Whipping Wisps Into Storm Clouds: Iran and the “Alleged Studies”

. . . the IAEA has effectively shifted the normal burden of proof in regard to the intelligence documents. Instead of requiring the IAEA and those who provided the documents to give evidence of their authenticity, [recently retired director of the IAEA's Safeguards Department Olli] Heinonen has demanded that the Iranians prove they are fabrications.

This is reminiscent of the “you can’t prove a negative” argument that those who attempted to slow the rush to war with Iraq invoked. In other words if you’re trying to prove something, it’s obviously contrary to the applicable principles of philosophy and science to begin with the assumption that said something exists and that what needs to be proved instead is its nonexistence.

The documents on missile re-design demonstrate how the fraud is being perpetrated. They

. . . had the most impact on media coverage. [They consist of] a series of technical drawings or schematics — all in Farsi — of as many as 18 different ways of fitting the unidentified payload into the missile-reentry vehicle or warhead. . . . But when IAEA analysts were allowed to study the documents, they found that images of the the warhead had the familiar “dunce cap” shape of the original North Korean No Dong missile, which Iran had acquired in the mid-1990s.

“That was odd,” writes Porter. He explains.

[When] Iran had flight-tested a new missile in mid-2004, the warhead had not had a dunce-cap shape but a new . . . “baby bottle” shape, which was more aerodynamic than the one on the original Shahab-3 missile. The warhead schematics in the alleged-studies documents thus depicted a reentry vehicle design that the analysts knew had already been abandoned by the Iranian military in favor of a new, improved one.

When I asked Heinonen . . . how he could consider it plausible that Iran’s purported secret nuclear weapons research program would redesign the warhead of a missile that the Iranian military had already decided to replace with an improved model, he suggested that the group that had done the schematics had no relationship with the regular Iranian missile program.

We’re all familiar with the phenomenon of firewalls between security agencies or branches of the military, but that’s ridiculous. The explanation?

Heinonen [suggested that] missile engineers . . . were ordered to redesign the older Shahab-3 model before the decision was made by the missile program to switch to a newer missile and warhead design, and that it couldn’t change its work plan once it was decided. . . . Heinonen’s explanation assumes that the Iranian military ordered an engineer to organize a team to redesign the warhead on its secret intermediate-range ballistic missile to accommodate a nuclear weapon but kept them in the dark about its plans to replace the Shahab-3 in favor of a completely new and improved model.

You can be forgiven if you find that far-fetched. Especially since

. . . the reason for the shift to the new missile . . . was that the Shahab-3 [which dates from the ] early to mid-1990s, had a range of only 800 to 1,000 km [compared to the new missile which has a range of] 1,500 to 1,600 kilometers, bringing Israel within the reach of an Iranian missile for the first time.

In other words, what would the Iranian military want with an underpowered missile? Porter then points out what should be obvious — and, in the process, demonstrates that the “alleged studies” were only looked over by those “allegedly studying.”

The implausibility of the suggestion that a group organized to redesign the . . .warhead would not have been working with the new warhead underlines the tortuous thinking that must be used to avoid an obvious conclusion: the warhead schematics are fraudulent.

Before we get to who’s behind the alleged studies, we’ll excerpt Porter’s summary of the fraud.

The authors of the laptop documents left a trail of indicators that reveal their fraudulent character. Because of their ignorance of some key facts about the Iranian nuclear program and their effort to ensure that the documents would have the desired political effect, they made a series of errors. This investigation of all the available data related to the laptop documents found eight indicators of fraud.

Among them, as noted above (emphasis added)

The warhead schematics shown in the documents were based on a design that had already been abandoned by the Iranian military in favor of a new and improved design.

Besides

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