The European View on Iran: Fallout from the New U.S. Intelligence Estimate

NEIL CROMPTON

Much of the reporting in the United States about the National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) has been misleading. The European and international concern about Iran's nuclear ambitions has never been about weaponization, but rather the other elements essential to having nuclear weapons, namely uranium enrichment and missiles. Iran is actively pursuing enrichment, which is the most complicated and time-consuming part of the nuclear program. Also, it proudly displays missiles that are too inaccurate to be useful with conventional warheads.
International concern over Iran's nuclear program is also not based on highly sensitive intelligence material. The concern reflects the activities surrounding the declared program, the fact that Iran concealed that program for eighteen years, and that Iran has not resolved significant questions about its past activities.
There has been some speculation that the NIE will weaken pressure for sanctions. Actually, the NIE could have the opposite effect. There has been much concern in Europe that sanctions will inevitability lead to military action. However, now that the prospects of a military strike have been reduced, there might be more willingness in some countries to pursue more sanctions.
The international consensus that comes from the unity of the Security Council remains a powerful point of pressure on Iran. At the same time as pursuing action at the UN, European countries are actively considering how to step up European Union pressure on Iran. Europe has already gone farther than required by the Security Council: the EU has sanctioned twenty-four entities not named by UN Resolutions 1737 and 1747, and has prohibited some transactions that are not delineated on either resolution. More of this type of action will be taking place in the future.
Reading the political straws in Tehran is a complicated business but in the last few weeks, there has been some sign of discomfort. There has been public and private debate about the direction of the regime, and there seems to be a real nervousness about the sanctions' impact on business. Although some of this debate has diminished because of regime crackdowns, there is still a window of opportunity before the March parliamentary elections.
The challenge is to encourage and exacerbate that debate. The international community needs to raise the stakes through UN and European sanctions and also clarify the significant political and economical benefits of the carrots being offered. The heart of the current international approach is the calculation that the Iranian system as a whole is receptive to a cost-benefit rational -- which is precisely what the NIE found.

NICHOLAS ROCHE

The NIE has made more noise in Washington than in Europe. France's strategy has always been based on certain simple facts, not intelligence judgments.
First, the Iranians have possessed a clandestine nuclear program for eighteen years, procuring technology from the A.Q. Khan network, which is not known for its expertise in electricity production. Second, the Iranians have developed an enrichment program with no foreseeable civilian use. It is worth emphasizing that the Iranians have not mastered the technology for producing fuel rods. Russia, which will provide the fuel for the Bushehr power reactor, will not under any circumstances provide Iran with the information it would need for Iran's fuel to be used in that reactor. This begs the questions, why is Iran enriching uranium, and what will it do with the material?
The appropriate course now is to continue the sanctions and to finalize a third UN resolution. Although at some point it may become necessary to reconsider this strategy, France does not see any particular "red line" that would force a change in approach. That said, there is always room for maneuvering on the current policy, such as on the modalities of negotiation.
Enrichment suspension is the key element to regain confidence in Iran's peaceful intentions. There cannot be negotiations while Iran continues to advance its nuclear program. Without suspension, the ongoing Iranian program would give Iran the capability to build nuclear weapons very quickly.

The Sun is Bristling with X-ray Jets

Dec. 06, 2007: Astronomers using Japan's Hinode spacecraft have discovered that the sun is bristling with powerful "X-ray jets." They spray out of the sun's surface hundreds of times a day, launching blobs of hot gas as wide as North America at a top speed of two million miles per hour. These jets add significant mass to the solar wind and they may help explain a long-standing mystery of astrophysics: the superheating of the sun's corona.
"This is awesome and very much unexpected," says Jonathan Cirtain of the Marshall Space Flight Center who was a key figure in the discovery. He recalls how it happened: "We found them a year ago in Nov. 2006. Hinode had just been launched and its instruments were coming online." To calibrate the spacecraft's X-ray Telescope, mission controllers in Japan pointed the telescope at a dark hole in the sun's atmosphere--a "coronal hole." Cirtain analyzed the data and "there they were!"

"After the shock wore off, I ran around dragging other scientists into my office to show them the movie." He likens the appearance of the jets erupting within a coronal hole to "the twinkle of Christmas lights, randomly oriented. It's very pretty."
Cirtain notes that X-ray jets have been seen before, but never in such abundance. The first jets were recorded by a 1st-generation X-ray telescope onboard Skylab in the 1970s. They were called x-ray jets for the simple reason that they were bright at x-ray wavelengths. The phenomenon was later confirmed by a Naval Research Lab ultraviolet telescope that flew aboard the space shuttle in the 1980s as well as by Japan's Yohkoh X-ray Telescope in the 1990s. "All those instruments saw very few jets--typically one or two per day," says Cirtain. X-ray jets were thus regarded as a curiosity of little importance.

Hinode has changed all that. The spacecraft's advanced X-Ray Telescope can take pictures rapidly enough to catch these fast-moving eruptions. "We now see that jets happen all the time, as often as 240 times a day. They appear at all latitudes, within coronal holes, inside sunspot groups, out in the middle of nowhere--in short, wherever we look on the sun we find these jets. They are a major form of solar activity," says Cirtain.
Each jet is triggered by a magnetic eruption or "reconnection event"--essentially the same process that powers solar flares albeit on a much smaller scale. "The energy in a typical jet is about a thousand times less than the energy of an M-class (medium sized) solar flare," says Cirtain. Individually, jets are weak; en masse, however, they pack quite a punch. "If we add up all the energy jets deposit into the sun's atmosphere, the daily total is on par with solar flares."
Indeed, the jets may contribute significantly to the solar wind. Every day a hot, relentless wind of solar protons and electrons blows against Earth, deflected just before it can reach the atmosphere by our planet’s global magnetic field. Gusts in solar wind can cause bright auroras, power outages and other effects collectively known as "space weather." What drives this wind away from the sun? It's a question that has puzzled physicists for decades. Jets provide at least part of the answer:
"We've added up the mass flowing in these jets and it amounts to between 10% and 25% of the solar wind. That's a significant fraction," he says.

X-ray jets may also contribute to the mysterious heating of the sun's outer atmosphere, the ghostly "corona" seen during solar eclipses.
Right: The sun's outer atmosphere or "corona". Credit & Copyright: Koen van Gorp.
The mystery is this: If you stuck a thermometer in the surface of the sun, it would read about 6000o C. Yet above the surface of the sun, in the corona where intuition says things should be cooler, the temperature rises to millions of degrees. What heats the corona to such extreme temperatures?
X-ray jets seem to help. Cirtain and colleagues have examined four jets in great detail and found that they launch magnetic waves into the sun's upper atmosphere. These waves, called Alfven waves, propagate into the corona where they *crack* like a whip, heating the gas where the crack occurs. (Note: When a whip is cracked on Earth, the sharp sound we hear is a result of energy being transferred from the fast-moving tip of the whip to the air around it. The same basic process is at work with Alfven waves cracking in the corona.) Cirtain doesn't believe jets can wholly explain the super-heating of the corona, but "they make an important contribution."
Another team of Hinode researchers led by Bart De Pontieu of Lockheed-Martin have found evidence for more Alfven waves coming from a layer of the sun's atmosphere called the chromosphere. (The chromosphere is to the sun as the troposphere is to Earth; both are near-surface layers of atmosphere.) These Alfven waves are not launched by jets but rather by turbulent motions within the chromosphere itself. "If we add all the Alfven waves together, the ones from the chromosphere plus the ones from X-ray jets, it may be enough to solve the mystery of coronal heating," says Cirtain.
Even if jets solved no Great Mysteries, however, Cirtain says he's just delighted to have found them. "Jets remind me why I love my job. "

كوكب الزهرة: «نجمة مشعة» حارّة بحجم الأرض

2007 في زمن غابر، كان كوكب الزهرة مغطى على الارجح بالمحيطات لكن بدلا من أن تتكون الحياة على سطحه تحول الى مكان حار يتكون جوه من ثاني اوكسيد الكربون بنسبة 96?، وفق التحاليل التي اجراها المسبار الاوروبي «فينوس اكسبرس» منذ نيسان .2006 وتتجاوز درجات الحرارة 450 درجة مئوية على كوكب الزهرة الذي يطلق عليه العرب اسم «نجمة الصباح» او «نجمة المساء» تبعا للتوقيت الذي يشع فيه. ويقترب الكوكب في حجمه وكتلته من كوكب الارض. وقال الباحث في وكالة الفضاء الاوروبية هاكان سفيديم ان «المياه التي كانت موجودة على كوكب الزهرة تبخرت. ولا تزال هناك آثار لها في اجوائه».

ويبعد كوكب الزهرة 108 ملايين كلم عن الشمس في مقابل 149 مليونا للارض. ويعتقد العلماء ان الجو على كوكب الزهرة، شأنه شأن الارض او المريخ، تكوّن نتيجة الغازات التي نفثتها البراكين وكان مؤلفا اساسا من البخار وثاني اوكسيد الكربون. ولم يكشف كوكب الزهرة الذي استكشفته اكثر من ثلاثين مركبة فضائية منذ 1962 كل اسراره. اذ حالت طبقة كثيفة من السحاب المكون من حمض الكبريت التي ربما تكونت من البراكين، دون التقاط صور واضحة عن سطحه. لكن فينوس اكسبرس وبفضل استخدام اجزاء جديدة من الطيف الضوئي، تعمل اليوم على رسم صورة ثلاثية الابعاد لجو الزهرة تسمح بفهم افضل للاحوال الجوية السائدة عليه.

وتصل سرعة الرياح في طبقة الجو العليا على كوكب الزهرة الى ثلاثة اضعاف سرعة الرياح المصاحبة لاعصار على الارض على ارتفاع 70 كلم، في حين ان الكوكب يدور حول نفسه ببطء شديد ويشهد شروقا ومغيبا للشمس كل 177 يوما. وتم قياس سرعة هذه الرياح التي توزع درجات الحرارة بالتساوي وتبرر غياب الفصول على سطحه، من خلال تتبع سحب حمض الكبريت السابحة في طبقة الجو العليا حيث سجل المسبار تفاوتا في درجات الحرارة بنحو 30 الى 40 درجة مئوية بين الليل والنهار وهو فرق لا يمكن ان يكون ناجما فقط عن اشعة الشمس.. كما رصد المسبار فينوس اكسبرس ايضا موجات كهرومغنطيسية تدوم جزءا من الثانية ويفترض ان تكون ناجمة عن شحنات كهربائية. ويقول اندرو اينغرسول من جامعة كاليفورنيا إن «توصلنا الى متابعة التقلبات المناخية على كوكب الزهرة كما نفعل على كوكب الارض سنتمكن من فهم الارصاد الجوية بصورة عامة». (أ ف ب)