Ron Rosenbaum - How the End Begins

The Syrian efforts to dismantle and destroy the building revealed features of the internal arrangements and structure that corroborated what we saw before and were consistent with the ground photos that we had obtained. [It’s the cover-up, not the crime, that’s most incriminating.] If you understand what we’re doing here, you have the building. There were real hard reinforced concrete things in there like the sarcophagus [the Enigmatic Box] around the reactor and as you can see heat exchanges and so on. The Israeli strike make it inoperable; Syrians decide, okay, we’ve got to take it down. As you begin to blow it up, what remains, the hard, reinforced concrete structures, which are the guts of the reactor. And that’s what you’re seeing. This is after the Syrians had begun to dismantle what the Israelis destroyed and the telltale signs of it being a nuclear reactor become even more visible as they go about the destruction.

[The lights go down and the video shows computer graphics reconstruction of the interior in simulated operation from the photos. It’s an expensive-sounding production with narration, we are told.

The key features are “the top of the reactor vessel,” which “we judged [to be] a spent fuel holding pool.” This is key since the spent fuel from a working nuclear reactor is the chief source of plutonium for bomb making and some observers had not seen any plutonium-reprocessing capability in the aerial photos of the site.

And there’s this: “Only North Korea has built such gas cooled graphite moderated reactors in the past 35 years.”

And finally the clincher: “When the pipeline and pump house were externally completed in early August 2007, no further observable construction was necessary before the reactor could begin operations. We assess that the reactor could have been complete and that start of operations could have begun at any time.”

And then the North Korean freighter arrived at the port of Tartous. We may never know its cargo since it slipped away into the night, but that was the night the Israelis struck. The moment when the reactor was about to become nuclear capable.

The film concludes with satellite and aerial imagery of the cover-up attempts: the Enigmatic Box over the reactor, now in ruins.

These actions probably were intended to forestall identification of reactor debris by international inspectors and are inconsistent with peaceful nuclear intentions.]

“In conclusion, our information shows that Syria was building a gas-cooled, graphite-moderated reactor that was nearing operational capability in August 2007. The reactor would have been capable of producing plutonium for nuclear weapons. It was not configured to produce electricity and was ill-suited for research. The reactor was destroyed in early September 2007 before it was loaded with nuclear fuel or operated. We are convinced based on a variety of information that North Korea assisted Syria’s covert nuclear activities both before and after the reactor was destroyed. Only North Korea has built this type of reactor in the past 35 years.”

SENIOR ADMINISTRATION OFFICIAL:Just like to make a couple of points. One of the questions you may have is why are we making this disclosure now and why not before. [Yes!] Our first concern was to prevent conflict and perhaps an even broader confrontation in the Middle East region. We were concerned that if knowledge of the existence and then destruction of the reactor became public and was confirmed by sources that the information would spread quickly and Syria would feel great pressure to retaliate. And, obviously, that would have been a threat to Israel and risked the possibility of a broader regional confrontation which we hoped to avoid.

[Here is a crucial connection between the Israeli attack and the potential for a regional nuclear war, should Syria, Iran, or Pakistan seek to retaliate with chemical or nuclear weapons and Israel either preempts them with nuclear weapons or retaliates with nuclear weapons. It’s an instance of everyone pretending something didn’t happen for the sake of preventing something worse from happening. Once we have reached the threshold of regional nuclear war, it is one step—a giant step, yes, but not an inconceivable one—to globalizing it, considering the range of Iranian and Pakistani ballistic missiles. It is here at least that the very senior British ministry official’s invocation of World War III can be found. This explains the eerie silence that followed the raid on the part of all parties. Syria did not wish to appear to be deterred from retaliation by fear of Israel’s nuclear arsenal. Nor did it wish to be forced to retaliate, and create, in the words of The Spectator’s source, “Armageddon and the bloody Book of Revelation.”]

As time has passed, our assessment is that that risk has receded….

[Recent developments suggest that Iran is not responding to either international pressure or the strike against an ally’s nuclear facilities. Which suggests the Israelis have no alternative but to strike Iran itself, as they did Iraq and Syria, before it becomes nuclear-capable. A nightmare scenario that seems more and more inevitable.]

For example, first let me take North Korea. [He’s continuing to answer the “why now?” question.] We are at the point in the Six-Party talks where we believe going public will strengthen our negotiators as they try to get an accurate accounting of North Korea’s nuclear programs. We believe and hope that it will encourage North Korea to acknowledge its proliferation activity, but also to provide a more complete and accurate disclosure of their plutonium activities and their enrichment activities as well.

With respect to Iran, the Syrian episode reminds us of the ability of states to obtain nuclear capability covertly and how destabilizing the proliferation of nuclear weapons in the Middle East would be. [Here he suggests that the raid, with its implicit blessing by the U.S., was about Iran—a bad cop/good cop way of encouraging Iran to expedite a diplomatic solution to its nuclear activities, because it now had an example of what might happen if it didn’t.] And obviously everyone is concerned about that with respect to Iran, and we hope that disclosure will underscore that the international community needs to rededicate itself to ending Iran’s nuclear enrichment activities, and needs to take further steps to ensure that Iran does not obtain nuclear weapons. And countries can start by the full implementation of the U.N. Security Council resolutions already dealing with Iranian nuclear activities, which are not being implemented as aggressively and fully as they should. [Yes, that will certainly take care of the problem.]

One of the things that I’m sure also people are wondering is whether there was any discussion between us and the Israelis about policy options and how to respond to these facts. We did discuss policy options with Israel. Israel considered a Syrian nuclear capability to be an existential threat to the state of Israel. [Here we have—slipped into the language of the briefing—the explosive phrase: “existential threat.” It is the justification the Israelis use for their forward-leaning, preemptive stance. Some suggest the use of the term “existential threat” is an exaggeration when it comes to the capability of Israel’s Middle East antagonists, but the Israelis don’t want to be the testing ground for this counterhypothesis. In any case, note the subtle distinction between the urgency for immediate action attributed to the Israelis and the “other options” Senior Intelligence Official 2 will later suggest the U.S. was considering.] After these discussions, at the end of the day Israel made its own decision to take action. It did so without any green light from us, so-called green light from us; none was asked for, none was given. [The whole “green light” rhetoric is somewhat dodgy. In the summer of 2008 there were leaked reports that Israel had asked President Bush for a green light to attack the Iranian nuclear facilities and had been turned down. In fact most insiders read this as a kind of green light in itself. It gave the U.S. the ability to deny any connection to an Israeli strike while making it seem like plans for just such a strike were moving toward execution, U.S. green light or not. [262] ] We understand the Israeli action. We believe this clandestine reactor was a threat to regional peace and security, and we have stated before that we cannot allow the world’s most dangerous regimes to acquire the world’s most dangerous weapons.