On July 2 at Truthout, Gareth Porter wrote:
For many months, the most dramatic media storyline on Iran’s nuclear program has been an explosives containment cylinder that the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) says was installed at Iran’s Parchin military base a decade ago to test nuclear weapons. The coverage of the initial IAEA account of the cylinder in its report last November has been followed by a steady drip of reports about Iran refusing to allow the agency’s inspectors to visit the site at Parchin and satellite photos showing what are said to be Iranian efforts to “sanitize” the site.
But
… the images in question suggest something quite different from the “clean up” of the site reported in global news media.
As opposed to a sanitization or clean-up, the activities, Porter writes, may constitute a lure to induce the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to visit the site. Tehran may be thinking that
… the agency would be more open to compromise on its demand to … to continue investigating allegations of Iranian covert nuclear weapons work indefinitely, regardless of the information provided by Iran in response to its questions.
Former IAEA inspector Robert Kelley explained
… why that makes no sense. “The Uranium signatures are very persistent in the environment,” he wrote in an article for the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute in May. “If Iran is using hoses to wash contamination across a parking lot into a ditch, there will be enhanced [not fewer, as one would think if Tehran was hiding activities — RW] opportunities for uranium collection if teams are allowed access.”
Meanwhile, David Albright of the Institute for Science and International Security
… was back again in June with a new satellite image taken May 25 showing that soil had been moved from two areas north and south of the building said to have held the explosive chamber. … But it also showed that the same soil was dumped only a few hundred feet farther north of the building, making environmental sampling quite simple.
Assuming that Tehran doesn’t know that leaving the soil beside the building or that, by washing “contamination across a parking lot into a ditch, there will be enhanced opportunities for uranium collection if teams are allowed access” strikes this observer as part of a pattern of underestimating the intelligence of Tehran. As Kelley wrote in a comment at Arms Control Wonk on June 19, “I think [Iran is] teasing the international community with these activities.” (In the same comment thread, Albright defends his findings.)
The pattern on the part of the United States of underestimating and condescending towards Tehran — and other states that aspire to develop nuclear-weapons programs — can best be observed in two examples. The first is the New START treaty, which is long on confidence building but short on weapons reduction. The second is the $700 billion the United States expects to spend on nuclear weapons over the next ten years. While those realities may not drive it to develop nuclear weapons, they’re not exactly lost on Tehran.