The International Atomic Energy Agency
(IAEA) reported on February 22 that Iran had not
responded "adequately" to intelligence alleging it
studied technology applicable to making atom
bombs, but said that Tehran had defused concerns
about other activities.
IAEA board
governors are due to discuss the findings next
week, and the outcome could have a bearing on
whether the United Nations Security Council
imposes a third round of sanctions on Iran over
its nuclear program.
Matthew Bunn [1], a
senior research associate in the Project
on
Managing
the Atom in the Belfer Center for Science and
International Affairs at Harvard University's John
F Kennedy School of Government, calls the IAEA
report "mixed", and says that it is no means a
clean bill of health from the IAEA.
Kaveh Afrasiabi:
What is your reaction to the new International
Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) report on Iran?
Matthew Bunn: It's
a mixed report, by no means a clean bill of health
from the IAEA. On the one hand, Iran finally
provided detailed explanations and documentation
to the IAEA on several issues that looked
suspicious in the past, and the IAEA considers
those issues "no longer outstanding".
This
includes procurements that looked
centrifuge-related by the head of the Physics
Research Center (and contamination with enriched
uranium on equipment there); experiments with
Polonium-210 (which can be used to start the chain
reaction in a nuclear bomb); and changing
administrative arrangements at the Gachine mine
(which some had interpreted as an attempt to hold
it aside as a secret source of unmonitored
uranium). In each of these cases, the IAEA says
that Iran's explanations are either "consistent
with" or "not inconsistent with" the other
information it has, though it wants to keep
working to verify that Iran's explanations are
correct.
On the other hand, the report
includes troubling new information about
procurement and other activities by Iran that the
agency judges to be "relevant to nuclear weapon
R&D [research and development]" - not just
civilian enrichment. This includes "the testing of
high voltage detonator firing equipment; the
development of an exploding bridgewire detonator
(EBW); the simultaneous firing of multiple EBW
detonators [especially relevant to designing and
building implosion-type nuclear weapons]; and the
identification of an explosive testing arrangement
that involved the use of a 400 meter shaft and a
firing capability remote from the shaft by a
distance of 10 kilometers".
The report
also discusses procurement of "training courses on
neutron calculations, the effect of shock waves on
metal, enrichment/isotope separation and ballistic
missiles. Efforts to procure spark gaps, shock
wave software, neutron sources, special steel
parts (GOV/2006/15, para 37) and radiation
measurement equipment, including borehole gamma
spectrometers, were also made."
The agency
says that it is has assessed the ballistic missile
re-entry vehicle schematic from the famous laptop
[said to provide intelligence on Iran's nuclear
program] as "quite likely to be able to
accommodate a nuclear device". From the report and
from discussions with IAEA safeguards staff, it
appears that this information on procurements and
the like comes from sources going well beyond the
laptop.
Iran describes almost all of this
as "fabricated" and "baseless," while
acknowledging buying some shock-modeling software
for other purposes, and some radiation detectors
for radiation protection purposes. The agency also
asked about particular people and organizations
named in the documents, and Iran asserted that
neither the people nor the organizations even
exist (except for some of the organizations, which
Iran says exist but have never done anything
nuclear-related).
In some cases, the state
that provided the information that was the basis
for the agency's questions - the United States, in
most cases, though the agency report pointedly
refers to information from "other member states",
in the plural - only allowed the IAEA to show the
information to Iran days before the report was
written; in those cases, therefore, it may not be
surprising that Iran has not yet answered some of
the questions the IAEA raised.
Given
Iran's extended period of violating its safeguards
agreement and making false statements to the IAEA
in the past, many states will probably not accept
Iran's assertion that all of the information that
suggests weaponization activities is fabricated
and baseless. If Iran wants to rebuild
international confidence in the peaceful nature of
its nuclear program, it is likely to have to
explain these past activities fully.
KA: The report
states that the outstanding questions have been
satisfactorily resolved. Do you agree?
MB: That's not
what the report says. It says that some issues are
no longer outstanding, but that others, including
issues that strongly suggest Iran had a nuclear
weapons program in the past, are still very much
open. And it makes the point that the IAEA is
unable to draw the conclusion - as it has for many
other countries - that there are no covert, hidden
nuclear activities in Iran.
KA: In your
opinion, how close, or far, is Iran to its stated
objective of nuclear fuel production "on
industrial scale"?
MB: Iran is a long
way from being able to do enough enrichment to
provide any significant fraction of the fuel for
the Bushehr reactor - but unfortunately not very
far from being potentially able to make enough HEU
[highly enriched uranium] for a bomb, should it
choose to do so. The information in the report on
the quantity of UF6 [Uranium Hexafluoride] that
has been fed into the centrifuges at Natanz so
far, and the amount of product that has resulted,
makes clear that these cascades are still
operating far below their design capacity.
Comparing this information to the data in
previous IAEA reports, it appears that this
situation has not improved significantly for over
a year. This may explain the widespread press
reports that Iran has decided not to deploy more
of the P-1 centrifuges, but to finish development
of a more advanced centrifuge, the IR-2, and focus
additional deployments on that type. One of the
important pieces of new news in the report is that
initial testing of the IR-2 centrifuges with UF6
has begun. Nevertheless, if it remains Iran's plan
not to deploy more of the P-1s, then it is likely
to be a substantial time before additional
centrifuges are deployed in large numbers at
Natanz, which would create some time for
additional diplomacy to find a solution that
serves Iran's national interests and those of the
United States, of the other interested parties,
and of the non-proliferation regime.
KA: Given the
IAEA's close monitoring of Iran's uranium
enrichment and reprocessing activities and the
agency's ability to detect any military diversion,
doesn't it make more sense for the US and its
European allies to focus on nuclear transparency
and the implementation of the IAEA's Additional
Protocol, instead of seeking a full suspension of
those activities?
MB: I
believe that a negotiated solution that is
acceptable to the P5+1 [US Security Council
Permanent Five - the US, Russia, China, Britain
and France - plus Germany] will have to include
both far-reaching transparency - and,
ideally, actual multinational ownership and
control of whatever centrifuge activities continue
in Iran - and restraints on Iran's real enrichment
capabilities.
The problem with Iran's view
that transparency should be enough is the inherent
capability of these centrifuges to produce nuclear
bomb material at any time Iran chose to withdraw
from the agreement and tell the inspectors to
leave. Since the world already has the experience
of Iran terminating its voluntary compliance with
the Additional Protocol in early 2006, that is a
genuine concern for the international community.
A low cap on the centrifuge capability
actually in place in Iran would provide a
significant time between any decision on Iran's
part to leave the agreement and when Iran could
produce enough nuclear material for a bomb;
international ownership and control of whatever
agreed centrifuge activities continue would
provide additional 24/7 [24 hours a day, seven
days a week] transparency and a higher political
barrier to turning these activities to weapons
uses. It would still allow Iran to ramp up
production over a period of a few years if it ever
suffered an interruption of fuel supply. [See
Iran shakes pillars of nuclear
accord Asia Times
Online, February, 9, 2008.]
For the
present, Iran remains in violation of legally
binding Security Council resolutions requiring it
to suspend its enrichment and reprocessing
activities. I believe it would be in Iran's
national interest to enter into at least a
short-term suspension to get negotiations started,
while pushing for those talks to be based on the
same "action for action, words for words" formula
as has been followed in the six-party talks with
North Korea, so that for each subsequent step Iran
took, it would get specific actions in return from
the other parties.
KA: What is the
objective of the UN Security Council's demand for
the suspension of the Iranian nuclear fuel cycle,
since it refers to the IAEA's similar request as a
"confidence-building" measure, as opposed to a
legally-binding demand for permanent suspension?
What should be the duration of this suspension?
MB: The Security
Council resolutions legally require Iran to
suspend its enrichment and reprocessing
activities, with the legal authority of Article
VII of the UN Charter. They are not suggestions,
or voluntary requests. Given Iran's 18-year
history of violating its safeguards agreement with
the IAEA, given the clear capability of the
centrifuge technology Iran is deploying to produce
highly enriched uranium for nuclear weapons, and
given the continuing troubling questions that have
not yet been resolved - including the new
weaponization-related information in the new IAEA
report - the Security Council clearly judged that
Iran's refusal to suspend its enrichment
activities constituted a threat to international
peace and security, giving the Security Council
both the right and the responsibility to act under
Article VII. At the same time, the Security
Council resolutions are very clear in calling for
dialogue and negotiation to find a solution
acceptable to all parties. The time has come to
find a path by which such dialogue can succeed.
The Security Council resolutions do not
specify any particular duration for the suspension
they require. They say nothing about making the
suspension permanent. I believe there is an
opportunity for Iran - especially now that it
appears to be shifting its emphasis away from the
P-1 centrifuges that are now deployed, so that it
has little need for large-scale enrichment
activity at Natanz in any case - to enter into a
suspension lasting a few months or a year
(preferably the latter, so that the suspension,
and the talks, could continue into the term of a
new US president), to see if negotiations will be
productive.
Note 1.
Matthew Bunn's current research interests include
nuclear theft and terrorism; nuclear proliferation
and measures to control it; and the future of
nuclear energy and its fuel cycle. Bunn played a
major role in US policies related to the control
and disposition of weapons-usable nuclear
materials in the United States and the former
Soviet Union. He is the winner of the American
Physical Society's Joseph A Burton Forum Award for
"outstanding contributions in helping to formulate
policies to decrease the risks of theft of nuclear
weapons and nuclear materials", and the Federation
of American Scientists' Hans Bethe Award for
"science in service to a more secure world".
Bunn is the author or co-author of over a
dozen books and book-length technical reports
(most recently including Securing the Bomb 2007),
and scores of articles, including the paper
Placing Iran's Enrichment Activities
in Standby, June
2006.
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", Brown
Journal of World Affairs, Volume XII, Issue 2,
Summer 2005, with Mustafa Kibaroglu. He also wrote
"Keeping Iran's nuclear potential latent", Harvard
International Review, and is author of
Iran's Nuclear
Program: Debating Facts Versus
Fiction.
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