Iran's fate still in US
hands By Kaveh L Afrasiabi
This week, the highly anticipated status
report on Iran by Mohamed ElBaradei, the director
general of the International Atomic Energy Agency,
will be released, ahead of a crucial IAEA meeting
set for March 6, and all parties to the Iran
nuclear crisis are involved in ferocious
last-minute diplomacy.
The whirlwind
global diplomacy includes the visit to Tehran by
China's vice minister of foreign affairs, Lu
Guozheng, and the
Middle East trip of US
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to whip up
Arab support for the US stance against Iran.
This coincides with the dangerous
escalation of Sunni-Shi'ite conflict bordering on
civil war in Iraq, bound to benefit Rice's agenda
of heightening the perception by Sunni Arabs of
the Iran threat, given that none of the Arab
states that are currently members of the IAEA's
board of governors sided with Iran at the last
meeting that saw Tehran's nuclear dossier referred
to the United Nations Security Council.
It
is noteworthy that the statement of Iran's
spiritual leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, issued
last Thursday forcefully condemned attacks on
Sunni mosques in Iraq in retaliation for an attack
on a Shi'ite shrine. "I see it necessary to
strongly request from the grieving Shi'ites in
Iran, Iraq and elsewhere in the world to refrain
from any hostile action toward their Muslim
brethren. Surely there are hands at work seeking
to provoke the Shi'ites against the mosques and
other revered places of the people of Sunni faith.
Any such action is aiding the enemies of Islam and
is forbidden by sharia [Islamic law]."
Nevertheless, there is now a double-edged
sword in Iraq's connection to the Iranian nuclear
crisis: just as Iran has been using its influence
in Iraq as a lever with the West, the United
States can now turn the tables and use the growing
Sunni tide against Shi'ites to its advantage in
the nuclear crisis.
There is some good
news from Tehran, though. Iranian officials
announced on Sunday an "agreement in principle"
with Russia on the idea of a joint nuclear-fuel
venture on Russian soil. Establishing the facility
in Russia would give that country some control
over the the uranium.
The head of Russia's
atomic-energy agency, Sergei Kiriyenko, was,
however, more circumspect than his Iranian
counterpart at a press conference. He limited
himself to mentioning continuing talks in Moscow
this week and a guarantee of a Russian supply of
fuel for the nuclear power plant in Bushehr, Iran,
that Russia is building.
He did say later,
though, that "the majority of technical and
financial issues pertaining to the joint
enrichment project in Russia have been solved".
This, in turn, raises an important
question: What about the moratorium on Iranian
enrichment activities, which a mere 10 days ago
was set as a precondition for the Russian proposal
by Russia's officials? There are growing
indications of a possible breakthrough on this
thorny question, in light of a recent report by
the Brussels-based organization International
Crisis Group endorsing the notion of "delayed
limited enrichment" by Iran. [1]
Conceptually, then, the gap between the
parties in this crisis appears to be narrowing,
and barring unforeseen circumstances, such as
"incriminating" news about Iran's nuclear
activities in light of another IAEA visit to Iran
to inquire about the so-called "Green Salt"
project, we can be guardedly optimistic about a
breakthrough. [2]
Still, the bottle
remains half-empty, and as of this writing many
important details still need to be ironed out. The
devil of the Russian proposal is, after all, in
the details. Even Kiriyenko admitted in his press
conference that the Russian proposal entailed a
time-consuming chain of activities involving a
whole network backed by a "study".
The
scope of Iran's managerial involvement and
technical participation are two related issues of
tremendous concern to the US, which supports only
financial participation by Iran, and it remains to
be seen whether the White House will endorse any
potential deal between Tehran and Moscow in the
near future.
In some respects, then, the
ball is at present in the US court: an inflexible
US attitude could torpedo the Russian deal and
force the issue at the UN Security Council,
probably with less Russian backing, as Moscow for
the moment favors the resolution of the issue
within the IAEA framework. But that may be
diplomatic maneuvering not sustainable after a
collapse of Iran-Russia talks.
A flexible
US response, on the other hand, could put a cap on
this unpredictable crisis and allow the United
States to have a proactive role, even with respect
to future Iranian nuclear programs. Concerning the
latter, Iran has recently referred favorably to
the US-backed idea of an international fuel bank,
and Iran's chief negotiator, Ali Larijani, has
explicitly mentioned some recent ideas put forward
by US scientists (see Asia Times Online, Closing the doors to nuclear
diplomacy, February 22).
Larijani, in
a recent interview with Al-Arabiya, stated that
Iran was still studying certain recent proposals
made by US scientists, such as the use of
"automatic centrifuges" for low-enriched uranium.
Indeed, in an ideal scenario, the US could
offer support to Iran in such important areas as
nuclear-waste management. Compared with Russia,
which has a less than desirable record on
nuclear-waste management, particularly during the
Cold War, the US has advanced technology and
experience that it could conceivably share with
Iran and thus help the cause of Iran's nuclear
environmentalism.
A US role in
low-level waste in Iran? At present, the US
has a couple of low-level nuclear-waste facilities
- the Savannah River site in South Carolina and
the Hanford site in Richland, Washington - and it
passed a low-level-waste act in 1980 that could be
instructional for Iranian lawmakers.
The
US has shut down several sites, including one in
Idaho, because of such problems as ground
contamination and poor safety standards, again,
all of which could be instructional for Iran. As
of now, after decades of a nuclear program in
Iran, there is no legislation on nuclear waste
and, sadly, no nuclear environmentalism either.
This is despite the presence of many
environmentalist organizations in Iran focusing on
pollution and other related issues.
Hypothetically, if Iran and the US were to
allow a sudden U-turn in their present hostile
relations and seriously to contemplate a gradual
normalization, then the idea of some token US
participation in the Iranian nuclear program
should not be ignored.
This could begin in
the area of nuclear-waste management, particularly
since an Iran-Russia agreement on the return of
spent fuel from the Bushehr plant to Russia covers
only intermediate and high-level nuclear waste,
and hence there is room for some US involvement
deemed politically safe in the current
environment.
At a minimum, the US could
assist with facilitating a consulting role by US
scientists and nuclear-waste experts with Iran's
atomic-energy agency; the latter would certainly
benefit from US experience, such as in the interim
storage of nuclear waste.
David Lochbaum,
in his book Nuclear Waste Disposal Crisis
(PennWellBooks, 1996), has noted that
post-Chernobyl studies have shown that Russian
safety analysis "tends to place greater emphasis
on prevention and early mitigation of selected
design-basis accidents than it does on the
consequences and mitigation of severe accidents
beyond the design basis of the plant".
Another author, Raymond Murray, in his
book Understanding Radioactive Waste
(Battelle Press, 1994), has stated that only
by means of a sophisticated computer program "can
the performance of a disposal facility be
predicted accurately". This, in turn, raises the
question: Why shouldn't the US consider assisting
Iran as it has such know-how?
Toward
nuclear environmentalism in Iran As Iran
persists in its ambitious plan to expand its
nuclear program through the purchase of several
new reactors, among other things, the issues of
license requirements and contingency plans for
crisis prevention, environmental protection and
the like will gain greater prominence. And again,
these are areas where US nuclear experience and
knowledge could be used.
The bottom line
of the United States' concern about Iran's nuclear
program should not just be about militarization,
but about nuclear safety as well.
What is
needed in Iran today, in addition to a
nuclear-waste act, is a nuclear-waste fund, to
underwrite fully the costs of disposal programs
not covered by the agreement with Russia on the
return of spent fuel, including the training of a
whole new cadre of nuclear environmentalists.
But that is future thinking and, for now,
the political crisis over Iran's nuclear program
has first to be resolved.
Notes 1. According to the
International Crisis Group, the delayed limited
enrichment plan would work as follows: "The wider
international community, and the West in
particular, would explicitly accept that Iran
cannot only produce peaceful nuclear energy but
has the right to enrich domestically; in return,
Iran would agree to a several-year delay in the
commencement of its enrichment program, major
limitations on its initial size and scope, and a
highly intrusive inspections regime."
2.
"Green Salt" is a term given to uranium
tetrafluoride (UF4), which is
a mid-point state in the process of converting
uranium ore into the UF6
uranium fuel used in nuclear plants or,
alternatively, further enriched for weapons-grade
uranium. In essence, it is a section of the fuel
cycle that Iran had not divulged. Word of the
"Green Salt" project first emerged in a summary of
investigations by a deputy to IAEA head ElBaradei
given to a February 2-4 IAEA board meeting that
resulted in a vote to report Iran's case to the UN
Security Council. Western intelligence has linked
this uranium-processing project to missile warhead
design and tests with high explosives, although
the basis for these charges remains highly
debatable.
Kaveh L Afrasiabi,
PhD, is the author of After Khomeini: New
Directions in Iran's Foreign Policy (Westview
Press) and co-author of "Negotiating Iran's
Nuclear Populism", The Brown Journal of World
Affairs, Volume XII, Issue 2, Summer 2005, with
Mustafa Kibaroglu. He is also author of Iran's
Nuclear Program: Debating Facts Versus Fiction
(forthcoming).
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