Bush heads for Europe

Posted by Mark Silva at 5:15 am CDT

BOARDING AIR FORCE ONE -- President Bush is taking off this morning for a three-day swing through two European capitals, with a goal of solidifying European support for U.S. demands that Iran suspend its enrichment of nuclear fuel and a celebration of Hungary's revolution.

In Vienna, Bush will meet with leaders of the European Union on Wednesday. He will underscore the importance of a united front in the pressure that the U.S., European allies, China and Russia are placing on Iran to suspend a long-concealed enrichment program that experts now believe is headed toward development of nuclear weapons. Iran denies such intentions, insisting that it is developing only a civilian nuclear power-generating program. The Bush administration is offering to open negotiations with Iran on a broad range of economic and culture exchanges, if Iran will suspend its enrichment.

We're preparing to board Air Force One now.

It's a nine-hour journey to Vienna -- the 15th trip that Bush has made to Europe. Air Force One is taking off on a hot summer morning with a red ball of a sun rising over the field at Andrews Air Force Base. The president will spend the night in Vienna and head into meetings on Wednesday. He will fly from there to Budapest for a commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the Hungarian Revolution on Thursday, and plans to return to Washington by week's end.

For more on the Iranian situation, see this article in today's Tribune:

Bush, EU to tackle Iran

By Mark Silva
Washington Bureau
Published June 19, 2006, 8:09 PM CDT

WASHINGTON -- President Bush and European leaders kick off talks this week in Vienna on a problem that has defied solution for years, with the cost of failure only seeming to get more dangerous--how to talk Iran out of a nuclear weapons program it denies exists.

That denial is making diplomatic maneuvering difficult, especially given the prewar insistence by the U.S. that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. The International Atomic Energy Agency has acknowledged finding "no smoking gun" proving Iran's intentions, though there is broad international agreement that those plans include a bomb.

Bush broke with nearly three decades of U.S. policy toward Iran by offering negotiations that could lead to a new era of economic and cultural cooperation with a nation that once held Americans hostage for 444 days. But on the eve of his departure, the president reiterated that those talks can begin only if Iran suspends its enrichment of uranium.

"Iran's leaders have a clear choice," Bush said Monday, delivering a commencement address at the U.S. Merchant Marine Academy in New York before embarking on his three-day trip to Europe. "If Iran's leaders want peace and prosperity and a more hopeful future for their people, they should accept our offer, abandon any ambitions to obtain nuclear weapons and come into compliance with their international obligations."

Despite Iran's insistence that it is interested in developing nuclear technology solely for civilian power generation, experts inside and outside the administration say the evidence is indisputable that Iran's long-concealed nuclear program is geared toward development of weaponry.

Iran began its nuclear program in the mid-1980s, aided by technology obtained through a secretive network led by Abdul Qadeer Khan, mastermind of Pakistan's nuclear program. The government recently resumed enrichment of uranium, which can be used to generate electricity when enriched at low levels and can become the core of a nuclear bomb when enriched at much greater levels.

Amid signs that another U.S. adversary, North Korea, is ratcheting up its own nuclear weapons program, analysts say they have no doubt where the Iranians are heading. Iran, they note, has rich oil reserves that could be used for energy needs, and could purchase enough enriched uranium for civilian purposes—raising doubts about its plans to greatly expand its enrichment facilities.

"The evidence looks pretty clear," said Leonard Spector, who heads the Washington office of the Monterey Institute's Center for Nonproliferation Studies. "They pursued this thing in secrecy for so long. They worked with A.Q. Khan. … This looks like the classic clandestine nuclear program, with echoes of Pakistan."

The U.S. severed relations with Iran in 1980 during the holding of 52 hostages taken in the storming of the American Embassy in Tehran. But now, with a powerful yet tenuous alliance of the U.S., Britain, Germany, France, Russia and China offering Iran economic incentives to abandon any aspirations to develop nuclear weaponry, the Iranian president has signaled he is open to talks.

"We're regarding this offer as a step forward, and I have instructed my colleagues to carefully consider it," President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said last week after meeting with Chinese President Hu Jintao in Shanghai.

The Bush administration insists that Iran has little time to decide before the U.S. and its European allies press for sanctions in the UN Security Council. The Vienna-based IAEA already has found Iran in violation of the international nuclear non-proliferation treaty and has referred the matter to the Security Council.

"They're clearly considering the proposal," Stephen Hadley, Bush's national security adviser, said of Iran. "We think that's a good thing." An Iranian response, he said, is expected within "weeks, not months—but weeks, not days. And we're kind of in that zone at this point."

In meeting Wednesday with leaders of the governing body of the 25-nation European Union, Bush will press for more of the support that the U.S. already has found from Britain, Germany and France, which have led negotiations with Iran.

He will travel to Budapest on Thursday to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Hungarian Revolution, another chance to repeat a message he has carried across Europe about the defeat of tyranny.

The incentives the U.S. and its allies are offering Iran—from replacement civilian aircraft parts to assistance in building power-generating nuclear reactors—also include an openness to letting Iran enrich its own nuclear fuel in the future.

But Bush insists that enrichment must be suspended now before the U.S. will enter talks that could lead to a new relationship, including trade and cultural exchanges.

"Our position on Iran is real simple," said White House press secretary Tony Snow. "You go ahead and take care of business on the nuclear front, [and] we'll talk about a whole lot of stuff, and we'll be happy to cooperate on any number of fronts."

Iran has been exploring the nuclear front since the mid-1980s. But the program was long hidden, with the IAEA reporting in 2005 that Iran had followed "a policy of concealment" until 2003.

Iran says it has resumed enrichment of uranium with 164 centrifuges operating at a plant in Natanz, south of Tehran, and maintains that it is developing fuel for power plants. Those centrifuges are far fewer than needed to develop weaponry, experts say, but Iran may be able to expand that machinery rapidly by the end of this year.

Iran needs about 1,500 centrifuges operating in concert to produce a bomb, said David Albright, a physicist and president of the Institute for Science and International Security who worked with the IAEA in the mid-1990s in evaluating Iraq's nuclear program.

"There is sort of an expectation that [Iran] will try to put in five or six of these 164-centrifuge cascades by the end of the year," Albright said. "A tremendous amount is known about the Iranian enrichment program, mainly through the IAEA's inspections and through Iran's procurement efforts" in attempting to obtain material from other countries.

What is unknown, Albright said, is what sort of program Iran may have for making weapons.

"A weaponization facility is so small and so hard to find, there is nothing you can do to guarantee you will find it," he said. "Iran short-circuits that by cutting off the inspections that would help you find this stuff, and they did that many months ago."

The IAEA has acknowledged finding "no smoking gun" proving Iranian intentions of building a bomb. But analysts insist that a nuclear program such as Iran's in an oil-rich nation—with a world market of enriched uranium sufficient to sustain its civilian nuclear power program—can only have the purpose of bomb-building.

"We do not dispute that right to have nuclear technology," said Greg Schulte, the U.S. representative to the IAEA. But he called calling Iran's nuclear project "really a cover for a military program. … The problem here [is] when you produce low-enriched uranium, you are 70 percent of the way to producing high-enriched uranium. It's just a matter of reconfiguring the pipes a little bit."

mdsilva@tribune.com