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.
