Atoms of Fear: Reality Check on That Iranian Nuclear Programme

The flurry of headlines on the International Atomic Energy Agency report on the Iran nuclear programme has come and gone. The hype in some media outlets of "Iran has enough enriched uranium to build a bomb" has not been matched by a dramatic response from the Obama Administration.

Still, it's not a bad idea to knock down the distortions and exaggerations of the IAEA's findings. Blogger Cheryl Rofer offers an excellent scientific reality-check on Iran's stocks of enriched uranium:

Whoo-Hoo! Atoms of Fissionable Material Everywhere!
by Cheryl Rofer

As I put the tea water on to boil and turned on the tv this morning, I was assaulted by the claim that seems to be everywhere. Maybe you've seen it in the New York Times, or the Los Angeles Times, or heard the same CBS report that I did, or even read it on Kevin Drum [of Mother Jones].


It's a lie.

Much as I hate to do so, because psychology tells us that repetition will help to fix the erroneous message in our minds, I will quote the most egregious statement of this "news."

Iran has enriched sufficient uranium to amass a nuclear bomb – a third more than previously thought – the United Nations announced yesterday.

Ah yes. And if you live in Boulder, Colorado, or in Connecticut, or New York City, you have enough U-235 under your house (or perhaps block) to amass a nuclear bomb! Or, Kevin, all that sea water lapping up against the California coast has uranium in it too! I have a call in to the IAEA to inspect your homes!

The issue here is concentration. Mining uranium concentrates it from the ore. Purification and conversion to UF6 concentrates it further. The purpose of the enrichment centrifuges is to concentrate the fissionable U-235.

Concentration is not that hard to understand, but in our science-challenged society (yes, we all hated chemistry, where it was discussed in the first week), it seems not to be a consideration. See also this post from earlier this week.

The concentration of U-235 is 3.49% in the enriched uranium that the Natanz plant is turning out. The IAEA has found no evidence that any higher enrichment is being produced. 3.49% is not enough to make a bomb. Iran is not in a position to make a bomb, unless there is a bunch of hidden stuff that nobody has found, involving big buildings that can be seen by satellite surveillance.

It would take a reconfiguration of the Natanz facility that the inspectors would notice to produce bomb-grade uranium (concentration of U-235 of 90%). The inspectors also take environmental samples to verify the concentration of U-235. They would have to be kicked out of the facility and their video cameras taken down for Iran to do this.

There are a number of other things in that IAEA report that the media aren't bothering to report, like that the pace of enrichment has slowed. That doesn't support the idea that Iran is racing toward a bomb, so it's not relevant, I guess.

Bloggers who are trying to hold back this tsunami of misleading non-science: Sean Paul Kelly, Cernig.

I also know of one newspaper reporter who is trying to get the story straight, but he hasn't posted yet. I'll post more links as I get them.

US Government Documents: Proof of "Ghost Detention", Torture, Death

Last night we closed an update with a note that CNN had just reported on hundreds of pages of documents obtained by Amnesty International USA, New York University’s Center for Human Rights and Global Justice, and the Center for Constitutional Rights — which established that the Pentagon sought loopholes in the Geneva Conventions to hide “ghost detainees”. They also confirmed that the Bush Administration delayed the release of Guantanamo Bay detainees to avoid negative publicity.

This morning the American Civil Liberties Union has released two pages from a Department of Defense document concerning the death of two detainees at Camp Bagram in Afghanistan:

"In both cases, for example, [prisoners] were handcuffed to fixed objects above their heads in order to keep them awake. Additionally, interrogations in both incidents involved the use of physical violence, including kicking, beating, and the use of "compliance blows" which involved striking the [prisoners] legs with the [interrogators] knees. In both cases, blunt force trauma to the legs was implicated in the deaths. In one case, a pulmonary embolism developed as a consequence of the blunt force trauma, and in the other case pre-existing coronary artery disease was complicated by the blunt force trauma.

Seven years after the Bush Administration effectively set aside the Geneva Conventions, declaring they were not relevant to US detentions from Guantanamo Bay to Camp Bagram to CIA "black sites" in North Africa and Eastern Europe, five years after Abu Ghraib, here are the documents establishing not only that detainees were tortured and, yes, murdered. Here is the evidence that US Government officials sanctioned the renditions and "enhanced interrogations" and that they were willing to lie to cover up the programme they had authorised.

It was with a sense of expectation that I have just turned to the headlines in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Times of London. And here is what I found: nothing. I cannot find the story in any "mainstream" US or British newspaper this morning.

Full credit to CNN. And full credit to Harper's, Mother Jones and The Raw Story because, without outlets such as these, "ghost detainees" --- and what happens to them --- would remain, well, ghosts.