{"id":122197,"date":"2021-04-15T08:52:17","date_gmt":"2021-04-15T08:52:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.counterpunch.org\/?p=134906"},"modified":"2021-04-15T08:52:17","modified_gmt":"2021-04-15T08:52:17","slug":"israel-sabotages-the-natanz-nuclear-facility","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/2021\/04\/15\/israel-sabotages-the-natanz-nuclear-facility\/","title":{"rendered":"Israel Sabotages the Natanz Nuclear Facility"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Photograph Source: Hamed Saber – CC BY 2.0<\/a><\/p><\/div>\n

Over the weekend, Iran marked National Nuclear Technology Day.\u00a0 The stars of the show were going to be new advanced centrifuges at the Natanz uranium enrichment plant.\u00a0 Unfortunately, the stars did not shine and President Hassan Rouhani and his officials were left with a reminder of the previous time the centrifuges at Natanz crashed.\u00a0 In 2010, a joint US-Israeli operation against Iran\u2019s nuclear program is said to have destroyed a fifth of the Iranian centrifuges, using the Stuxnet virus.<\/p>\n

A sequence of events have been viewed cumulatively as suggesting that this was no error of engineering so much as plain sabotage.\u00a0 Israel was again the central agent of perpetration, a not implausible accusation given its relentless efforts to curb Iran\u2019s nuclear ambitions.\u00a0 The latest came last November, when Iran\u2019s chief nuclear scientist Mohsen Fakhrizadeh was slain<\/a> by a gun operated by artificial intelligence.\u00a0 At this feat, Brigadier-General Ali Fadavi was almost admiring in description<\/a>: the gun had \u201cfocused only on martyr Fakhrizadeh\u2019s face in a way that his wife, despite being only 25 cm away, was not shot.\u201d<\/p>\n

Itamar Eichner of YNet was happy to indulge<\/a> in questions regarding the latest incident at Natanz.\u00a0 Was the politically troubled Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu raising a toast with officials of Mossad, the IDF and Shin Bet ahead of Independence Day auspicious?\u00a0 And why did US Defence Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III pay a visit to Israel on April 11, the day the attack took place?\u00a0 Defence analyst Ron Ben-Yishai, also of YNet, suggested<\/a> that it was \u201creasonable to assume that the problem \u2026 might not have been caused by an accident, but by deliberate sabotage intended to slow the nuclear race accelerated by the negotiations with the US on removing sanctions\u201d.<\/p>\n

Israeli and US officials have confirmed that Israel did play a role, though the speculation as to what actually happened at Natanz remains a feast of various courses.\u00a0 The Times of Israel<\/em> provided<\/a> some detail: a bomb had been planted in advance at the nuclear enrichment facility near the main electricity line, more than implying that Iran\u2019s nuclear program has been infiltrated and compromised.\u00a0 According to Channel 13 news, the device went off on Sunday at 4 in the morning, after which the facility was evacuated.\u00a0 The bomb crippled the entire facility, leading Channel 13 defence analyst Alon Ben-David to conclude<\/a> that this was \u201cthe worst attack that Iran\u2019s nuclear program has suffered \u2026 at the most important Iranian nuclear facility.\u201d<\/p>\n

An unnamed Israeli intelligence official told<\/a> the Kan news that the damage to the site was \u201cextensive\u201d in nature, having affected various types of centrifuges. Others read from the same script in their assessments to Channel 13, citing<\/a>\u201csevere damage at the heart of Iran\u2019s enrichment program.\u201d\u00a0 In the New York Times<\/em>, another intelligence official explained<\/a> that the remotely detonated device had disabled both primary and backup electrical systems.<\/p>\n

Behrouz Kamalvandi, a spokesman for the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran, preferred to minimise the effect of the blast, claiming<\/a> on April 12 that the explosion had been \u201csmall\u201d and took place \u201cat the electricity distribution centre\u201d.\u00a0 The damage caused could be \u201cquickly repaired.\u201d<\/p>\n

But as with the killing of Fakhrizadeh, some officials could not help but be impressed by the manner of execution, inadvertently confessing to the sheer seriousness of it.\u00a0 \u201cThe enemy\u2019s plot was very beautiful,\u201d came the reflection<\/a> from Fereydoun Abbasi, head of the Iranian Parliament\u2019s energy committee.\u00a0 \u201cI\u2019m looking at it from a scientific point of view.\u00a0 They thought about this and used their experts and planned the explosion so both the central power and the emergency power cable would be damaged.\u201d<\/p>\n

Such violent behaviour on Israel\u2019s part is heavily leveraged against the relationship with the US.\u00a0 While the Biden administration moves in a constipated fashion towards re-establishing a patchy dialogue with Tehran over the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) talks, Israel persists in remaining a spoiler. The nagging question was whether Israel was unilaterally roguish in order to purposely disrupt such incipient diplomacy, or whether the White House had given a barely noticeable nod of approval for the operation.\u00a0 Doing so would make Israel the agent of disposition, thereby weakening Tehran\u2019s future discussions on the nuclear agreement.<\/p>\n

The White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki, for her part, was not giving much away, showing that transparency remains, at least in certain areas of the Biden administration, aspirational.\u00a0 \u201cThe US was not involved in any manner,\u201d she stated<\/a> during her April 12 press conference.\u00a0 \u201cWe have nothing to add on speculation about the causes or the impacts.\u201d\u00a0 As for planned talks to re-establish the nuclear deal, the Press Secretary claimed that discussions would still proceed on Wednesday in Vienna, expected \u201cto be difficult and long.\u00a0 We have not been given any indication about a change in participation for these discussions.\u201d<\/p>\n

Iranian legislators have been none too impressed, insisting that the country\u2019s Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif suspend talks.\u00a0 Abbas Moghtadaei, deputy chairman of the Parliament\u2019s national security and foreign policy committee, suggested<\/a> that talks undertaken \u201cunder pressure have no meaning.\u201d<\/p>\n

Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Saeed Khatibzadeh did not shy back from calling<\/a> the attack \u201ca crime against humanity\u201d though it was not a crime with much effect.\u00a0 \u201cAll decommissioned centrifuges are IR1 and will be replaced with new centrifuges.\u201d\u00a0 Such an act of \u201cnuclear terrorism\u201d triggered Article 51 of the United Nations Charter, which permits sovereign states to defend its territory when attacked.<\/p>\n

Revenge will come in cold and calculated doses: an assault on Israeli-owned shipping; harrying missile fire from bases in Yemen or Syria; the use of drones on specific Israeli targets.\u00a0 On this, Ben-David had a bland observation to make.\u00a0 \u201cYesterday signifies that the faceoff between Israel and Iran has escalated to a higher level.\u201d\u00a0 Of even greater concern to Tehran is the obvious point, openly admitted by Moghtadaei, that there have been \u201cvery obvious security infiltrations.\u201d\u00a0Charges of incompetence and treason have begun to thicken the atmosphere.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

The post Israel Sabotages the Natanz Nuclear Facility<\/a> appeared first on CounterPunch.org<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n

This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org<\/a>. <\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Over the weekend, Iran marked National Nuclear Technology Day.\u00a0 The stars of the show were going to be new advanced centrifuges at the Natanz uranium enrichment plant.\u00a0 Unfortunately, the stars did not shine and President Hassan Rouhani and his officials were left with a reminder of the previous time the centrifuges at Natanz crashed.\u00a0 In More<\/a><\/p>\n

The post Israel Sabotages the Natanz Nuclear Facility<\/a> appeared first on CounterPunch.org<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":30,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[22],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/122197"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/30"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=122197"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/122197\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":122198,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/122197\/revisions\/122198"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=122197"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=122197"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=122197"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}