Omid Memarian
o.memarian@roozonline.com

Ahmad Shirzad, sixth Majlis MP and expert on Iran’s nuclear development, has spoken ‎to Rooz about the installation of 6000 new centrifuges and the associated technical and ‎political complications. Below is the text of the interview. ‎

Rooz (R): How do you evaluate the Iranian government’s decision to install new ‎centrifuges? ‎

Ahmad Shirzad (AS): Evidence shows that a “plan” is in place to install 6000 ‎centrifuges, not that the centrifuges have actually been installed. We have to wait for El ‎Baradei’s report to confirm how many centrifuges have been installed and how many are ‎working. ‎

R: The United Nations Security Council resolutions demand that Iran stop enriching ‎uranium, while Iran continues to install new centrifuges to enhance its enrichment ‎capabilities. How do these two issues affect one another? ‎

AS: The installation of new centrifuges does not change much at this point, except that it ‎adds to Iran’s enrichment capabilities in a quantitative sense. This development will be ‎important from a technical point of view only when Iran could assemble about 40 to 50 ‎thousand centrifuges. Only then can it claim that it is able to obtain enough to operate at ‎least one power plant. But the difference between 3 thousand centrifuges (which were ‎there before) and 7 to 8 thousand centrifuges is not much, although politically it is an ‎important development. It shows that Iranian officials insist on ignoring the demands of ‎the Security Council and obviously the political cost of it is more than its technical ‎advantage, making it easier to pass future resolutions against Iran. ‎

R: Given this threat, what is the advantage of increasing the number of centrifuges for ‎Iran? ‎

AS: As far as we can discern from remarks and actions, for some Islamic Republic ‎officials and especially Mr. Ahmadinejad’s friends, what is of utmost importance is ‎domestic propaganda. The issue that currently receives less attention is severe economic ‎and bureaucratic crisis, and what has been able to cover up these problems a bit is the ‎very expansive propaganda over the nuclear issue, which has had limited success inside ‎the country. The government of Mr. Ahmadinejad is in desperate need of using any ‎opportunity to announce a nuclear achievement and orchestrate celebrations. ‎

R: The President has recently claimed that the new centrifuges are more than 5 times as ‎productive as the old ones. What do you think about that? ‎

AS: The point here and generally in all of Mr. Ahmadinejad's speeches is that perhaps he ‎does not understand the meaning of some of the numbers he throws out. Otherwise, he ‎would have been more careful when speaking about such issues. In the world of ‎engineering, everyone knows that any kind of innovation in a system can increase that ‎system's efficiency by, at most, 10 to 20 percent, and maybe 30 percent in the case of the ‎most amazing improvements, unless a new system is designed that is based on different ‎principles altogether. Anyway, one point about his recent claim could be that the old ‎centrifuges - which were heavily advertised - were so weak technically that the new ‎centrifuges are so much more productive. ‎

Indeed, Mr. Ahmadinejad makes a lot of perplexing claims. For instance, he just said ‎that inflation was reaching 70 percent, and with a lot of work, we were able to bring it ‎down to 20 percent! Perhaps he is unaware of what a 70 percent inflation rate means, or ‎that such high inflation is found only in disintegrated systems or in systems were prices ‎are liberalized overnight such that, in a short period of time, prices go up so much. In ‎general, as an engineer, Mr. Ahmadinejad must be more careful about using numbers so ‎that his words do not become subject for jokes in engineering and scientific circles. ‎