Sunday night, the residents of Tehran got a light show when an explosion at a military complex east of the city shook the Iranian capital. According to the New York Times, an orange flash lit up the city, but officials denied that the incident occurred at Parchin–though how exactly an “ordinary fire” would create such a display was left unsaid. But whatever it was that happened at the place where Iran has been conducting military nuclear research, the incident is a reminder that despite the all-out push for détente with the Islamist regime being conducted by the Obama administration, its nuclear program presents a clear and present danger to the world.
Parchin is famous because it is not just another of Iran’s many nuclear facilities. What makes it special is the fact that the regime has consistently denied inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency access to it. Western and Israeli intelligence agencies as well as the UN monitoring group believe Parchin is where Iran has conducted high-explosive experiments related to nuclear-weapons research. In other words, Parchin is the locus of some of the world’s worst fears about Iran’s nuclear ambitions as well as of its government’s most egregious lies and deceptions of the international community.
Speculation about the cause of the incident is inevitable. Was it American or Israeli sabotage? From 2010 to 2012, there were a number of suspicious incidents at Iranian nuclear facilities, computer viruses aimed at knocking out their infrastructure, as well as assassinations of Iranian nuclear scientists. But in the last year as the Obama administration shifted away from sanctions and attempts to stop Iran to a campaign of appeasement, we’ve heard very little about any action to forestall their nuclear progress. The explosion could have been a Western covert operation aimed at pressuring the Iranians to be more reasonable in the ongoing nuclear talks or it could be an Israeli effort to knock out Iranian capabilities or to refocus U.S. attention on the threat.
But it could just as easily be another “work accident,” such as many other occurrences that illustrated the dangerous nature of the work being conducted at Parchin.
The truth is we don’t yet know the truth about what happened in Parchin. But the precipitate cause of the explosion is not as important as what the facility represents and why the West should not be blindly assuming that everything Iran says about its program is the truth.
Until UN inspectors have gone over every inch of the place without allowing the Iranians to try to clean up and erase all evidence of their nuclear research, as they have repeatedly tried to do, we simply don’t know how close Tehran is to realizing their nuclear goal. But while the interim deal signed by the West with Iran last year paid lip service to the principle of transparency, the fact that the IAEA still hasn’t gotten into Parchin and is not even negotiating about Tehran’s ballistic missile program and other aspects of the threat undermines confidence in a process that is already based more on Western hopes than Iranian reality.
This is important because the current compromise proposals on the table in the Iran talks seem to be based more on trust than on verification. The idea that Iran could be allowed to keep thousands of centrifuges for producing nuclear fuel for weapons on condition that the pipes were disconnected between them is farcical on its face. But even if we thought that this made a smidgeon of sense (and the idea that such a provision was a serious obstacle to an Iranian nuclear breakout is ludicrous even by the debased standards of Obama administration foreign policy) it would have to be based on a foundation of rigorous and intrusive surprise inspections that the Iranians have never allowed at any crucial site.
Whether Parchin is being sabotaged—a prospect that would renew one’s faith in the smarts of whichever government, be it American or Israeli, that sponsored the attack—or has suffered an accident unrelated to international concerns, the IAEA must be allowed in immediately.
While there is little reason to believe that any nuclear deal would be observed by Tehran, until the inspectors get in there and other facilities, President Obama is doing nothing more than gambling the future of the world on Iranian promises. The Parchin explosion is a reminder of how dangerous such a premise would be.
