Project 111

From Reuters via Iran Focus comes news that I have yet to see on the BBC or any UK news service.

"U.N. investigators want Iran to explain an organizational chart linking projects to process uranium, test explosives and modify a missile cone for a nuclear payload, diplomats briefed on the matter say.

They said a top U.N. nuclear watchdog official last week gave a detailed presentation of intelligence alleging illicit atomic "weaponization studies" by Iran and naming the man who ran them for the Ministry of Defense and Armed Forces Logistics...

In the power-point presentation, IAEA safeguards chief Olli Heinonen displayed an organizational diagram linking the three projects with numbered code names -- "5" for processing nuclear fuel, "110" for purported tests of an atomic device and "111" for a longer-range, Shahab-3 missile adapted to carry it.

Project 111 was also known as the "Orchid Office".

One of dozens of slides screened by Heinonen cited a progress report on the related projects for the period July 9, 2003-January 14, 2004. Other files showed the warhead design project began in July 2002.

U.S. spy services estimated Iran halted outright "weaponization" work in 2003 but also said it continued efforts to master technology applicable to yielding nuclear explosives.

The summary said Heinonen showed diagrams depicting tests with explosives to be placed in a shaft 400 meters (1,300 feet) underground and detonated from 10 km (6 miles) away.

Electrical bridge-wire (EBW) detonators would be used to ensure the several fissile layers of the warhead blew up in a chain reaction within 130 nanoseconds.

"The high-tension firing systems and multiple EBW detonators fired simultaneously are key components of nuclear weapons," the summary quoted Heinonen as saying.

Iran had said its explosives tests were for conventional arms only, he told the diplomats from the IAEA's 35-nation board of governors who will debate Iran at a meeting starting Monday.

Heinonen cited documentation from "Project 111" showing steps, including mathematical simulations, to design a "spherical warhead", suitable for the Shahab-3 missile, that would explode at a height of 600 meters (2,000 feet).

He said that altitude excluded the possibility that the warheads would be for chemical or biological weapons."


Read the rest and then wonder if the BBC could find space amongst its joyous reporting of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's visit to Iraq to mention Project 111.