Iran’s Arak reactor looms into Israeli, Western view

Iran aims to start a reactor next year which the West fears could arm an atomic bomb; Israel, which has bombed such construction sites around the Middle East before, may try to stop the plant being completed.

The timetable for the planned start-up of the Arak heavy-water research plant is closely watched: Israeli and Western experts say any attacker would probably prefer to act before it becomes operational – to avoid generating radioactive fallout.

The Islamic Republic says it will make isotopes for medical and agricultural use. But analysts say this type of facility can also produce plutonium for weapons if the spent fuel is reprocessed – something Iran says it has no intention of doing.

Time may be pressing for adversaries who want to act.

“Whoever considers attacking an active reactor is willing to invite another Chernobyl,” former Israeli military intelligence chief Amos Yadlin said, referring to the 1986 Soviet reactor accident which sent radioactive dust across much of Europe.

“And there is no one who wants to do that.”

Yadlin, who runs Tel Aviv University’s Institute for National Security Studies, was among eight pilots who in 1981 bombed Iraq’s Osirak reactor. Still under construction, Israel believed nuclear fuel was about to be loaded and decided to hit it then, avoiding a risk of sending fallout over nearby Baghdad.

Further underlining Israel’s determination to prevent its enemies from acquiring the means to assemble nuclear bombs, it attacked a site in Syria in 2007 that the United States said was a reactor being built with North Korean help. Syria denied that.

Israel, widely assumed to be the Middle East’s only nuclear-armed state, now sees Iran’s purportedly civil nuclear program as the most serious risk to it and has threatened military action if diplomacy and sanctions fail to make Tehran hold back.

Western and Israeli worries about Iran are focused largely on uranium enrichment plants buried underground at Natanz and Fordow, as such material refined to a high level can provide the fissile core of an atomic bomb.

But diplomats and experts say Arak could offer Iran a second route to nuclear bombs, if it decided to build such arms.