Washington – Iranian engineers have completed sophisticated drawings of a deep subterranean shaft, according to officials who have examined classified documents in the hands of U.S. intelligence for more than 20 months.
Complete with remote-controlled sensors to measure pressure and heat, the plans for the 1,300-foot tunnel appear designed for an underground atomic test explosion that might one day announce Tehran’s arrival as a nuclear power, the officials said.
By the estimates of U.S. and allied intelligence analysts, that day remains as much as a decade away, but whether Iran’s leaders have decided to push forward is a still a question to government analysts and U.N. inspectors.
In the three years since Iran was forced to acknowledge having a secret uranium enrichment program, Western governments and the United Nations’ nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency, have gathered evidence to test the Tehran government’s assertion that it plans to build only peaceful nuclear power plants, but the evidence hasn’t been strong enough to reach a confident judgment about Iran’s intentions.
Drawings of the unbuilt test site, not disclosed publicly before, appear to U.S. officials to signal at least the ambition to test a nuclear explosive, but U.S. and U.N. experts who have studied them said the undated drawings do not clearly fit into a larger picture.
Nowhere, for example, does the word “nuclear” appear on them. The authorship is unknown, and there is no evidence of an associated program to acquire, assemble and construct the components of such a site. As far as U.S. intelligence knows, the idea has not left the drawing board.
Contained in a laptop stolen by an Iranian citizen in 2004 are designs for a small-scale facility to produce uranium gas, the construction of which would give Iran a secret stock that could be enriched for fuel or for bombs.
U.S. intelligence considers the laptop documents authentic but cannot prove it. Analysts cannot completely rule out the possibility that internal opponents of the Iranian leadership may have forged them to implicate the government or that the documents were planted by Tehran itself to convince the West its program remains at an immature stage.
