US
rejected Iranian no nukes offer in
2005 By Gareth Porter
WASHINGTON - France and Germany were
prepared in spring 2005 to negotiate on an Iranian
proposal to convert all of its enriched uranium to
fuel rods, making it impossible to use it for
nuclear weapons, but Britain vetoed the deal at
the insistence of the United States, according to
a new account by a former top Iranian nuclear
negotiator.
Seyed Hossein Mousavian, who
had led Iran's nuclear negotiating team in 2004
and 2005, makes it clear that the reason the offer
was rejected was that the George W Bush
administration refused to countenance any Iranian
enrichment capability, regardless of the
circumstances.
Mousavian reveals
previously unknown details about that pivotal
episode in the diplomacy
surrounding the Iran nuclear issue in memoirs
published Tuesday.
Mousavian, now a
visiting research scholar at Princeton
University's Woodrow Wilson School, had been a top
political aide to former president Hashemi
Rafsanjani and head of the foreign relations
committee of Iran's Supreme National Security
Council during his political-diplomatic career in
Iran.
Mousavian had been entrusted with
Iran's most sensitive diplomatic missions,
including negotiations on a strategic
understanding with Saudi crown prince Abdullah in
the early 1990s and with US officials on
Afghanistan and Al-Qaeda in 2001 and 2002, his
memoirs reveal. He was arrested by the Mahmud
Ahmadinejad administration on charges of
"espionage" in April 2007.
The British and
US refusal to pursue the Iranian offer, which
might have headed off the political diplomatic
crisis over the Iranian nuclear program since
then, is confirmed by a former British diplomat
who participated in the talks and former European
ambassadors to Iran.
Mousavian writes that
one of the European negotiators told him that
"they were ready to compromise but that the United
States was the obstacle".
The episode
occurred a few months after an agreement between
Iran and the British, French and German
governments on November 15, 2004, on terms for
negotiations on "long-term arrangements", during
which Iran agreed to maintain a voluntary
suspension of enrichment and other nuclear
activities.
The agreement to be negotiated
was to "provide objective guarantees that Iran's
nuclear program is exclusively for peaceful
purposes" as well as "firm guarantees on nuclear,
technological and economic cooperation and firm
commitments on security issues".
The EU
objective in the talks was to demand a complete
end to all Iranian enrichment. At the March 23,
2005, meeting in Paris, the EU called for an
indefinite suspension of enrichment by Iran,
meaning suspension beyond the negotiations
themselves.
At the same meeting, Iranian
negotiators submitted a proposal that included a
"policy declaration to convert all enriched
uranium to fuel rods" and "committed to getting
the Additional Protocol", which would allow the
IAEA to make snap inspections on undeclared
facilities, ratified by its parliament.
Conversion of low enriched uranium (LEU)
to fuel rods only usable for power plants could
have provided a guarantee against using the
enriched uranium for nuclear weapons. Iran did not
have the capability to fabricate fuel rods, so the
implication was that the LEU would have to be
shipped to another country for conversion or would
have to be done under international auspices
within Iran.
Once the fuel rods were
fabricated, it would be practically impossible for
Iran to reconvert them for military purposes.
Peter Jenkins, then the British permanent
representative to the IAEA and a member of the
British delegation to the Paris meeting with Iran,
recalled in an interview with IPS, "All of us were
impressed by the proposal."
The European
delegations asked for a break to discuss it among
themselves, Jenkins recalled, but soon decided to
tell Iran they would "need more time to consider
further".
But the Europeans did not seek
to explore the Iranian offer further.
Mousavian reveals that Iran learned a few
weeks after that meeting that the Europeans had no
intention of negotiating any agreement that would
allow Iran to have any enrichment program. On
April 12, 2005, Mousavian recounts, the French
ambassador to Iran, Francois Nicoullaud, told him
it was impossible for the Europeans to negotiate
on the Iranian proposal.
"For the US the
enrichment in Iran is a red line which the EU
cannot cross," Mousavian quotes Nicoullaud as
saying.
In June 2009, Nicoullaud signed a
statement with five other former European
ambassadors to Iran recalling that in 2005 "Iran
was ready to discuss a ceiling limit for the
number of its centrifuges and to maintain its rate
of enrichment far below the high levels necessary
for weapons," but that "the Europeans and the
Americans wanted to compel Iran to forsake its
enrichment program entirely."
Jenkins
recalled that he was aware that no proposal, no
matter how forthcoming on assurances against
diversion of LEU to a nuclear weapon, would be
acceptable to the British government if it
involved a resumption of enrichment.
"I
knew in my heart of hearts that this was a waste
of time - that it would not fly," he recalled.
"The British objective was to eliminate
entirely Iran's enrichment capability," Jenkins
said. "I remember we couldn't even allow Iran to
have 20 centrifuges for R&D [research and
development] purposes because we ourselves had
mastered the technology with even fewer than
that."
The Iranians had made clear to the
European three that they could not agree to any
loss of their right to enrich, according to
Jenkins, but the Europeans hoped that it was
merely an opening negotiating position.
"I
don't think we realized fully in March 2005 that
Iran was not prepared to give up enrichment as the
price of a settlement," Jenkins recalled. "We
believed that if we could come up with sufficient
incentives and scare Iran with the threat of
referral to the [United Nations] Security Council,
they would give in."
After reading
Mousavian's minutes of the meeting with
Nicoullaud, the Supreme Leader instructed his
nuclear policy coordinator, Hassan Rowhani, to
restart the uranium conversion facility at
Isfahan. Iran had included the conversion facility
in its suspension of enrichment activities only
with great reluctance under the pressure of the
European negotiators.
Meanwhile, Mousavian
made the rounds to try to persuade the Europeans
to accept an Iranian offer to ensure that it would
not divert uranium to nuclear weapons. He recalls
offering his German counterpart, Michael Schaefer,
in Berlin yet another proposal that had not yet
been cleared by Iranian leaders.
Under the
Mousavian proposal, Iran would have resumed
uranium conversion at the Isfahan plant but would
have exported its product to "an agreed-upon
country" in exchange for yellowcake, the form
uranium takes prior to enrichment.
At a
later stage of the proposal, Iran would have begun
enrichment at Natanz with some 3,000 centrifuges,
but again would have exported all the enriched
uranium to "an agreed-upon country".
While
those extraordinary arrangements were being
carried out, Mousavian proposed, negotiations on a
"final compromise" on "objective guarantees of
non-diversion" and EU "firm guarantees" on
comprehensive relations with Iran would continue
for a maximum of one year, and that Iran would
adopt a timetable for enrichment agreed upon with
the EU "based on Iran's fuel requirements".
Schafer encouraged Mousavian to pursue the
proposal with the French and British, and French
political director Stanislas Lefabvre Laboulaye
told him it would depend on the British response.
But Mousavian writes that the British
director general for political affairs, John
Sawers, told him that the Bush administration
"would never tolerate the operation of even one
centrifuge in Iran".
After his round of
meetings with the Europeans, Mousavian was
informed by Rowhani that the package he had
proposed had been accepted by the Iranian
leadership, based on a minimum of 3,000
centrifuges and a one-year limit on the
negotiations. But a third condition was that the
Europeans had to agree on the plan before the
August Iranian presidential election.
The
third condition suggests that Supreme Leader Ali
Khamenei did not want either of the two
presidential candidates, Hashemi Rafsanjani or
Ahmadinejad, to get credit for the agreement with
the Europeans.
The conversion of the bulk
of Iranian low enriched uranium to fuel rods after
being exported to France or Russia was the basis
for the Barack Obama administration's diplomatic
proposal to Iran in October 2009.
The
Ahmadinejad government negotiated with the US and
European diplomats on the proposal, but in the end
Iran was not willing to part with as much as 80%
of its stockpile of enriched uranium without
getting any change in US policy in return.
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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