Quick takes //by Ben FrankelYet another mysterious explosion in an Iranian nuclear facility

A powerful explosion rattled the Iranian city of Isfahan early Monday evening Iran’s time (late morning EST). Isfahan is Iran’s third largest city, but more importantly, a major nuclear weapons-related facility is located eight miles from Isfahan. The facility is used for processing uranium so it can be fed into uranium enrichment centrifuges.

Iran uses two other facilities, in Natanz and in Qom, to enrich uranium.

This is the second powerful explosion in as many weeks in an Iranian nuclear weapons-related facility. On 12 November, a powerful explosion destroyed a large area in a military facility twenty-five miles west of Tehran. That facility is the center of Iran’s ballistic missiles development work, The explosion, which killed about twenty top commanders of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard, including Gen. Hasan Tehrani Moghaddam, the general who founded and led the country’s missile program, occurred during a demonstration of a ballistic missile capable of carrying a nuclear payload.

Haaretz’s defense and intelligence analyst Yossi Melman notes that during the past two years there were several mysterious explosions in nuclear weapons-related facilities in Iran, and in military facilities operated by regional agents of Iran such as Hezbollah. Only five days, a powerful explosion destroyed a major Hezbollah armaments storage facility near to city of Zur in south Lebanon.

A series of explosions during the past two years also wrecked Iranian critical infrastructure facilities (see Thomas Erdbrink, “Mysterious explosions pose dilemma for Iranian leaders,” Washington Post, 25 November 2011). Referring to the 12 November missile base explosion, Erdbrink writes:

A massive blast at a missile base operated by Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps nearly two weeks ago was the latest in a series of mysterious incidents involving explosions at natural gas transport facilities, oil refineries and military bases — blasts that have caused dozens of deaths and damage to key infrastructure in the past two years.

No details are yet available about this latest mysterious explosion in Iran. We note, however, a speech former Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert gave on 26 March 2009 in an academic gathering in Herzlyia, outside Tel Aviv (he was still in office when he gave the speech). We do not know whether he was referring — obliquely — to the attacks on Iran’s nuclear weapons infrastructure or to the efforts to contain Iran’s influence in the Middle East by preventing it from arming Hamas and Hezbollah. Perhaps he was referring to both campaigns. He warned Israel’s adversaries that Israeli forces, in defending the country, were operating “near and far”:

We are operating in every area in which terrorist infrastructures can be struck. We are operating in locations near and far and attack in a way that strengthens and increases deterrence. It is true in the north and in the south … there is no point in elaborating. Everyone can use their imagination. Whoever needs to know, knows.

Olmert is no longer Israel’s prime minister, but the operational principles which guided Israel’s covert campaign against Iran’s nuclear weapons during his tenure, and which guided earlier Israeli governments, appear to be guiding the current Israeli government as well.

Ben Frankel is the editor of the Homeland Security NewsWire