WASHINGTON, Jan 28, (Agencies): The US military has concluded that its largest conventional bomb is not capable of destroying Iran’s most heavily fortified underground facilities suspected to be used for building nuclear weapons, The Wall Street Journal reported late Friday.
But citing unnamed US officials, the newspaper said the military was stepping up efforts to make it more powerful.
The 13.6-ton “bunker-buster” bomb, known as the Massive Ordnance Penetrator, was specifically designed to take out the hardened fortifications built by Iran and North Korea, the report said.
But initial tests indicated that the bomb, as currently configured, would not be capable of destroying some of Iran’s facilities, either because of their depth or because Tehran has added new fortifications to protect them, the paper noted.
In a report issued in November, the International Atomic Energy Agency said intelligence from more than 10 countries and its own sources “indicates that Iran has carried out activities relevant to the development of a nuclear device.”
It detailed 12 suspicious areas such as testing explosives in a steel container at a military base and studies on Shahab-3 ballistic missile warheads that the IAEA said were “highly relevant to a nuclear weapon programme.”
Iran, which has come under unprecedented international pressure since the publication of the report, with Washington and the EU targeting its oil sector and central bank, rejected the dossier as based on forgeries.
Meanwhile, doubts about its bomb’s effectiveness prompted the Pentagon this month to secretly submit a request to Congress for funding to enhance the bomb’s ability to penetrate deeper into rock, concrete and steel before exploding, The Journal noted.
The Defense Department has spent about $330 million so far to develop about 20 of the bombs, which are built by Boeing Co., the report pointed out.
The Pentagon is seeking about $82 million more to make the bomb more effective, The Journal said.
Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, in an interview with The Journal Thursday, acknowledged the bomb’s shortcomings against some of Iran’s deepest bunkers.
He said more development work would be done and that he expected the bomb to be ready to take on the deepest bunkers soon.
“We’re still trying to develop them,” Panetta said.
Inspectors
Senior United Nations nuclear inspectors headed to Tehran on Saturday to press Iranian officials to address suspicions that the Islamic state is seeking atomic weapons.
The UN International Atomic Energy Agency hopes Iran, which has indicated readiness to discuss the issue for the first time since 2008, will end years of stonewalling on intelligence pointing to an intention to develop nuclear arms technology.
“We are trying ... to resolve all the outstanding issues with Iran, in particular we hope that Iran will engage with us on our concerns regarding the possible military dimensions of Iran’s nuclear programme,” IAEA Deputy Director General Herman Nackaerts told reporters as he prepared to depart from Vienna airport.
But Western diplomats, who have often accused Iran of using such offers of dialogue as a stalling tactic while it presses ahead with its nuclear programme, say they doubt Tehran will show the kind of concrete cooperation the IAEA wants.
They say Iran may offer limited concessions and transparency in an attempt to ease intensifying international pressure on the country, a major oil producer, but that this is unlikely to amount to the full cooperation that is required.
The outcome could determine whether Iran will face further international isolation, or whether there are prospects for resuming wider talks between Tehran and the major powers on the nuclear dispute that has sparked fears of war.
The United States and its allies suspect the programme has military aims but Tehran says is for peaceful electricity generation.
“The chances of the IAEA’s success may depend on how badly Iran wants to avoid harder sanctions,” said nuclear expert Mark Hibbs of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
Remarks by Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s top adviser on international affairs on Saturday suggested Iran was not in the mood for concessions.
“Iran’s stance towards its nuclear issue has not changed in term of fundamentals and principles,” Ali Akbar Velayati said, according to the ISNA news agency.
“One important principle is that Iran would not relinquish or withdraw from its peaceful nuclear activities.”
The six-member IAEA team of senior officials and experts, headed by Nackaerts, was due to arrive in Tehran early on Sunday.
The three day visit comes at a time of soaring tension between Iran and the West. The IAEA issued a report in November with details of suspected research and development activities in Iran relevant to nuclear weapons.
The West has seized on the report to ratchet up sanctions aimed at Iran’s lifeblood oil exports. Iran hit back on Friday warning it may halt oil exports to Europe next week .
The IAEA team is expected to seek explanations to the issues raised in the report, including information that Iran appears to have worked on a nuclear weapon design, and demand access to sites, officials and documents relevant to the agency’s probe.
The IAEA says Iran, which has rejected the allegations as forged and baseless, has not engaged with the agency in a substantive way on these issues since August 2008 and that it keeps receiving intelligence data adding to its concerns.
“There were a huge number of questions raised by the November report. They will be seeking to answer those questions, and it’s incumbent on Iran to be supportive,” U.S. State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland said this week.
IAEA Director General Yukiya Amano has called on Iran to show a “constructive spirit” in the meeting and Iran has said it is willing to discuss “any issues” of interest to the UN agency, including the military-linked concerns.
Iran’s Press TV state television said on its website the IAEA visit was aimed at bolstering cooperation between the two sides “by resolving ambiguities”, language Tehran has also used in the past.
The English-language station cited Iran’s envoy to the IAEA, Ali Asghar Soltanieh, as saying the main objective was to “thwart plots by enemies who are levelling unfounded allegations” against Iran and to prove its nuclear transparency.
Hibbs said Amano would want to see a “significant step” from Iran, for example by agreeing to more intrusive IAEA inspections or by explaining issues related to the weapons suspicions.
“I’m not very optimistic,” Hibbs said. “Iran’s track record is of appearing to cooperate whenever they are threatened by penalties.”
Impact
The National Iranian Oil Company has no firm projection of the impact on world crude prices of a looming EU embargo on Iranian exports, its managing director said in comments published on Saturday.
Ahmad Qalebani told the government newspaper Iran that the size of any hike in prices would depend on the European Union’s success in finding alternative output to make up for Iranian deliveries lost to the market.
“One cannot have an accurate prediction of prices, but it seems that in the future we will witness 120 to 150 dollars a barrel,” Qalebani said.
He said the reason that EU foreign ministers had decided on Monday to give the bloc’s existing purchasers of Iranian oil until July 1 to find alternative suppliers was to try to minimise the impact on prices.
“The reason for this six-month postponement is to buy time — they want to use this opportunity to pass the peak winter season and find a suitable replacement for Iranian oil,” he said.
“If the Europeans successfully achieve it, then there won’t be any price hike. But if they don’t, then certainly there will be price hikes.”
Iran’s Oil Minister Rostam Qasemi said in late December that EU and other Western sanctions against its exports could see prices soar to $200 per barrel.
In New York on Friday, benchmark West Texas Intermediate crude for delivery in March closed at $99.56 a barrel. London’s main contract, Brent North Sea crude for March, finished the week at $111.46 a barrel.
An International Monetary Fund report released on Wednesday said that a somewhat broad embargo on Iranian oil, effectively taking 1.5 million barrels a day of Iran’s exports off the world market without another producer compensating for it, risked pushing the market price up 20-30 percent, “about $20-30 a barrel currently.”
The IMF said that if Iran made good on its threat to retaliate by closing the Strait of Hormuz — the strategic oil waterway at the mouth of the Gulf — there could be a far greater impact.
“A Strait of Hormuz closure could trigger a much larger price spike, including by limiting offsetting supplies from other producers in the region,” the report said.