WASHINGTON — Amid growing international pressure in advance of highly anticipated talks this week, Iran displayed its defiance of Western threats against its nuclear program by announcing Sunday that it had test-fired at least two short-range missiles. Senior Obama administration officials, meanwhile, said they had the international support necessary to impose crippling sanctions if Tehran does not stop construction on a new uranium-enrichment plant and allow immediate inspections.
“There is obviously the opportunity for severe additional sanctions” after disclosures Friday by the United States, Britain and France of the secret Iranian facility beneath the mountains near the city of Qom, Defense Secretary Robert Gates said as reports emerged of the Iranian test launches.
The missile firings are not directly related to Iran’s nuclear- weapons program, and the tests apparently were planned before last week’s disclosures by President Barack Obama and the European leaders. But Tehran used what it said was a military drill in the central Iranian desert to underscore its rejection of international efforts to halt its nuclear program, which it contends is intended for the peaceful production of electricity.
“We are going to respond to any military action in a crushing manner, and it doesn’t make any difference which country or regime has launched the aggression,” Revolutionary Guard Air Force head Gen. Hossein Salami said, according to Iranian state media.
Gates said all options remained on the table for dealing with Iran.
But, he said, “the reality is, there is no military option that does nothing more than buy time” in preventing what the United States has said is Iran’s determination to acquire nuclear-weapons capability.
“The only way you end up not having a nuclear-capable Iran is for the Iranian government to decide that their security is diminished by having those weapons, as opposed to strengthened,” Gates said.
Revelations about the new facility, which officials have said could be ready in 2010 to produce enough weapons-grade material for one nuclear bomb a year, did not change the overall U.S. assessment that Iran could produce a warhead within one to three years, he said.
“I think there is still room left for diplomacy,” Gates said in an interview on CNN’s “State of the Union,” referring to a meeting scheduled for Thursday between Iran and members of the negotiating group, comprising the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council and Germany. “The Iranians are in a very bad spot now because of this deception, in terms of all the great powers.”
In a separate interview broadcast on CBS’s “Face the Nation,” Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said the administration believed that Russia, which previously objected to harsher sanctions against Iran, was now moving in Washington’s direction.
“I think Russia has begun to see many more indications that Iran is engaging in threatening behavior,” Clinton said in the interview, which was taped Friday.
“The Iranians keep insisting, ‘No, no, this is just for peaceful purposes,’ ” she said. “Well, I think, as the Russians said in their statement, and as we believe, and what this meeting on Oct. 1 is to test, is, ‘Fine, prove it. Don’t assert it; prove it.’ ”
Russia has also expressed satisfaction with the Obama administration’s decision, announced early this month, to revise its missile-defense program and cancel plans to install interceptors and radars in Poland and the Czech Republic. The administration said new intelligence indicated that Iran’s program to produce the long-range missiles that the system was designed to combat was less advanced than believed. A new system outlined by the administration would protect against medium- and short-range missiles.
Iran’s strategy for almost a decade has been to publicize its short- and medium-range missile-development programs while covertly pursuing a capability to produce a nuclear weapon, according intelligence analysts. Sunday’s test announcement fit into that pattern.
“Missiles are for (Iranians) what both tactical and strategic air power are for the West,” said Uzi Rubin, an Israeli engineer considered by U.S. intelligence analysts to be an expert on Middle East missile programs.
The Iranians “are transparent. They want to deter any U.S. or Israeli attack, (and) Iranian leaders openly wish for U.S. satellites to take pictures of their weapons sites and to see their capability,” Rubin said in an interview Sept. 17 with Iran Watch, a website maintained by the Wisconsin Project on Nuclear Arms Control.
A new U.S. intelligence-community assessment completed in May and disclosed Sept. 17 said Iran’s development of an intercontinental ballistic missile has slowed but that its short-range, medium-range and intermediate-range ballistic-missile programs have grown more rapidly than previously projected.
Rubin, who was in charge of Israel’s successful Arrow missile-defense system, said, “The Iranians believe in conventional missiles,” and the country “will use its missiles if it is attacked.”
