PROJECT 111

The CIA turned over to the IAEA last year thousands of pages of computer simulations and documents — purportedly from a defector\'s laptop — that indicated that Iranian experts studied mounting a nuclear warhead on a ballistic missile.

The laptop also contained drawings and notes on sophisticated detonators and conventional high explosives arrayed in a ring — the shape used to trigger nuclear weapons — and implicated a firm linked to Iran\'s military in uranium-enrichment studies.

The documents included drawings of a 1,200-foot-deep underground shaft apparently designed to confine a nuclear test explosion. Iran denounced the materials as \"politically motivated and baseless,\" but promised to cooperate with an IAEA investigation into so-called Project 111 once other questions are settled. U.S., French, German and British intelligence officials think the materials are genuine. \"I wouldn\'t go to war over this, but it\'s reason for suspicion,\" Fitzpatrick said. \"It hasn\'t been explained.\" Muhammad Sahimi, a professor of chemical and petroleum engineering at the University of Southern California who emigrated from Iran in 1978 and has analyzed Iran\'s nuclear program closely, dismissed the materials as \"totally not believable.\" Noting how carefully Iranian intelligence agencies monitor the program and the borders, he said, \"If the laptop did exist, I find it hard to believe that its absence wasn\'t noticed for so long that somebody could take it out of Iran.\"

Read more: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2007/11/04/21067/experts-no-firm-evidence-of-iranian.html#ixzz1dDZMz7DC

CRITIQUE