Northeast Intelligence Network

By Sean Osborne, Associate Director, Military Affairs

17 June 2008: In March 2005 I wrote an article entitled “Smoking Gun: Iran Already Nuclear Armed” which dealt with the 2001 Iranian acquisition of six Russian-made KH-55 nuclear-capable cruise missiles from the inventory of the former Soviet Union. It was Colonel Hryhoriy Omelchenko of the Ukrainian State Secret Services (SBU) within the newly-elected Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko’s government that alerted the world. Details of the illegal transfer were confirmed by the middleman in the transfer, Dr. Sarfraz Haider, who was found murdered in Cyrpus in 2004. An autopsy of Dr. Haider revealed that his neck had been broken and his aorta split. Dr. Haider was quoted in a February 2005 article in the Australian Herald-Sun newspaper as having stated prior to his murder, “What’s the use of the missiles without them [warheads]?” The KH-55 cruise missiles were designed to carry a 200kT nuclear warhead to a target more than 1,860 miles away.

On Sunday we learned from the International Herald-Tribune that an advanced nuclear warhead design was discovered by American and IAEA investigators resident in the global network of computers belonging to Pakistani nuclear proliferation network engineer AQ Khan. The advanced design was verified as operational in tests conducted by Pakistan during May of 1998. Most disturbing about this discovery is the unknown number of copies which were made and distributed to any number of governments or terrorist organizations. It is also known that this advanced design included the digital coding necessary for automated machining of the parts for the warhead. All that is missing from this proven weapon design is the fissionable HEU (highly enriched uranium) core of the warhead. And what has the Islamic Republic of Iran been so relentlessly enriching in the clandestine nuclear weapons facilities in the face of feckless Western negotiations and ineffectual regime of sanctions? The fissionable HEU core for this nuclear warhead, of course.
Recall the brouhaha over the November 2007 NIE (National Intelligence Estimate) on Iranian nuclear progress. The big issue at the time was that Iran had halted its work on how to design and build a nuclear warhead way back in 2003. No wonder. The Iranian’s already had six KH-55 delivery systems to reverse engineer and upgrade and they very probably had AQ Khan’s proven, mass-production ready warhead design. What else could the Iranian’s possibly need?

Time.

All that Iran needed was time to manufacture the weapon delivery systems, the warheads and enriched HEU. That time has been provided them in abundance as the West failed to act in any meaningful way. Remember, we’re talking about an Iran which is the preeminent terrorist sponsoring state on the planet, an Iran whose Shi’a zealots desire an Armageddon scenario to hasten the arrival of their well-dwelling al-Mahdi, an Iran which has on more than one occasion pledged to annihilate Western civilization beginning with the United States, the United Kingdom and Israel.

Is there any question what hard assessment America and its allies must arrive at in very short order to preempt this digitized nuclear nightmare? We should hope not.