US
think tank fuels Iran nuclear
crisis By
Kaveh L Afrasiabi
CAMBRIDGE, Massachusetts - Several years
ago, when a US Congressional report erroneously
caused false alarms about Iran's "weapons-grade"
uranium enrichment, it was publicly rebuffed by
the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), and
a top IAEA official criticized the report's
authors for making statements that showed "they
are interested in fueling the crisis, not solving
it".
Today, the same criticism is
warranted against a new report, entitled US
Nonproliferation Strategy for The Changing Middle
East, which recommends increased US sanctions
and "credible military threats" against Iran in
order to halt its march toward nuclear weapons.
Published by a US think tank, the
Institute For Science and International Security,
this report states unequivocally that Iran will
reach the "critical" threshold of producing
weapons-grade
uranium for one or more bombs
by the middle of 2014. In no uncertain terms, the
authors endorse the military option and state that
the US president "should explicitly declare that
he will use military force to destroy Iran's
nuclear program if Iran takes additional decisive
steps toward producing a bomb."
A close
scrutiny of this report reveals, however, the
existence of several problems that undermine its
value and reveal its authors's political bias.
First, even David Albright, a co-chair of
the report, in his interview with Reuters, dated
January 14, 2013, has admitted: "We don't think
there is any secret enrichment plant making
significant secret uranium enrichment right now."
[1]
Absent evidence of an undeclared,
secret enrichment activity by Iran, and given the
IAEA's repeated confirmation of the absence of any
evidence of diversion of declared nuclear
material, this obviously begs the question of
whether the report raises a false alarm.
Second, all of Iran's uranium enrichment
activities at the Natanz and Fordo nuclear plants
are covered by the IAEA's safeguard and
verifications standards, including surveillance
cameras at the enrichment halls, regular as well
as (dozens of) short-notice inspections, and this
simply means that the agency is in a position to
detect any illicit diversion shortly after it
transpires.
Third, this report collides
with earlier output from the think tank. Case in
point, Albright himself has repeatedly admitted
(for example in a 2006 report entitled "The Clock
Is Ticking, But How Fast?", that "there is no
evidence of any decision by Iran to build a
nuclear arsenal". In that report, Albright
calculated that with 1,500 centrifuges Iran "could
produce as much as 28 kilograms of weapons-grade
uranium per year".
He estimated that 15-20
kg of highly-enriched uranium (HEU) was needed to
build a nuclear weapon and that if Iran had
"produced a stock of LEU (low-enriched uranium)
and used this stock as the initial feed stock, it
could produce 20 kg in about one to two months".
What then explains the newest report's more
conservative estimate that gives a grace period of
roughly one-and-a-half years?
Should Iran
choose, it can use its LEU to produce several
bombs by summer 2013, so there is actually no
question about Iran's potential capability. But,
the real question is whether or not Iran is
marching down this path at all - that would
warrant the report's hawkish and thoroughly
coercive recommendations vis-a-vis Iran?
Indeed, this is the key question that
determines the justification for sanctions and,
worse, military threats against Iran. After all,
Iran's right to possess a civilian nuclear fuel
cycle is protected under the NPT articles and to
this date there is no evidence that Iran has
breached its nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty
(NPT) obligations that would warrant a UN Security
Council's quest to deprive Iran of this
"inalienable" right, in light of Iran's
"corrective steps" that have resolved all the
initial "six outstanding questions" per the 2007
Iran-IAEA Workplan.
Instead of
"normalizing" Iran's nuclear dossier, as called
for by that Workplan's concluding paragraph, the
IAEA since then has been obsessive regarding "the
possible military dimension" of Iran's nuclear
program, citing "credible" intelligence, such as
with respect to the suspected buildings at Parchin
Military complex, a site visited twice in 2005
without finding anything suspicious. Yet, Albright
and his colleagues have seized on Parchin as if a veritable "smoking gun" has at
long last been discovered that substantiates the
suspicions of weaponization.
Thus, they
have repeatedly cited the Institute's acquisition
of satellite imagery showing the removal of dirt
around the suspected building, allegedly
containing a steel container for high atmospheric
explosive tests with nuclear weapons applications.
Yet, no one has ever suggested that these tests
involve any nuclear material, which renders
meaningless the quest for environmental sampling
(to confirm if Iran conducted such tests a decade
ago). In a word, the obsession with Parchin has
camouflaged the real absence of any tangible
evidence of weaponization on Iran's part.
Consequently, there is no viable, and
legally defensible, rationale for sanctions on
Iran, which has been singled out while other
countries also found in serious violation of their
safeguard agreements (South Korea and Egypt, for
example) have gone unpunished for known political
reasons.
Unfortunately, Albright and his
co-authors fail to pay attention to the question
of legality of unilateral sanctions on Iran,
notwithstanding the UN Security Council's
triggering Chapter VII and thus seizing control of
the subject following the principles of necessity
and proportionality. As nuclear experts, these
authors have thus stretched beyond their areas of
expertise by making policy recommendations that
directly implicate international law.
Rogue experts In fact, worse,
these authors have turned completely rogue by
prescribing outright US military action against
Iran "if it takes additional decisive steps toward
producing a bomb". Even in the unlikely scenario
of Iran taking these steps, the US has no legal
right to attack Iran and would be in serious
violation of international law if it does. This
would require explicit UN Security Council
authorization, which cannot be foreseen since the
Council cannot operate in a legal vacuum and the
UN's article 51, on preemption, applies only if an
armed attack by Iran ever materializes.
The UN Charter, Article 2 (4) states: "All
members shall refrain in their international
relations from the threat or use of force against
the territorial integrity or political
independence of any state, or in any other manner
inconsistent with the Purpose of the UN."
Even, assuming en argumendo that
Iran ends up possessing nuclear weapon capability,
this does not constitute an unlawful threat to use
force, let alone an armed attack, in light of a
1996 advisory opinion by the International Court
of Justice on Legality of the Threat Or Use of
Nuclear Weapons, which held that mere possession
of nuclear weapons is not necessarily unlawful
under international law.
In conclusion, an
apt counter-proliferation strategy in the Middle
East cannot be constructed on the basis of
hypothetical future scenarios that are largely if
not entirely precluded by the objective present
guarantees as well as subjective, namely,
counter-proliferation pronouncements such as the
Supreme Leader's binding edict, fatwa, that
together meet the standards of international law
regarding "wrongful acts". [2]
Consequently, the report is a poor
substitute for enlightened decisions on this
important subject, principally as a result of its
main defects that bespeak of false alarms and
innocence regarding the dictates of international
law.
What is needed instead is a rational,
rule-based US policy that recognizes Iran's
nuclear rights, pushes for enhanced transparency
and Iran's adoption of the Additional Protocol of
the NPT, while adhering to the norms of
reciprocity via mutual efforts at
confidence-building and reciprocal relaxation of
sanctions in return for certain Iranian
concessions on a low enrichment ceiling, or the
conversion of enriched uranium to fuel rods, for
example.
Only then we may begin to see the
beginning of the end of a nuclear crisis that is a
crisis of choice, not necessity.
Notes: 1. See here. 2.
For more on this see Afrasiabi here.
Kaveh L Afrasiabi, PhD, is the
author of After Khomeini: New Directions in
Iran's Foreign Policy (Westview Press) . For
his Wikipedia entry, click
here. He is author of Reading In Iran
Foreign Policy After September 11 (BookSurge
Publishing , October 23, 2008) and Looking for
Rights at Harvard. His latest book is UN
Management Reform: Selected Articles and
Interviews on United Nations CreateSpace
(November 12, 2011).
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