There are two things we need to separate when we’re talking about nuclear issues in Iran: the first one is whether Iran has capabilities of developing nuclear weapons and highly enriched nuclear material it may still have; the second issue is about potential US-Israeli attacks on Iran’s nuclear power stations.
A lot of people don’t understand that these are two very different things. They hear the word “nuclear” and think it means bombs destroying everything in sight, but that is not the case – nuclear weapons are by far the most damaging and dangerous weapons in the arsenals of today.
The first point is about Iran and whether it has nuclear material. We know that Iran has a number of facilities that have been enriching uranium, which is the focus of most concern, because of the fears surrounding what they might do with it.
We’ve been worrying about the Iranian nuclear programme for years now. Prior to 2003, Western intelligence strongly suggested that they were developing a nuclear weapons capability, but in 2003, US intelligence agencies came to the conclusion they’d stopped doing that. However, Iran has been enriching uranium – one of the materials used in nuclear weapons – to use in their reactors, and for developing isotopes for medical purposes.
They have a right to do that for peaceful purposes, and it was agreed in the Iran nuclear deal in 2015. Strict inspections showed that Iran was only developing the allowed low-enriched uranium. But when Donald Trump pulled the US out of the Iran nuclear deal in 2018 and reimposed sanctions, the situation changed.
Iran started enriching their uranium again to higher levels. They soon enriched to around 20 per cent and then 60 per cent. When it’s that high, it’s not for a nuclear reactor or for medical purposes. You don’t need it that high for anything other than a weapon.
The International Atomic Energy Agency found Iran has 400kg of this 60 per cent enriched uranium – but they cannot be sure where it is now. In June last year, Israel and the US attacked the facilities where Iran was enriching uranium, but we don’t know if the Iranians removed the material from those sites prior to the bombing or if it remained underground at Isfahan, for example.
If they moved it, where is it now?
There is evidence that it could be buried at the known nuclear sites, or hidden somewhere like Pickaxe mountain, south of the nuclear facilities. But the truth is that nobody knows for sure where it is.
This uranium is one of the things that the US and the Israelis are after; they want to put it out of action, so Iran can never use it. But what’s worrying people now is the question of whether Iran can do anything with this 60 per cent uranium?
To develop a nuclear bomb small enough to go on top of a warhead missile, it would need to be about 90 per cent enriched. The first bomb dropped on Hiroshima in the Second World War was 80 per cent enriched, and at 60 per cent it is still possible to make a nuclear bomb – it just can’t be delivered by missiles.
In the worst case scenario, Iran could develop that 60 per cent material into bombs to take them out onto ships to ports, which could lead to a nuclear explosion like Hiroshima. If they don’t explode properly, you’ve still got a dirty bomb, which would create a spread of radioactive material, contaminating an area for a long time and leading to widespread panic.
President Donald Trump pulled the US out of the Iran nuclear deal in 2018 (AP)
We have to acknowledge that Iran has always said they didn’t want to develop a nuclear weapon – they have repeated this to the US negotiators recently – and there’s been a fatwa against having nuclear weapons in place for a long time.
In the Iran-Iraq war in the early 80s, Iraq used chemical weapons against Iran. Iran had developed chemical weapons but never used them, because they ruled that chemical weapons were inhumane and against God. Whether that would policy would remain in these circumstances is unknown, but I’ve always given weight to that decision.
However, the fear is that US-Israeli attacks could accidentally land on Iran’s store of enriched uranium, and the IAEA are monitoring radiation levels. If that did happen, it would be more like a dirty bomb rather than a nuclear explosion, which, although awful, is nowhere near as bad.
My biggest worry is post-conflict, if chaos reigns in Iran with factions fighting each other. Currently, the nuclear facilities are guarded; it’s a real possibility that guards could flee the site where the enriched material is stored, leading to attempts to seize it and sell it on illicit markets. We saw this before when the USSR collapsed.
I don’t think terrorist groups have the engineering capacity to do anything with it; it would more likely be bought by North Korea, which already has nuclear weapons or another state wanting to develop a clandestine nuclear weapons programme that doesn’t have enriched uranium or an enrichment capability.
A UN security council resolution could address this and give powers to UN experts to secure the material and to ensure the nuclear material doesn’t get into the wrong hands. But it could be very dangerous.
We also have the concerns about potential attacks to Iran’s nuclear power stations and what that could mean. An attack on a nuclear power station is not the same as a nuclear weapon. It’s just not comparable. You’d get a spread of radioactive material, but the number of deaths would not be on the scale of a nuclear explosion. Again, it would be more like the effects of a dirty bomb, where you have conventional explosives spreading radioactive material.
Firefighters work at the site of an apartment building hit by a Russian drone strike in Zaporizhzhia, Ukraine (Reuters)
We’ve had a number of attacks on nuclear power stations recently, with attacks on Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia plant throughout the Russian war against Ukraine. The worst experience with a nuclear power explosion was an accident at Chernobyl in 1986. That reactor was very different to today’s modern reactors in that it was an old graphite reactor that burns when it catches fire, and weather conditions led to radiation making its way to the British Isles. Zaporizhzhia is much more modern with a pressurised water reactor and inherently safer, like most reactors today.
But nobody should be attacking nuclear reactors. It goes against international law and creates a risk of radiation in the region. Iran has recently attacked the Israeli nuclear facility at Dimona and it has to stop. India and Pakistan have an agreement where no matter what, they don’t attack each other’s nuclear facilities, and over many years, Iran has been calling for a similar arrangement in the Middle East.
Nuclear explosions are at another level – they can destroy the whole of a city depending on its size, the size of the explosion, the height at which it is detonated and the geography of the city. In the immediate area of the explosion – the “ground zero” – everyone would be instantly killed. Further away, those who aren’t destroyed by the impact of the blast wave could be burned by the following fires.
There is also an immediate blast of highly energetic radiation, which can lead to radiation poisoning, then there is the long-term radioactive fallout which circulates in the atmosphere and rains down on people, causing cancers and other damage in the short and long terms. Depending how many explosions take place, a nuclear war could also cause long-term climate changes worldwide – the so-called nuclear winter – leading to global famine.
The US possesses over 3,500 warheads, while Israel is generally believed to have nuclear weapons, but doesn’t admit to it. I’m not worried about them using these missiles on Iran – I see no advantage for them in doing that, and they’d lose any support in the world if they were to do that.
What this war shows is that you can’t bomb countries into nuclear non-proliferation. It needs negotiation. I wish the first Trump administration had understood that all negotiation is compromise, before they pulled the US out of the 2015 Iran nuclear deal.
This was a deal where Iran agreed to not develop nuclear weapons, and it prevented Iran from acquiring highly enriched uranium via stringent monitoring measures by the IAEA – and it worked. Even in the last few months, the US was negotiating with Iran to get rid of all its highly enriched uranium, but the US abruptly pulled out of those talks and started the bombing campaign with Israel, and now we’re where we are. Now more than ever, we need mature leaders who will say we need to have a new push on preventing nuclear proliferation and getting rid of nuclear weapons in the world, before it all spreads out of control.
As told to Radhika Sanghani
