New Year in Natanz

2010 could be the year Iran gets the bomb.

Depending on your take on these matters, that may read as either understatement or hysteria. But if you go back and do the research, a broad range of intelligence estimates — from the United States, Israel, London, Europe — put 2010 as the earliest possible year for Iran to acquire nuclear weapons capacity.

“We judge with moderate confidence Iran probably would be technically capable of producing enough HEU for a weapon sometime during the 2010-2015 time frame,” the United States’ 2007 National Intelligence Estimate said.

In London, the prestigious International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) predicted Iran will have enough enriched uranium to make a single nuclear weapon later in the coming year.

Estimates from Israel are, frankly, all over the place. Israel’s Mossad chief, Meir Dagan, has predicted that Iran would likely develop its first nuclear weapon around 2009-2010, though he has since extended that date to 2014.

On Dec. 13, the Times of London reported on a secret Iranian document that purportedly lays out the country’s secret testing of a crucial component of a nuclear weapon. There are questions about the authenticity of the document, but together with Iran’s apparent reneging on an October deal under which it would ship its low-enriched uranium out of the country in exchange for fuel to run a research reactor, these developments only underscore years of dire predictions.

In other words, beginning Jan. 1, the clock starts ticking very, very loud.

What this means is that it is time to try to get our fellow Americans to avert their eyes for a few minutes from Tiger, from Super Bowl Sunday, from whatever narrishkeit is passing for news these days, and focus on what may be the most deadly serious topic of the next year, if not the next decade.

If Iran gets the bomb, it will unleash a Middle East arms race that will destabilize the region, endanger world oil supplies (and thus the world economy) and increase the chances of state and non-state nuclear terror. These are threats to America’s well-being.

Beyond that, there is the mortal danger a nuclear Iran poses to Israel and the high cost Israelis and Iranians would pay in a military confrontation — be it a pre-emptive strike and retaliation or, God forbid, a nuclear war.

This is a problem we don’t want to wait any longer to resolve.

There is a school of thought that the Iranian nuclear threat is another neocon stalking horse, an exercise in fear mongering concocted to aid Israel in garnering world support against a longtime enemy, or to help it forestall dealing with the Palestinians.

That theory would be defensible if we were hearing only from Richard Perle. But the United Nations is now exasperated with Iran, and last month Mohamed ElBaradei, the outgoing director of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), forcefully told the U.N. General Assembly that “a number of questions and allegations relevant to the nature” of Iran’s nuclear efforts remain.

One of those questions, for me at least, is: Would Iran actually use a nuclear weapon or make it available to a terror group to use?

One answer to that came last Thursday night, Dec. 17, at about 10 p.m. Pacific Time. That was when a group calling itself the Iranian Cyber Army hacked into the social networking Web site Twitter. For about two hours, Twitter users found themselves staring at a home page with a green flag and a message that read: “This site has been hacked by the Iranian Cyber Army. USA think they are controlling and managing internet by their access, but they don’t, we control and manage internet by our power.”

The use of Twitter, of course, was instrumental in helping Iran’s freedom fighters organize and communicate with one another and the outside world during the anti-regime protests last June. No one knows whether last week’s saboteurs had the Iranian government’s backing or blessing. Nevertheless, I won’t hold my breath waiting for the Iranians to investigate, arrest or denounce the people who did it.

“It took enormous sophistication to do what they did,” said a computer expert I spoke with Friday morning. “It wasn’t a simple hack.”

That’s why I’m worried. We’re dealing with a regime that thrives in two centuries at once — the seventh and the 21st. At every opportunity, they devise ways to use the fruits of the latter to return us to the former. Using cell phones to detonate bombs against “infidels.” Supporting suicide bombers and supplying missiles. Making women wear chadors, but shooting them dead with the latest machine guns when they speak their minds.

Nuclear weaponry is the mother of all modern technologies. If the Iranian regime can hack into the secrets of centrifuges and highly enriched uranium and warhead delivery, it will be able to advance its seventh century cause far and wide and all at once. I can’t imagine why a sane world would want to risk allowing that.

Last Monday, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton told reporters that the administration’s efforts to engage Iran have so far “produced very little.” But the Obama administration has indicated it will step up the pressure for more international sanctions against the Iranian regime, beginning early in January.

The key for Obama is to link actions to pressure Iran’s leaders with continued support for the people of Iran who desire regime change. Some of that is in the language of the House of Representatives’ Iran Refined Petroleum Sanctions Act (IRPSA), co-sponsored by Howard Berman (D-Calif.), which passed with overwhelming bipartisan support on Dec. 15. (The Senate has yet to vote on its version of the bill, called the Comprehensive Iran Sanctions, Accountability and Divestment Act.) The Obama administration needs to build on these measures.

According to the International Atomic Energy Agency, from June to October 2009, the centrifuges at the Natanz Fuel Enrichment plant produced about 2.75 kilograms of low-enriched uranium hexafluoride per day, the building block of nuclear weapons production. The Iranians don’t want to ship it abroad, and don’t want inspectors at home.