New York Times spotlights Iranian nuclear bomb technical “riddle”

In general, say the New York Times‘s William Broad and David Sanger, discussion of Iran’s nuclear-arms intentions and progress “has focused on curtailing Iran’s uranium plants and plutonium complex, its pathways to atomic fuel,” while “quietly, the United States and its allies are also discussing whether a final deal should compel Tehran to reveal the depth of its atomic knowledge.”

In an 8 March Sunday Review news analysis headlined “What Iran won’t say about the bomb,” Broad and Sanger observe that while that country could get fuel from “the likes of North Korea or on the black market,” a “design riddle still lurks in the background.” The “real question,” they assert, “is whether Iran can miniaturize a weapon to fit atop a missile, can make bombs more destructive than the one that turned Hiroshima into a radioactive cinder, and can use precious fuel sparingly enough to build a nuclear arsenal.”

Science writer Broad came to the Times from the weekly journal Science more than 30 years ago. He has twice shared a Pulitzer—once for work concerning the “Star Wars” antimissile program, once concerning the Challenger space shuttle disaster. Sanger , the Times‘s chief Washington correspondent and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, shared the Challenger Pulitzer and was part of the team that covered Japan’s tsunami-induced nuclear disaster. The pair have been recognized for their reporting on nuclear proliferation. They were the writers for a TV documentary that won a 2007 DuPont Award from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism: Nuclear Jihad: Can Terrorists Get the Bomb?

In their Sunday Times piece, an illustrated sidebar based on information from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) summarizes what the two journalists see as too-seldom-discussed questions about Iranian bomb design and development. A headnote says, “Atomic inspectors cite evidence that Iran has taken a dozen clandestine steps toward atom-bomb development. Iran denies this. It has declined to give technical replies to all but one of the specific allegations.” Iran has discussed detonators, Broad and Sanger say. But explosive lenses and computer modeling, though “on the table,” haven’t been addressed. It’s also alleged that Iran has worked on neutron initiators, technology for bomb-firing tests and for firing systems, re-entry vehicle design, and mock components for fuel-compression testing. Three more weapon-development allegations are administrative or political.

The evidentiary basis for the allegations, the reporters say, is the IAEA’s “secret trove of reports, correspondence, viewgraphs, videos and blueprints that purport to show Iran’s skill in warhead design.” Near the end, the two observe that “it remains unclear whether the atomic riddle will be resolved.”

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Steven T. Corneliussen, a media analyst for the American Institute of Physics, monitors three national newspapers, the weeklies Nature and Science, and occasionally other publications. He has published op-eds in the Washington Post and other newspapers, has written for NASA’s history program, and is a science writer at a particle-accelerator laboratory.