If you recall my world news roundup thing from Monday, one of the stories I mentioned was an explosion (supposedly a pretty massive one, although that report is coming from an anti-government news outlet so you may need to take it — as well as the government’s version of events, that this was “an ordinary fire” — with a grain of salt) at Iran’s Parchin military base, which killed two people. This is a facility where it is known that Iran has tested ballistic missile technology in the past, and where the IAEA believes it may have tested some of the non-nuclear components needed for a nuclear weapon (specifically explosive triggers). Given what is known about Parchin, and also what is not known about Parchin (Iran has been notoriously difficult about allowing the IAEA to access the base, which is certainly suspicious, but they’d understandably be reluctant to let the IAEA into a military research facility even if it was only used for conventional weapons development), there’s obviously a lot of suspicion about what exactly caused this explosion. The simplest answer is an accident; those do happen, after all, especially at facilities where explosives are being kept. But the number of “accidents” that have befallen people in and around Iran’s nuclear program over the years also raises the possibility that this was a deliberate attack, maybe by Mossad, or the (*cough*) definitely not at all terrorist group (just ask their lobbyists) Mujahidin-i Khalq (MEK), maybe by both in collaboration.
Once you get past the simplest explanation and the simplest alternative explanation, you start to get into some deep rabbit holes. Jim White at emptywheel comes down pretty much on the “sabotoge” side of things, but also speculates that the explosion could have been deliberately set by the Iranians, to destroy Parchin and thereby remove it as an issue in the nuclear talks without having to let the IAEA inspect the site:
Another possibility that I haven’t seen mentioned is the potential of a semi-intentional accident that would destroy the building that is at the heart of the negotiations. It is only a matter of days before satellite imagery of the blast site become public, so we will know fairly soon whether the particular building with the blast chamber in question was destroyed. If the site is completely destroyed, that would be a convenient way for Iran to prove, without saying it, that no further work of this type will take place.
Then there’s “Allahpundit” (via Andrew Sullivan), who to his credit is actually questioning whether there was an explosion at all, given that there was no social media reaction to what was supposedly such a huge explosion not far from Tehran. But he also spins a scenario under which this could have been a nuclear weapons test, because why not?
Which raises the question of just what sort of explosion this was. If it broke windows miles away and emitted a bright glare, that could mean either a really large conventional blast (e.g., if the fire reached the base’s weapons depot) or a small atomic blast — and of course western governments who detected it would have an interest in hushing it up too, lest they’re forced to admit that they failed to stop Iran from getting the bomb. But if there really was a huge explosion, how come social media wasn’t instantly inundated with “whoa!” tweets from Iranians living in and around east Tehran and Parchin? Seems hard to believe Iran’s Internet censorship could be so thorough that no trace of a reaction like that was detected online by western media. Which means maybe there was no such reaction, and thus no explosion.
Again, he’s skeptical that any explosion took place at all, so I don’t want to harp too much on this (on the other hand, here’s a ynet column essentially arguing the same thing but really meaning it), but in order to believe that this was an atomic detonation, you have to believe that a) the Iranian government would test a radioactive weapon (or at least permit the conditions under which such a weapon could be accidentally set off) just outside its most populous city, b) it wouldn’t try to evacuate anybody from the area where the radioactive explosion took place or the area downwind of the explosion site, thereby presumably dooming a lot of people to radiation sickness and all that entails, and c) Western governments would be equally likely to pretend that this hadn’t happened, because otherwise they might be embarrassed. That’s, well, pretty crazy. I know the right-wing has constructed this almost-mythical alternate version of Iran whose leaders are all fanatical nihilists hell-bent on bringing about the apocalypse, and this hypothetical scenario feeds right into that myth, but there’s no actual evidence to support any of it.
The Foreign Exchanges Companion 