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Iran: Front Companies Support Weapons Program, Sources Say U.S. officials and an Iranian opposition group have said that Iran has used several front companies to acquire materials and assistance to build nuclear facilities secretly, the Washington Post reported today (see GSN, Dec. 16). Through the use of such companies over the past five years, Iran has been able to appear to abide by the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty while still obtaining materials and equipment needed to produce weapon-grade materials from foreign sources, U.S. officials and other experts said. “The problem is that Iran is not cheating,” said Henry Sokolski, executive director of the Nonproliferation Policy Education Center. “They haven’t broken any rules, and they won’t until they have weapons,” he added. Funding for two recently disclosed nuclear facilities currently under construction — an apparent uranium enrichment site near the city of Natanz and an apparent heavy water production plant near Arak — does not appear in the official Iranian budget, the opposition group National Council of Resistance of Iran said. Instead, the country’s main policymaking body, Supreme National Security Council, provided funds directly, the resistance group said. Iran has used front companies to further hide the construction and purposes of the two facilities, according to the group. The company Kala Electric has obtained the materials and equipment used for the Natanz site, the group said, adding that Kala Electric officials visited India and China several times last year. A second front company, Mesbah Energy Co., has conducted similar work to aid the Arak facility, the group said. Iran has attempted to hide the true purposes of the Natanz and Arak facilities through secrecy and misinformation, said Alireza Jafarzadeh, the U.S. representative of the National Council of Resistance of Iran. The Natanz facility has been officially described as a desert-eradication project, and provincial authorities have been instructed to withhold the location of the Arak facility, he said. The existence of the two facilities could be an indication that Iran has built other hidden nuclear sites, said David Albright, president of the Institute for Science and International Security. For example, the Natanz site appears to be too large for a first attempt to build a uranium enrichment plant, suggesting that engineers might have already built a smaller pilot facility, he said. The Arak heavy water production plant, meanwhile, would only be needed if Iran had a reactor that uses heavy water, which has not yet been detected, Albright said. “At this point, we have more questions than answers,” he said (Glenn Kessler, Washington Post, Dec. 19). For further information, see: States Parties to the NPT (U.N.)
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