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Ball in Europe's court
By Dilip Hiro
With the
Iranians threatening to resume some nuclear
activities in the near future, their European
Union (EU) interlocutors are threatening to break
off their six-month long negotiations to resolve
the nuclear issue diplomatically. They have called
an emergency meeting of the 35 member Board of
Governors of the International Atomic Energy
Agency (IAEA) in Vienna at which they are likely
to join the United States in recommending that the
Iranian situation be referred to the United
Nations Security Council.
But they are
unlikely to get their way. The Europeans -
represented in the negotiations by the troika of
Britain, France and Germany - claim that before
the latest round of talks, starting in
mid-November, Tehran promised to freeze "all
uranium enrichment-related activities".
What the Iranians have, in fact, done is
not to start the actual enrichment of uranium
hexafluoride (UF6 gas), but to convert uranium
yellow cake into a precursor for UF6. According to
a non-European diplomat in Vienna, the non-aligned
governors of the IAEA board will accept the
Iranian argument that this is uranium-conversion
work and not uranium-enrichment work.
The
emerging crisis is the result of a stalemate
between Iran and the EU-3. The Europeans are
aiming to get Tehran to cease all uranium-related
activity permanently and depend instead
exclusively on imports of low-enriched fissile
material produced by the Europeans for Iran's
civilian nuclear program. This is totally
unacceptable to the Iranians.
On May 3,
addressing the UN conference to review the nuclear
Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), Iran's Foreign
Minister Kamal Kharrazi hinted at the real reason
for the devolving Iranian nuclear situation. He
spoke of the demands being made on Iran as
"arbitrary and self-serving criteria and
thresholds regarding proliferation - proof and
proliferation-prone technologies" which violate
"the spirit and letter of the NPT and destroy the
balance between the rights and obligations in the
treaty".
At the core of the NPT is Article
IV. It gives any signatory "an inalienable right
to develop, research, produce and use nuclear
energy for peaceful purposes" and to acquire
technology to this effect from fellow signatories.
In practical terms, removing Article IV from the
NPT - as some in the Unites States have proposed -
would mean terminating the right of the signatory
to "the nuclear fuel cycle".
Fueling
what?
This nuclear fuel cycle
consists of mining uranium ore, processing it
into uranium oxide (yellow cake), transforming
yellow cake first into uranium tetrafluoride (UF4)
gas and then into UF6 gas, followed
by the enrichment of UF6 to varying degrees of
purity for the lighter U235 isotopes: 3.5-4% for
use in nuclear power reactors; 10-20% for research
reactors; and 90%-plus pure for use in the
building of nuclear weapons.
After the
fuel rods in a nuclear power plant have yielded
their energy, transforming water into steam to run
electricity-generating turbines, they are called
"spent rods". They can then be reprocessed with
the aim of extracting from them plutonium (Pu239
or Pu241), which can be used as yet more fissile
material. Nuclear fuel thus produces both electric
power and more nuclear fuel, and is therefore in
principle a renewable source of energy.
"The termination of the fuel
cycle activities demanded of Iran [by the EU] means
you have killed off the nuclear NPT," said
Hassan Rouhani, Iran's chief negotiator with the EU-3
and secretary of the country's Supreme
National Security Council. "If you take out Article
IV, all developing countries will step out of the
treaty."
This is not a fanciful scenario.
Just before the UN conference of 188 countries
opened in New York on May 2 to review the NPT, the
non-nuclear weapons signatories to the NPT met in
Mexico City under the auspices of the New Agenda
Coalition (NAC).
Seven foreign ministers
from Asian, African, European and South American
countries that do not have nuclear weapons
summarized the NAC's stance in the International
Herald Tribune in the following fashion: "When the
nuclear NPT came into force 35 years ago, the
central bargain was that non-nuclear-weapons
states like us would renounce their right to
develop nuclear weapons while retaining the
inalienable right to undertake research into
nuclear energy and to produce and use it for
peaceful purposes ... while the five declared
nuclear-weapon states reduced and then eliminated
their nuclear weapons [Article VI]."
By
now, it has become crystal clear that this bargain
has not been - and will not be - kept. The NAC
criticized the IAEA for spending all its time and
energy monitoring and enforcing compliance by
non-nuclear-weapon countries suspected of wanting
to develop such weapons, while overlooking the
obvious - that the nuclear powers have not
implemented the commitments they made at the NPT
review conferences of 1995 and 2000.
For
instance, in 2000 the US government pledged to
ratify the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, but has
not done so yet and shows no signs that it will.
It also promised to sign a verifiable accord to
end the production of new fissile material for
nuclear weapons, but has failed to do so. To make
matters worse, the Bush administration has been
trying for two years to get Congressional
authorization to fund research on a new generation
of nuclear weapons, including small yield
mini-nukes and nuclear bunker busters. It has also
mandated nuclear labs in the US to come up with
ways of upgrading the present nuclear arsenal by
making it more robust and longer lasting.
US Assistant Secretary of State Stephen
Rademaker carefully pointed out to the NPT review
conference that the Bush administration's Moscow
Treaty with Russia in 2002 required sharp
reductions in the number of operationally deployed
nuclear warheads it retained by 2012. What he
failed to say was that these warheads would be
mothballed, not destroyed, and that the bilateral
treaty lacks verification procedures.
The
NAC representatives also brought up another sore
point for non-nuclear NPT signatories. They
highlighted the 2000 NPT review conference where
nuclear-weapon countries once again formulated an
"unequivocal" undertaking to completely eliminate
their nuclear arsenals. "This goal is all the more
important in a world in which terrorists seek to
acquire weapons of mass destruction," they wrote.
"The nuclear-weapons states should acknowledge
that disarmament and non-proliferation [are]
mutually reinforcing processes: what does not
exist cannot proliferate."
In
contrast, the three Western nuclear-weapon counties (the
US, Britain and France) are primarily interested
in closing what they see as loopholes in the
NPT which, in their view, can be exploited
by non-nuclear-weapon states to fabricate
nuclear arms - especially, of course, "the
inalienable right" to acquire dual-use technology which
could then be deployed for civilian or military
ends. For example, centrifuges used for
enriching uranium to 3.5-4% purity for nuclear-power plants
or 10-20% purity for research reactors can also be
harnessed to produce 90%-plus pure uranium for
weapons.
Iranian moves
In the
case of Iran, its leaders have publicly offered
the EU-3 "objective guarantees" regarding the
peaceful intentions of its uranium-enrichment
program (to be monitored by the IAEA). Washington,
on the other hand, insists that Tehran is using
the NPT as a cover to go to the brink of nuclear
weapons production; that it intends to withdraw
from the NPT at a time of its own choosing (just
as North Korea did) and then assemble a nuclear
weapon within weeks. By so doing, Iran would break
the nuclear weapons monopoly Israel has enjoyed in
the Middle East since 1968. Both the Bush
administration and Israel are determined to
maintain this monopoly.
Washington also
argues that Tehran has forfeited any rights under
the treaty by misleading the IAEA over the nature
of its uranium-enrichment program. Iran does not
accept this assessment, nor have the remaining 34
members of the IAEA's board of governors.
Iran attributes its cat-and-mouse behavior
in the past to the economic sanctions applied
against it by the Europeans and the Americans,
which deprived it of access to civilian nuclear
technology to which it is entitled as a signatory
to the NPT.
These days, however, Iranian
leaders are learning that transparency has its
virtues. Following the publication in the March 13
Sunday Times of a leak from Israeli Prime Minister
Ariel Sharon's office regarding his country's
possible plans to raid Iran's uranium enrichment
facility at Natanz, President Mohammed Khatami
escorted a party of 30 local and foreign
journalists to the underground facility.
That dispelled some of the fear-filled
mystique about the place created by the story
Israeli officials had planted. Among the
structures the visiting journalists saw was a huge
empty hall meant for the installation of thousands
of centrifuges at some future date. A few weeks
later, Iran broke another taboo. It took Elahe
Mohtasham, a representative of the London-based
International Institute of Strategic Studies, on a
day-long visit to the Uranium Conversion Facility
in Isfahan.
In a long report she published
in the Sunday Times on May 1, she described not
just the equipment and buildings she saw, but also
her conversations in Persian with scientists and
other officials at the site. The facility,
completed in March 1998, is visited by the IAEA
every three or four weeks. It was there that, in
March 2004, the Iranians converted yellow cake
into uranium hexafluoride gas UF6 for the first
time. Iran thus became the tenth country in the
world to do so - the five members of the initial
nuclear club, the US, Russia, Britain, France and
China; and later, Israel, India, Pakistan and
Brazil.
Within three months, the Isfahan
facility had produced 45 kg of UF6. By October,
its stock of UF6 rose to 3,000 kg. The scientists
and technicians, including women, had also managed
to transform UF6 gas into liquid. It was then,
with Iran entering talks with the EU-3, that all
such activity was suspended. When asked whether
they would be able to produce enough UF6 to feed
the prospective 50,000 centrifuges at Natanz, 90
miles to the northeast, the scientists replied,
"Yes."
According to the IAEA, between
April and October 2004, the number of centrifuge
rotors in Iran rose from 1,140 to 1,274. And
Rouhani revealed that the government had built and
assembled all those centrifuges in a year and
several months. Later, he stated that the reports
of protective tunnels and underground facilities
being built by Iran for its nuclear facilities
"might be true".
The scientists at the
Isfahan uranium conversion plant were familiar
with the Sunday Times story about Israeli plans to
attack Iran's nuclear facilities. They told
Mohtasham that they had no protection against
military attack and that the tunnels were actually
very narrow, just enough for two people to squeeze
through. They believed, however, that any attack
by the US or Israel would destabilize the whole
region and, at that point, Iran would probably
withdraw from the NPT and start a genuine
nuclear-weapons program.
The European
negotiators seem aware of the dire consequences of
military attacks on Iran by Israel or the US.
Until now, they seemingly wanted to keep the talks
simmering along, hoping that a pragmatic winner in
the presidential election on June 17 could open
the way for accommodation on the issue.
"Pragmatic" is their code word for Ali Akbar
Hashemi Rasfanjani, a wily politician who, along
with Supreme Leader Ali Khamanei, is now the only
surviving member of the top leadership that was
instrumental in bringing about the Islamic
revolution in 1979.
The Iranians do not
seem unduly worried that the emergency meeting of
the IAEA governors will postpone the discussion of
the Europeans' complaint to their regular
quarterly meeting, due to take place just a few
days before the Iranian presidential election.
Even if the issue is referred to the UN Security
Council, there is a very strong chance that China
and Russia will veto any resolution imposing
sanctions on Iran. Overall, the Iranians feel that
this issue, if pushed into the international
arena, will cause a global divide between the
developing world and the Western world. It may be
that they are overestimating, but there is no
doubt that this is an issue of paramount
importance in international affairs.
Dilip Hiro is the author of
The Iranian Labyrinth: Journeys Through
Theocratic Iran and Its Furies (just now being
published by Nation Books) and The Essential
Middle East: A Comprehensive Guide.
(Copyright 2005 Dilip Hiro)
Published with permission of TomDispatch.com |
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