Iran spinning centrifuges - and
half-truths By Gareth Porter
WASHINGTON - Iran's unexpected agreement
with the head of the International Atomic Energy
Agency (IAEA), Mohamed ElBaradei, to resolve old
issues surrounding its nuclear program in less
than two months, and the fact that it has
installed only two-thirds of the centrifuges
previously announced, indicate that Tehran may be
positioning itself for another bid for a
diplomatic solution.
The IAEA report
circulated to board members last week, which is
still unpublished but has been leaked to the
press, says only
2,000 centrifuges have been
activated. In mid-2006 and again in January,
Iranian officials had said they planned to have a
3,000-centrifuge cascade spinning by some time
last spring.
Iran had told IAEA nuclear
inspectors in April that more than 1,300
centrifuges were already in operation, but the
pace has slackened since then. In an interview
with Der Spiegel published on September 3,
ElBaradei admitted that both technical
difficulties and political considerations could
have been factors in the shortfall. But he said,
"My gut feeling tells me that Iran has responded
positively to my repeated demands that it scale
back the program."
Gas centrifuges are
used in uranium enrichment. The heavier isotope of
uranium (uranium-238) in uranium-hexafluoride gas
tends to concentrate at the walls of the
centrifuge as it spins, while the desired
uranium-235 isotope is extracted and concentrated
with a scoop selectively placed inside the
centrifuge. It takes many thousands of centrifuges
to enrich uranium enough for use in a nuclear
reactor (about 3.5% enrichment), and many
thousands more to enrich it to atomic-bomb-grade
(about 90% enrichment).
President Mahmud
Ahmadinejad announced this week that Iran had
actually achieved the goal of 3,000 operational
centrifuges. That was obviously aimed at appealing
to his own domestic base of people who regard the
uranium-enrichment program as a matter of national
pride.
But as Peter Beaumont,
foreign-affairs editor of The Observer in London,
reported in January, Western diplomats and
technical experts have long been "extremely
doubtful that Iran has yet mastered the skills to
install and run" such a large cascade of
centrifuges.
Iranian officials are well
known for always looking for bargaining chips, and
a centrifuge target that Tehran knew it could not
actually achieve any time soon nevertheless gave
Iran potential leverage in any future negotiations
with the IAEA - and particularly its most powerful
member, the United States - on its nuclear
program. It also allowed Iran to appear responsive
to ElBaradei's pleas to slow down the program.
Iranian willingness to reach formal
agreement in three separate meetings with
ElBaradei in July and August to resolve all
remaining issues on its past nuclear research by
November was clearly aimed at moving the Iran
nuclear dossier from the United Nations Security
Council back to the IAEA and averting a military
confrontation with the US.
Based on Iran's
own previous offers, such a deal would involve a
guarantee against any nuclear-weapons program
through an intrusive inspection regime, in return
for an approved enrichment program limited to a
number of centrifuges well short of what would be
required to produce nuclear weapons.
In
the brief 2005 negotiations with the European
Union Three (EU-3 - Britain, France and Germany),
Iran submitted a formal proposal offering to
negotiate a mutually acceptable ceiling on the
number of centrifuges at Natanz, which would be
producing low-enriched uranium that could not be
used to make weapons, and "continuous on-site"
inspection by IAEA nuclear specialists at all
facilities to provide "unprecedented added
guarantees". The EU-3 refused to discuss the
proposal with Tehran.
In May 2006, the
representative of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali
Khamenei on the Supreme National Security Council,
Hassan Rohani - who had been Khamenei's top
nuclear negotiator - offered a similar plan in a
Time magazine essay.
Rohani wrote that
Iran agreed to negotiate with the IAEA and "states
concerned" on the "scope and timing of its
industrial-scale uranium enrichment" and accept a
"verifiable cap on enrichment limit of
reactor-grade [ie, low-enriched] uranium". He
repeated the earlier proposal's acceptance of a
"continuous presence of inspectors" to verify that
no diversion takes place.
Finally,
Khamenei's representative offered to "consider"
ratification of the IAEA Additional Protocol,
which would require "intrusive and snap
inspections".
The argument that Iran
cannot be allowed to have any uranium enrichment
assumes that a sufficient number of centrifuges by
itself would allow Iran to have the capability to
build nuclear weapons. News media have routinely
repeated the statement that 3,000 centrifuges
could enrich enough uranium to make a bomb,
provided the machines run for the requisite
periods.
But ElBaradei observed in an
interview with The Financial Times on February 19
that even if Iran had 3,000 or more centrifuges
operating, they could not go beyond 5% enrichment,
which would be far below what would be required
for weapons-grade uranium, as long they remain
under an IAEA inspection regime.
In
February 2006, ElBaradei suggested that Iran
should be allowed a small-scale enrichment program
on Iranian soil in exchange for guarantees of no
full nuclear-fuel production that could be
diverted for military purposes. Such an agreement
would allow the international community to know
with certainty rather than having to guess whether
Iran is actually enriching uranium to
weapons-grade level or not.
The United
States has insisted that it will not negotiate
with Iran on the nuclear issue until it has agreed
to suspend enrichment completely, but Iran has
said it will only enter talks without
preconditions.
The administration of US
President George W Bush is furious with ElBaradei
for taking the steam out of its campaign of
pressure on Iran. The IAEA report that Iran had
made "a significant step forward" by agreeing to a
work plan for addressing remaining nuclear issues
by the end of the year makes it more difficult for
the US administration to get support for
ratcheting up pressure on Iran at a meeting of the
IAEA next week.
Even worse for the
administration, according to a report by Tom
Olmstead in US News this week, the agreement
"could well blunt any rapid moves at the Security
Council for further sanctions".
The
Washington Post, which has been vocal in support
of the administration's aggressive policy toward
Iran, attacked ElBaradei on Wednesday in an
editorial for using his agency to "thwart" US
policy. The Post accused him of refusing to "carry
out the policy of the Security Council or the IAEA
board" and acting "as if he were independent of
them ..."
The Bush administration has long
regarded the IAEA chief as an obstacle to its
policy of using military threats and economic
sanctions to coerce Iran to give up its nuclear
program and has tried repeatedly to remove
ElBaradei as general director or to get him to
follow its line toward Iran.
Neo-conservatives in the administration
were furious with him for having rejected its
charge that Saddam Hussein was actively pursuing a
nuclear-weapons program before the US invasion of
Iraq in 2003.
But ElBaradei angered
administration officials again by refusing to go
along with its policy of accusing Iran of having a
secret nuclear-weapons program. Then-secretary of
state Colin Powell confirmed in mid-December 2004
that he had asked ElBaradei to step down the
previous summer.
Despite US diplomatic
pressure on its allies, however, in an April 2005
showdown in the IAEA board, the US was the only
one of 35 members who did not support another term
for ElBaradei.
Gareth Porter is
a historian and national-security policy analyst.
His latest book, Perils of Dominance:
Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam,
was published in June 2005.
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