Tom Zoellner

by Uranium - Rock That Shaped the World

  The enrichment facility is snugly underground, built as the Israelis had built Dimona, which makes it harder to see and harder to bomb. There are said to be three thousand centrifuges in a room the size of a professional basketball arena, capable of spinning uranium hexafluoride at speeds high enough to dislodge the U-235 atoms for collection. The centrifuges are copied from A. Q. Khan’s basic model. Iran has also reportedly developed its own model of centrifuge, a type of design called IR-2, which is half the size and has four times the productivity. A bunker dug into a nearby hill is presumed to be a storage facility for centrifuge parts and the finished uranium.

  Iran has danced around the question of why it needed to build Natanz, insisting that it has plans to erect three nuclear generating stations while at the same time refusing the idea of accepting uranium deliveries from elsewhere. It wants the means of production for itself. “We must not at the beginning of the twenty-first century revert to the logic of the dark ages and once again try to deny societies access to scientific and technological advances,” said President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in his maiden address before the United Nations in 2005. He later told a group of friends that a halo of light had been emanating from him as he spoke.

  The former Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu once disparaged Ahmadinejad’s government as “basically a messianic apocalyptic cult,” and Iran’s president has not entirely contradicted this impression.

  Born the son of a blacksmith in 1956, Ahmadinejad holds a doctorate in “traffic and transport” and served as mayor of the capital city of Tehran before his election to the presidency in June 2005. He is slight in figure and soft in speech, and he prefers a tan jacket to a business suit. Ahmadinejad’s closest allies are hard-line Shiite clerics, and he is said to have spent almost no money running for office, trusting in the turnout from the mosques to carry him.

  He is also said to be a fervent believer in a Shiite folk belief: the return of the “hidden imam,” a holy man who disappeared in the ninth century and is believed by Shiites to be the Madhi, a salvation figure whose dramatic reentry into the world will trigger a final confrontation between good and evil before the dawning of a final age of justice and peace. This is not found in the Koran, but millions believe it to be true. There is no set timetable for the messiah’s arrival, though he is supposed to arrive with Jesus (regarded as a prophet in Islam, though not the Savior) and, in some versions, after a global war in which 80 percent of humanity dies.

  In one of his first acts as president, Ahmadinejad approved a $17 million renovation of the magnificent blue mosque in the city of Jamkaran, where the Madhi is expected to reveal himself. There have also been reports that the president—a doctor of traffic—has studied the layout of Tehran to make sure the city can handle the crush of people who will arrive for the imam’s first procession. Signs that said He IS COMING went up all over the city after Ahmadinejad took office. “The prospect of such a man obtaining nuclear weapons,” noted the London Telegraph, “is worrying.” This is a thought frequently echoed by leaders in the United States and the European Union, who say they will never tolerate a nuclear Iran.

  “We’ve got a leader in Iran who has announced that he wants to destroy Israel,” said President Bush, adding, “[I]f you’re interested in avoiding World War Three, it seems like you ought to be interested in preventing them from having the knowledge necessary for making a nuclear weapon.”

  This idea of “knowledge,” and the way the West would deny it to newcomers, lies closer to the true motivations for the Iranian uranium project. Iran’s nuclear thirst lies not so much in a desire to destroy the world, but rather in a yearning for lost prestige.

  There was a time when Islam was the dominant faith in the civilized world, the center of a global empire bigger even than the Romans had made, and its denizens made bold strides in mathematics, astronomy, literature, architecture, and medicine. After the death of the Prophet, Muhammad, in the sixth century, his followers worked quickly to consolidate regional allies and spread the message that Allah was the One True God. Energy coursed through the movement: The willing received the message hungrily; the unwilling were put to the sword. Armies flooded out of the Arabian Peninsula and stretched the caliphate wide, punching into Spain to the west and India to the east and swallowing the lands where the patriarch Abraham had walked. The spiritual capital was established at the crossroads city of Baghdad, where the Abbasid dynasty took power in the eighth century. With a liberal and generous attitude toward the acquisition of worldly knowledge, the dynasty commenced what has been called the Golden Age of the Islamic empire. Jews and Christians, specially mentioned as “people of the book” in the Koran, were treated as privileged minorities and encouraged to contribute. The works of Euclid, Plato, and Aristotle were translated into Arabic onto scrolls made from a paper mill built according to Chinese specifications. Baghdad featured the world’s first lending library and an advanced observatory. On the other side of the empire, the library at Córdoba had more than a half million volumes by the ninth century. By contrast, Europe’s largest library, at the monastery at St. Gall in present-day Switzerland, held less than five hundred manuscripts.

  The Arab genius Ibn al-Haytham conducted experiments with light rays and is credited with using an early version of the experimental scientific method to separate truth from error. Doctors invented the bone saw, forceps, and the clinical use of distilled alcohol (this last, ironically, an Arabic word). The greatest strides were in mathematics. The concept of zero is an Islamic invention, as is the decimal system, quadratic equations, and the numeration that made calculation easier and faster. For the world at the time, this was a high-water mark of science.

  Then it all changed. The Mongols sacked the intellectual center of Baghdad in the thirteenth century and, while political power lived on inside the vast Ottoman Empire, the spirit of learning and discovery never really recovered. The advances of Renaissance Europe were ignored. The printing press—that great democratizing force—was generally not welcomed.

  “In the Muslim world, independent inquiry virtually came to an end, and science was for the most part reduced to the veneration of a corpus of approved knowledge,” wrote Bernard Lewis in What Went Wrong?, an autopsy of the Golden Age. The influential sect of Wahabbism, founded in the 1700s, condemned the authority of science. After the disintegration of the Ottoman regime in the 1910s, Islamic societies turned ever more inward, shunning the Western idea of scientific progress as being counter-Koranic. The Moroccan sociologist Fatima Mernissi has written, bitterly, that “Islam is probably the only monotheistic religion in which scholarly exploration is systematically discouraged, if not forbidden.” Patents granted inside Muslim countries lag far behind those in other parts of the world, and top Pakistani physicist Pervez Hoodbhoy recently characterized the universities in his country as “intellectual rubble,” with barely five qualified mathematicians among them. He noted the disquieting fact that Spanish publishers now translate as many books in a single year as Arab publishers have translated in the last twelve hundred years since the reign of the caliph Mamoun in the ninth century. The West is resented for its political and cultural dominance at the same time that many of the technologies that made it possible are disdained and rejected.

  But the atomic bomb is the great exception to this rule.

  The political decay of the nineteenth century and the oil colonization of the Islamic heartlands in the twentieth century have been inglorious, and some political leaders have wondered if there might not be a way to create a fast solution to the trouble—a magical way to catch up. The quest to attain nuclear capability is a matter of especial pride among hard-line factions in Iran who see it as a route to the reborn glory of the Islamic empire and—on a smaller scale—a way of igniting a national burst of confidence such as came to Pakistan when A. Q. Khan succeeded in making that country a member of the nuclear club.

  “The bomb looms large in the popular Muslim consciousness as a symbol of Islami
c unity, determination and self-respect,” wrote Hoodbhoy. “It is seen by many as a guarantee against further humiliating defeats, as the sign of a reversal of fortunes, and as a panacea for the ills that have plagued Muslims since the end of the Golden Age of Islam. Such sentiments are echoed by Muslims from Algeria to Syria and from Iraq to Pakistan.”

  Even as antediluvian a figure as Osama bin Laden—while hardly a friend of the Shiite government in Tehran—has promoted atomic science as a means of Islamic advancement, if only as a sledgehammer to use against infidels. He has called it a “religious duty” for Muslims to acquire nuclear weapons in defense against the West. “It’s easy to kill more people with uranium,” one of his followers has said. Three years before the September 11 attacks, bin Laden put out a directive titled “The Nuclear Bomb of Islam,” telling his readers that it was their obligation “to prepare as much force as possible to terrorize the enemies of God.”

  His own attempts to make or purchase a bomb have been clumsy.

  In 1993, a Sudanese military officer who called himself Basheer left bin Laden the victim of a $1.5 million con job. He sold bin Laden a tube of “uranium oxide” that turned out to be red mercury, a useless powder.

  The father of the Iranian nuclear program is Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, a wealthy pistachio farmer and former military chief known as the Gray Eminence. At the end of the pointless Iran-Iraq war in 1988, he told the government disgustedly that international laws “are only drops of ink on paper,” and that the nation would have to go beyond conventional weapons to achieve security. That same year, Iran received a block of uranium from the then apartheid nation of South Africa and began to experiment with it, along with some plutonium from a five-megawatt research reactor in Tehran that had been supplied by the United States, through the Atoms for Peace program (a legacy of better times). A. Q. Khan was paid $3 million for a set of technical specifications and centrifuge parts. A good domestic source of uranium ore was discovered in the Great Salt Desert, and even more was quietly purchased from China. But Iran has had difficulty finding qualified scientists to run the program.

  Rafsanjani has made repeated calls for his nation to become more scientifically literate. His speeches often conflate the idea of “science” with “uranium enrichment.” The two seem to have merged in the minds of the Iranian leadership.

  “The natural right of a country which wants to make use of the latest sciences is under assault,” Rafsanjani told a group of students in 2006. “The root cause of these assaults lies in the colonialist nature and policies of the West, whose plan is to keep countries backward.” To another audience, he said, “Unfortunately, the world of Islam is in need of Western science. The Islamic revolution is determined to return that glorious era to the world of Islam. That is why the enemies of Islam are hurling obstacles under different pretexts.” A nuclear war with Israel would leave Muslims the clear winners, he has reasoned, because a single explosion over Tel Aviv would decapitate that country, whereas the belt of Islamic countries from West Africa to Indonesia would absorb partial damage at worst.

  This narrative of Islamic triumphalism often creeps into any discussion of uranium inside Iran. The religious scholar Karen Armstrong has noted that Islam places a premium on worldly results, in contrast to Christianity, which tends to see its highest expression within the context of visible failure—poverty, mortification, and crucifixion. Islam prefers more tangible evidence of divine favor, and the lack of modern atomic potency has been particularly crushing in this regard. The nation’s supreme spiritual leader, the Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has called Iran the “mother of science,” who now deserves the “sweet fruits” of nuclear power. “At this time, God wants us to make what we need,” one prayer leader said in a sermon attended by a Western reporter. “Other countries now feel threatened because we have advanced in our technology.”

  Rhetoric from the top has filtered to the street. While many average Iranians are unhappy with the way their leadership has taunted the rest of the world, there are others who take to heart the slogan that blares out from signs and is constantly repeated on television: “Nuclear energy is our indisputable right.”

  The idea has become so glorified in Iran, even fetishized, that it seems to cover up no end of other internal shortcomings. The righteous struggle to make uranium is a means for Ahmadinejad to blame the West for his nation’s troubles, to direct the national anger outward instead of letting it focus on his own inabilities. This might be called the William L. Laurence view—uranium as messiah—with scant regard for the more banal and disappointing reality that it usually brings.

  No matter: The goal of becoming a uranium maker has become a national battle standard, “an emotive nationalistic issue for Iranians, like supporting their football team,” in the words of one political science professor at the University of Tehran. He was talking to a U.S. journalist, who also picked up this telling comment from a young Iranian woman: “For a country to have nuclear energy means that it has made progress in all other fields as well, so other countries have to respect its technology.”

  Iran has repeatedly insisted that it wishes only to have control of the fuel supply for the three reactors it plans to build and does not want to “lose” its uranium the way it gave up its oil to British companies in the 1910s (Niger might be said to have lost its uranium to the French in a similar way). There is no plan to build weapons, says Ahmadinejad, who also says such a thing would be against the dictates of the Koran. But even a beginning nuclear engineer knows that the cascades designed to produce 3-percent uranium (for power) can yield 90-percent uranium (for weapons) with a few metaphorical twists of the wrench. The same car that gets you to the grocery store can also take you to the ocean if you point it in that direction and drive long enough. This is uranium’s joke on man: its refusal to be encircled; part of the “sheer cussedness of nature” that Enrico Fermi noted during the Manhattan Project. In fact, blending uranium up to weapons grade becomes physically easier and takes less time once the threshold of 3 percent has been crossed.

  There are many reasons—even logical ones—for Iran to desire to cross this line. For one thing, it already lives in a nuclear neighborhood. To the north is Russia, east is Pakistan, west is American-occupied Iraq, and then Israel on the Mediterranean. Having a bomb of its own would allow for some rough parity and strengthen Iran’s hand in the region. Once banked, the weapons would also reduce the chances of its leadership being the target of “regime change” by an invading superpower, or of another territorial conflict such as the one fought with Iraq in the 1980s, which served no purpose and wasted the lives of millions. This is the same philosophy of deterrence embraced by Bernard Brodie and the other U.S. strategists of the cold war, and what led to America’s $10 trillion expenditure during the arms race (uranium is a costly servant).

  But there is also the crude schoolyard calculus of international affairs to consider. Unfortunately, a weaponized state enjoys a level of prestige unmatched by lesser nations, though it may have turned itself into a pariah to get there. To join the elite circle of the nuclear club, even through the backdoor, is still a way of belonging.

  The Iranian thirst for atomic potency approaches the level of a national fetish; a state of mind the psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton has called “nuclearism,” in which the power to shatter the atom and fry the enemy is worshipped as a thing it itself. The bomb overtakes all other considerations and blots out all alternatives. Lifton writes: “It is the ultimate paradox in human existence—the worship of the agent of our partial annihilation. It is not surprising that the weapons should become agents of worship because they could do what only God could do before, i.e., destroy the world.”

  He also says this: “Indeed, nuclearism can become sufficiently perverse to reach the point of seeking an experience of transcendence via a final nuclear apocalypse—which is something on the order of the sexual perversion in which orgasm is sought at the point of death via strangulation or hanging.”

>   But it is not only Iran that is making a fetish of its uranium-making knowledge. Keeping that capability away from Ahmadinejad at all costs has become a priority of the United States, which has put pressure on Russia, China, and European allies to isolate the regime and keep it from joining the world’s most select club.

  Tehran clearly understands the apocalyptic pull of uranium, and it might also understand the singular effect that it has on the Western mind; the dread that our own hideous discovery could be used against our regional friends or, with the help of a missile, Miami or San Francisco or, God forbid, our own homes and children; the original sin of Hiroshima rendered back to us in a burst of savage white light. Such a terrible potency, it is thought, should never be trusted in the hands of The Other, the barbaric people on the other side of the hills: those who would take our lands, rape our brides, and slay our children if we are not evermore vigilant.

  Man’s most carnal tendencies are inflamed by the most modern of elements, uranium.

  Iran has no monopoly on this dread, of course. There is no shortage of people in the world with grudges and visions, and an underground group that was determined to bring a final orgiastic reckoning would likely avoid using plutonium as a tool. Making it requires a nuclear reactor, for one thing, which calls for either the cooperation of a state or the help of several coconspirators within a facility. These places watch their plutonium like a miser counts his gold, and so an elaborate bookkeeping fraud would be necessary. The metal is also extremely radioactive. Without costly precautions and a shielded glove box, it would be likely to kill anyone who tried to fashion it into an implosion bomb. One thousandth of a gram of plutonium, if inhaled, causes death in a matter of hours.