Iran’s Nuclear Weapons Program

The western world’s attention to the subterfuge of Iran with regard to its efforts to produce nuclear weapons has, in my view, been cleverly diverted from their real activities. On the one hand, they huff and puff about their right to enrich uranium for ‘peaceful use’, and at the same time construct one or more secret facilities to do so, perhaps to weapons-grade refinement. These spinning centrifuges, and the threat to produce more, have hypnotized U.S. government officials and the United Nations. And as far as I can tell, Iran has successfully hidden the real threat: The use of high-powered lasers to engage in laser isotope separation.

I personally became aware of their quest back in the 1990s when I was the director of sales and marketing for the American Laser Corporation. At that time, I was also responsible for the management of the engineering team that developed new products. A number of the team members were Iranian ex-pats, and I was intimately involved in their technical activities, generally conducting design reviews and monitoring their progress. Because I was responsible for sales and shipments outside of the United States, I was highly sensitive to any foreign requests for product and information sharing that might violate the U.S. export control laws. One day, and for the following week, I intercepted faxes that were addressed to several of the Iranian team members. These came from the Iranian Atomic Energy Commission, and invoked Allah, and our ‘Brothers in Islam’ to help them obtain information about the design of high-powered gas lasers—the very kind necessary to enrich uranium. Needless to say, I did not pass the faxes on to their intended recipients, and in fact, I contacted the FBI and alerted them to these unusual requests.

I wasn’t terribly alarmed at the time, because I knew of the technical challenges involved, and felt that it would have been akin to trying to teach quantum mechanics to an African Bushman. But, I wanted our government to know what was going on. Well, a lot of time has passed since then, and our open society has put enough technical information out in scientific and trade journals, that Iranian engineers probably have a pretty good understanding of how to build such lasers. Fortunately, there are a lot of other remaining technically challenging elements that make the process difficult for almost any country to master.

But, we cannot assume that they have not done so. My personal experience shows that they have been in pursuit of this goal for over a decade. And if they have reached it, this specific method of uranium enrichment makes it easy to conceal and, consequently, extremely difficult for international nuclear inspectors to detect. They could hide an enrichment facility of this type in a warehouse, and such a system uses far less energy than that required by centrifuges.

This would put an entirely new spin on our efforts to rein in these activities, and would require a lot of feet on the ground in-country. I am certain that the Mullahs would not allow such an international force go roaming unchecked around the countryside. Therefore, I feel that if the citizens of Iran are not able to reclaim their country from these religious fanatics soon, we will be forced to issue a terrible ultimatum: Set off a test nuke, and we will use our military to return the Iranian Plateau to the Stone Age.