The
cadence behind Iran's atomic
block By Gareth Porter
WASHINGTON - The failure of a mission by
the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to
get Iranian permission to visit a military testing
site mentioned in its latest report has been
interpreted in media coverage as a stall to avoid
the discovery of confirming evidence of past work
on nuclear weapons.
But the history of
Iranian cooperation with the IAEA on carrying out
inspections at the Parchin military testing
center, as well as a
previous IAEA-Iran work
program agreement, suggests that Iran is keeping
permission for such a visit as bargaining leverage
to negotiate a better deal with the agency.
The IAEA statement on Wednesday emphasized
the fact that the mission to Tehran had been
denied permission to visit the site at Parchin.
That prompted the Associated Press correspondent
in Vienna George Jahn to called Iran's refusal to
agree to an IAEA visit to Parchin "stonewalling"
and evidence of "hardline resistance" to
international pressure on its nuclear program.
International Herald Tribune blogger
Harvey Morris wrote that Iran's strategy was to
"play for time".
But access to Parchin was
discussed as part of broader negotiations on what
the IAEA statement called a "document facilitating
the clarification of unresolved issues" in regard
to "possible military dimensions" of Iran's
nuclear program. The negotiations were focused on
what cooperation the IAEA is demanding and what
the agency is ready to offer in return for that
cooperation.
Judging from past
negotiations between Iran and the IAEA, Iran is
ready to offer access to Parchin as well as other
sites requested by the agency as part of an
agreement under which the IAEA would stop accusing
Iran of carrying out covert nuclear weapons
experiments.
The IAEA's position in the
negotiations was revealed by the AP's Jahn, who
reported that the agency mission had hoped to get
Iranian agreement to meetings with "scientists
suspected of working on the alleged weapons
program" and to "inspect documents related to
nuclear weapons work".
The September 2008
IAEA report said the agency had "proposed
discussions with Iranian experts on the contents
of the engineering reports [on the Shahab-3
missile] examining in detail modeling studies ..."
Iran has rejected such demands as
threatening its legitimate national security
interests, in violation of the IAEA statute.
The scientists that the agency is
demanding to see are publicly known officials of
Iran's military research institutions. Even before
Israel had begun assassinating Iranian scientists,
Iran had made it clear it will not give the IAEA
physical access to any individual scientists.
The IAEA wants to visit a specific site at
Parchin because of information from an unnamed
member state, cited in its November 2011 report,
that Iran had "constructed a large explosives
containment vessel in which to conduct
hydrodynamic experiments" - tests of nuclear
weapons designs without the use of fissile
material.
The report said the construction
had been carried out at Parchin military complex
in 2000 and that the IAEA had satellite imagery
that was "consistent with" that information,
meaning only that there were structures that could
have housed such a vessel at Parchin in 2000.
The previous history of IAEA inspections
at Parchin make it clear, however, that Iran knew
it had nothing to hide at Parchin after 2000.
In 2004, John Bolton, the point man in the
George W Bush administration on Iran, who
coordinated closely with Israel, charged that
satellite imagery showed a bunker at Parchin
appropriate for large-scale explosives tests such
as those needed to detonate a bomb that would use
a neutron trigger.
Bolton put heavy
pressure on the IAEA to carry out an investigation
at Parchin. A few months later, Tehran agreed to
allow the agency to select any five buildings and
their surroundings to investigate freely.
That gave US and Israeli intelligence, as
well as IAEA experts, an opportunity for which
they would not have dreamed of asking: they could
scan satellite imagery of the entire Parchin
complex for anything that could possibly suggest
work on a nuclear weapon, including a containment
vessel for hydrodynamic testing, and demand to
inspect that building and the grounds around it at
their leisure.
In January 2005, an IAEA
team visited Parchin and investigated the five
areas they had chosen, taking environmental
samples, but found nothing suspicious. In November
2005, Iran allowed the IAEA to do the same thing
all over again on five more buildings of its own
choice.
The Iranian military and nuclear
establishment would never have agreed to such
terms for IAEA inspection missions at Parchin -
not once but twice - if they had been concealing a
hydrodynamic test facility at the base.
Other information suggests that no such
vessel ever existed at Parchin. The November
report claimed the IAEA had obtained information
on the dimensions of the containment vessel from
the publication of a foreign expert identified as
someone who worked "in the nuclear weapons program
of the country of his origin".
That was a
reference to Vlachyslav Danilenko, a Ukrainian
scientist who has acknowledged having lectured in
Iran on theoretical physics and having helped the
country build a cylinder for production of
nano-diamonds, which was his research specialty.
However, Danilenko has firmly denied ever having
done any work related to nuclear weapons.
The claim that the dimensions of the
putative bomb test chamber at Parchin could be
gleaned from a publication by Danilenko is
implausible.
The report said the bomb
containment chamber at Parchin was "designed to
contain the detonation of 70 kilograms of high
explosives". Danilenko's patented 1992 design for
a cylinder for nano-diamond production, however,
was built to contain only 10 kg of explosives.
Former IAEA weapons inspector and nuclear
weapons expert Robert Kelley has pointed out,
moreover, that a container for only 70 kg of
explosives could not possibly have been used for
hydrodynamic testing of a nuclear weapon design.
The negotiations on a "framework" for
Iran's cooperation with the IAEA recall the
negotiation of a "work program" in August 2007
aimed at resolving a series of issues on which the
IAEA Safeguards Department suspected links to
nuclear weapons. The issues included experiments
involving the extraction of polonium-210,
plutonium experiments and possible military
control of the Gchine uranium mine.
In
previous years, Iran had failed to provide
sufficient information to overcome those
suspicions. But after the negotiation of the "work
program", Iran began to move with dispatch to
provide documentation aimed at clearing up the six
remaining issues.
The IAEA acknowledged
that all six of the issues had been effectively
resolved in two reports in late 2007 and early
2008.
The reason for the dramatic change
in cooperation was simple: the IAEA had pledged
that, in return for Iran's resolving the six
issues, "the implementation of safeguards in Iran
will be conducted in a routine manner." That was
seen as a significant step toward finally getting
a clean bill of health from the agency.
But the IAEA instead then began focusing
its questioning entirely on the purported Iranian
documents of unknown origin and doubtful
authenticity which the IAEA called the "alleged
studies".
Gareth Porter is an
investigative historian and journalist
specializing in US national security policy. The
paperback edition of his latest book, Perils of
Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War
in Vietnam, was published in 2006.
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