process involving several disciplines, none of which Iran has been able to master.
Iran needs to spin 3,000 centrifuges for its project: It claims to have installed 1,312 in its nuclear facility at Natanz. It is a precise process fraught with difficulty: Prof Dombey says even a particle of dust from a fingerprint could halt the procedure (we expect the Iranian scientists have already stocked up on Marigolds then).
It will, he says, take two years to master spinning the centrifuges and another two to produce enough weapons grade uranium for a bomb.
Professor Dombey is a member of the UK Liberal Democrats' Policy Working Group on Trident Renewal.
The Federal Policy Committee was ordered with the task of coming up with a Liberal Democrat approach to the project of replacing Britain's nuclear deterrent. The group concluded that while there was no immediate danger to Britain from any of the current nuclear states, Britain should not disarm because of threats from Iran and North Korea among others.
The paper (PDF version here) argued that Britain should allow its current Trident capacity to be retained as long as it was cost-effective, and then it should be replaced by a scaled-down version of not more than 100 warheads.
This was to be the policy of the party, hoped Liberal Democrat leader Menzies Campbell. Campbell planned to vote against the Labour government's planned full renewal of Trident.
However, almost half his party conference in Harrogate disagreed and wanted to scrap the programme altogether. The party's leadership narrowly won a vote on its position.
Three members of the eleven-strong Policy Group disagreed strongly with the majority position on renewing Britain's nuclear deterrent. They produced a Minority Position listing their qualms. Prof Dombey was the first signatory of this report, which listed why Britain should not renew its nuclear deterrent.
Chief among them seems to be opposition to Britain's close relationship with the United States. "The UK at present is a permanent supplicant to the US", the report reads, and
"The US is a profoundly religious country: is it likely that the world view of the US will remain aligned with that of the secular and rationalist UK for the next 50 years? Already very different approaches to global warming, the International Criminal Court, international law, the death penalty and the treatment of prisoners have become apparent in the last five years. Yet the government decision to replace Trident assumes that US-UK relations will remain aligned over the next 50 years."
It admits that both Iran and North Korea are determined to build nuclear weapons, but says that neither pose a territorial threat to the UK. "Not replacing Trident would allow the UK a foreign policy more in keeping with the mood of the country and better for its relations with the rest of Europe, the Middle East and developing countries."
In conclusion it says that both Blair's government and the leadership of the Libdems (via its representatives on the Policy Committee) base their plans to renew Trident more on fear of attack by other parties and the media rather than "considered judgement." It says that Trident is based on fear of "the unknown and the unlikely" and adds that the LibDems were right to oppose the Iraq War - something the public has recognised. "Now is the time to do it again."
We reproduce this as a matter of background details, something the Telegraph neglects. Professor Dombey is and always had been clear about his position on disarmament. He has also written on how intelligence services including Britain's MI6, has forged documents "to make a political case."
Of Iran, he says, "At the moment, their programme doesn't constitute a threat. It would constitute a threat if they were enriching substantial amounts to more than five per cent and they're not. In fact they're not enriching anything very much. This talk about industrial scale enrichment is misleading."
Prof Dombey's position on Iran's capacity is backed by several others in the Telegraph's report: Mohammed ElBaradei, head of the International Atomic Energy Authority, reckons Iran is eight years from a bomb. US intelligence circles are reported to believe that Iran's centrifuges are more likely to break down than produce weapons-grade uranium. Even Israel, which is unambiguously in Iran's firing line should it build a nuclear weapon, plays down Iran's threat. Mossad is said to claim that a bomb is three to four years away, while Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said, "Iran is far from attaining the technology threshhold and this country is not close to getting it, contrary to statements by its leadership."
