The Disciple

CHAPTER SEVEN

Ghasem’s uncle Habib Sultani was a harried man. His afternoon interview with President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad did not go well. The president had just publicly reissued his call for the dissolution of Israel, peacefully or violently, which had boosted his and Iran’s status in the Muslim world to giddy new heights, as he had intended, and had caused temblors to once again rock Western capitals. Today Ahmadinejad was suffused with enthusiasm over reports of his speech from Arabia, Syria, Libya, Yemen and certain quarters in Palestine, Jordan, Egypt and Pakistan. His face seemed to glow.

“We play a dangerous game,” Sultani said bluntly to the exultant president when they were alone. “The Israelis and Americans know about our missiles. They know of their capabilities and their location. They know the design and location of the reactors to the precise inch. They could destroy the reactors and all our nuclear facilities aboveground with impunity, as they did the Syrian reactor. Our antiaircraft defenses are no better than the Syrians’.”

Ahmadinejad did not appreciate hearing the bald truth. He was a man who believed firmly in Allah and himself, although there were some who privately said that the order was reversed. “The Americans are great cowards,” he declared, and not for the first time. “They have a

“The possibility of radioactive contamination didn’t stop the Israelis,” Sultani noted.

“Ah, yes, the Jews,” Ahmadinejad said. “Infidels without scruples.”

The irony of Ahmadinejad’s comment did not escape Sultani, who had yet to observe a scruple in the president of Iran.

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad spoke as if God were whispering in his ear. “The godless Americans will do nothing-nothing-and they will not provide assistance to the Israelis. Without American airborne tanker assets, Iran is out of range of Israeli bombers.”

Once again Sultani was left to contemplate the carnage caused by the incompetence of the American CIA, which had agreed with the publicly issued National Intelligence Estimate that said Iran had discontinued its nuclear weapons program. He knew that the separation of weapons-grade plutonium from enriched uranium had never stopped-in fact, the man in charge of that effort worked for him. He also knew that the nation possessed enough plutonium to manufacture twelve bombs, and that the stockpile was growing at several kilos per month. Never, he thought, in the history of the world had a foreign intelligence estimate been seized upon with such glee.

What he didn’t know was that Ahmadinejad and Hazra al-Rashid had been playing two hands at once. Perfectly willing to have the world believe they were manufacturing nuclear weapons, they had used the Azari co

“We have tricked those fools,” Ahmadinejad had chortled.

Or they have tricked us, Sultani thought then, although he didn’t make that remark aloud.

Now, this afternoon, he advised the president that his attempt to get an assessment of how the Americans’ latest electronic magic was performed had failed. “The American fighters refused to take the bait,” he said in summation.

“We must put more pressure on the Russians,” Ahmadinejad said. “Those liars! The promises they made, the lies they told… They know the Americans’ secrets and are not sharing with us.”

Back in his roost at the Defense Ministry, Sultani rubbed his chin and tried to envision how Iran could gain access to one of the Americans’ magic boxes, which he knew were in their frontline warplanes, those carrier jets that flew boldly up and down the Persian Gulf with impunity. We could always shoot one down, he thought. Or arrange a midair collision, so that one crashes and we are first to gain access to the wreckage. He thought about the crash of the F-18. The pieces of the airplane were still out there in the Strait of Hormuz, which was deep, with swift tidal currents-and, of course, it had crashed beyond the territorial limits. If there was a magic black box somewhere on the floor of that strait, Iran lacked the technology to find it. No, that box was beyond reach, although there were plenty of others.

The real issue, he well knew, was the vulnerability of Iran’s nuclear program to a conventional air attack. The Iranians had spent over twenty billion dollars moving the entire weapons program underground. Entire underground cities had been created to house the enrichment facilities, the manufacture of neutron generators, the bomb plant itself and the missile factories. Only the reactors were still aboveground: unfortunately, they could not be moved. Everything else, including the spent fuel that was being enriched, was buried deep in bombproof tu

The real question, Sultani decided, was when the enemies’ window of opportunity would close. At what point would an attack be futile, pointless, unable to stop Iran’s march to the bomb?

He removed the files holding the plans for the tu

Still, the off-site stockpile of UF6 was adequate and growing by the day. That stockpile was held in four locations, all inside tu

The next step in the process was to raise the concentration of the U-235 isotope in the UF6 from its natural level of.7 percent to between 3 percent and 5 percent by the use of centrifuges. The product the centrifuges produced was called low-enriched uranium, or LEU. The cascade centrifuges at Natanz were 160 feet underground. This process took approximately 70 percent of the time and effort necessary to get to the final product, which was highly enriched uranium, HEU, containing weapons-grade concentrations of over 90 percent U-235.

Of course, even if Natanz was destroyed, Iran also had a laser enrichment facility and a heavy water facility, all hardened.

The detonator and warhead factories were also deeply underground.

All these facilities were protected by Russian S-300 antiaircraft systems, which fired the SA-20 surface-to-air missile at attacking planes. In Syria, this system failed to detect the inbound Israeli bombers.

Habib Sultani carefully studied the LEU and HEU production levels.

Finally he sighed and began arranging the materials back in his file.

Two weeks, he decided. In two weeks Iran would have enough HEU to manufacture twelve warheads. Regardless of what happened after that, bomb assembly could continue deep within the earth. If the Israelis or Americans attacked before that, they would of course do some damage, release some radioactivity, and delay the production of U-235. However, Sultani concluded, the time when they could shut down the program with conventional weapons had already passed.

There was nothing short of nuclear war that the Israelis and Americans could do to prevent Iran from becoming a nuclear power.