Although the place and time of the next round of talks on Iran’s nuclear programme have not yet been announced, the manoeuvring by Iran and the United States to influence the outcome has already begun.
Iran sought support for a revised proposal to the talks during the United Nations General [...]]]>
Although the place and time of the next round of talks on Iran’s nuclear programme have not yet been announced, the manoeuvring by Iran and the United States to influence the outcome has already begun.
Iran sought support for a revised proposal to the talks during the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) last month, according to a New York Times report Oct. 4. Then, only a few days later, the Barack Obama administration launched a preemptive attack on the proposal through New York Times reporter David Sanger.
The officials suggested the Iranian proposal would give Iran an easier route to a “breakout” to weapons grade uranium enrichment. But that claim flies in the face of some obvious realities.
An Oct. 4 story by Sanger reported that Iran had begun describing a “9-step plan” to diplomats at the UNGA and quoted administration officials as charging that the proposal would not “guarantee that Iran cannot produce a weapon”. Instead, the officials argued, it would allow Iran to keep the option of resuming 20-percent enriched uranium, thus being able to enrich to weapons grade levels much more quickly.
Iran’s nuclear negotiator Saeed Jalili issued a denial that Iran had “delivered any new proposal other than what had been put forward in talks with the P5+1″. But that statement did not constitute a denial that Iran was discussing such a proposal, because the Times story had said the proposal had been initially made to European officials during the P5+1 meeting in Istanbul in July.
Obama administration officials complained that, under the Iranian plan, Iran would carry out a “suspension” of 20-percent enrichment only after oil sanctions have been lifted and oil revenues are flowing again.
That description of the proposal is consistent with an Iranian “five-step plan”, presented during the talks with P5+1, the text of which was published by Arms Control Today last summer. In that proposal, the P5+1 would have ended all sanctions against Iran in steps one and two, but Iran would have ended its 20-percent enrichment only in the fifth step.
In that same final step, however, Iran also would have closed down the Fordow enrichment plant and transferred its entire stockpile of 20-percent enriched uranium to “a third country under IAEA (International Atomic Energy Agency) custody”.
Iran has made clear that it intends to use the 20-percent enrichment as bargaining leverage to achieve an end to the most damaging economic sanctions.
Ambassador Seyed Hossein Mousavian, the spokesperson for Iran’s nuclear negotiating team from 2003 to 2005 and now a visiting scholar at Princeton University, told IPS, “Iran is prepared to stop 20-percent enrichment and go below five percent. The question is what will the P5+1 provide in return. As long as the end state of a comprehensive agreement is not clear for Iran, it will not consider halting enrichment at 20 percent.”
But the administration’s portrayal of the Iranian proposal as offering a sanctions-free path to continued 20-percent enrichment is highly misleading, according to close observers of the Iran nuclear issue. It also ignores elements of the proposal that would minimise the risk of a “breakout” to enrichment of uranium to weapons grade levels.
The Obama administration criticism of the proposal, as reported by Sanger, was couched in such a way as to justify the U.S. refusal to discuss lifting the sanctions on Iranian oil exports during the four rounds of talks with Iran. A senior administration official was quoted as saying that Iran “could restart the program in a nanosecond,” whereas “it would take years” to re-impose the sanctions.
Paul Pillar, national intelligence officer for Near East and South Asia from 2000 to 2005, noted in a commentary in The National Interest that it is “far easier to impose sanctions on Iran than to lift them” and that if Iran reneged on a nuclear agreement, “it would be easier still.”
Peter Jenkins, British permanent representative to the IAEA from 2001 to 2006, noted in an e-mail to IPS that it took the EU only two months to agree to impose oil sanctions, and that “political resistance among the 27 (EU member states) to imposing oil sanctions would probably be less if re-imposition were required by an Iranian breach of a deal with the P5+1.”
Jenkins pointed out that EU oil purchases from Iran now have experience in getting supplies from other countries which could make re-imposing sanctions even easier.
One U.S. official was quoted by Sanger as complaining that the Iranian proposal would allow Iran to “move the fuel around, and it stays in the country”. That description appeared to hint that the purpose is to give Tehran the option of a breakout to weapons grade enrichment.
But the biggest difference between the proposal now being discussed by Iranian diplomats and the one offered last summer is that the new proposal reflects the reality that Iran began last spring to convert 20-percent enriched uranium into U308 in powdered form for fuel plates for its Tehran Research Reactor.
The conversion of 20 percent enriched uranium to U308, which was documented but not highlighted in the Aug. 30 IAEA report, makes it more difficult to use that same uranium for enrichment to weapons grade levels.
The new Iranian proposal evidently envisions U308 uranium remaining in the country for use by the Tehran Research Reactor rather than the entire stockpile of 20-percent enriched uranium being shipped to another country as in its previous proposal.
Former State Department official Mark Fitzpatrick of the International Institute of Strategic Studies, who has argued in the past that the only purpose Iran could have in enriching to 20 percent is a nuclear weapon, told the Times that the conversion “tends to confirm that there is civilian purpose in enriching to this level”.
But Fitzpatrick told the Times that the Iranians know how to reconvert the U308 powder back to a gaseous form that can then be used for weapons grade enrichment. “It would not take long to set it up,” Fitzpatrick said.
In an interview with IPS, Dr. Harold A. Feiveson, a senior research scientist at Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson’s school and a specialist on nuclear weapons, said “it would not be super hard” to carry out such a reconversion.
But Feiveson admitted that he is not aware of anyone ever having done it. The reconversion to 20 percent enrichment “would be pretty visible” and “would take some time,” said Feiveson. “You would have to kick the (IAEA) inspectors out.”
Even Israeli policymakers have acknowledged that Iran’s diversion of 20-percent enriched uranium represents a step away from a breakout capability, as Haaretz reported Oct. 9.
Defence ministry sources told the Israeli daily that the Iran’s reduction of its stockpile of medium-enriched uranium had added “eight months at least” to what the Israeli government has cited as its “deadline” on Iran. The same sources said it was the justification for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s dropping the threat of attack on Iran in his U.N. speech.
The deep reduction in Iranian oil revenues from sanctions and the recent plunge in the value of Iran’s currency may well have made Iran more interested in compromise than when the talks with the P5+1 started in April.
Mousavian told IPS, “I am convinced that Iran is ready for a package deal based on recognition of two principles.” The first principle, he said, is that “Iran recognises the P5+1 concerns and will remove all such concerns”; the second is that the P5+1 “recognises the rights of Iran and gradually lifts sanctions”.
But Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has expressed serious doubts about whether the Obama administration is willing to end the sanctions on Iran under any circumstances. In an Oct. 10 speech, Khamenei said the Americans “lie” in suggesting sanctions would be lifted in return for Iran giving up its nuclear program.
U.S. officials “make decisions out of grudge and aversion (toward Iran)”, Khamenei said.
]]>On 20 August Al-Monitor published a perceptive article about the upcoming Iranian three-year presidency of the Non Aligned Movement (NAM). The authors were Abbas Maleki, who was a deputy foreign minister of Iran for many years, and Kaveh Afrasiabi. One of the authors’ points was that any nuclear “missteps” by [...]]]>
On 20 August Al-Monitor published a perceptive article about the upcoming Iranian three-year presidency of the Non Aligned Movement (NAM). The authors were Abbas Maleki, who was a deputy foreign minister of Iran for many years, and Kaveh Afrasiabi. One of the authors’ points was that any nuclear “missteps” by Iran would be seen by many of Iran’s NAM partners as a betrayal of trust. This is a shrewd observation.
I was serving in Vienna in 2003 when Iran’s nuclear safeguards violations over several years were reported to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) board of governors. NAM countries, with few exceptions, were not amused. They felt that Iran had let their side down.
This may surprise Western readers who are used to hearing it implied that the NAM is feckless and irresponsible (because it refuses to toe Washington’s line). But that image of the NAM can be misleading. In my experience, most NAM members take seriously their responsibilities as parties to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and value the moral high ground that compliance with the Treaty’s provisions confers.
Why? Not least because that moral high ground can be used to condemn some of the practices of the three western nuclear weapon states (NWS), which the NAM see as a bad lot: dragging their feet on nuclear disarmament; denying the non-nuclear weapon states the nuclear fuel cycle technology to which the NPT appears to entitle them, provided they place all their nuclear material under safeguards and refrain from acquiring nuclear weapons; and turning a blind eye to the nuclear threat posed by the greatest rogue state (to NAM eyes) in the Middle East: Israel.
So Iran’s three-year leadership of the movement is likely to be two-edged. Should any fresh Iranian non-compliance with its NPT safeguards obligations come to light during this period, the odds are that NAM members will once more put Iran under pressure to correct the failures and come back into compliance with its NPT obligations.
An interesting question is whether NAM members would also be ready, as in 2003, to press Iran to suspend all enrichment and reprocessing-related activities and to re-apply the IAEA’s additional protocol (providing enhanced assurances as to nuclear material remaining in non-weapons use).
On the one hand, NAM members are likely to take a second betrayal of trust by Iran even more badly than the first, given Iran’s representational role as leader of the movement, and given the frequency with which Iran has assured NAM partners that its nuclear activities are blameless and that it is the victim of a vendetta.
On the other hand, the NAM view of the three western NWS is even darker than it was in 2003. NAM members did not appreciate the 2004 Bush administration’s proposal to divide the nuclear world into “haves” and “have nots”, nor a consequent tightening of the guidelines observed by members of the nuclear suppliers group. All but India and its closest friends disliked the same US administration’s decision to make nuclear technology available to one of only three states that have refused to adhere to the NPT: India.
Many NAM members consider the sanctioning of Iran by the UN Security Council, at western NWS instigation, to have been disproportionate to Iran’s pre-2003 safeguards failures, and therefore unjust. They note only modest NWS movement towards nuclear disarmament (though the Obama administration’s record is a big improvement on the back-sliding of the Bush administration). They also deplore continuing Israeli refusal to countenance proposals for a Middle East nuclear weapon-free zone, which would complement such zones covering Latin America, Africa and much of the Asia/Pacific region.
Moreover, the battle between the West’s candidate to succeed Mohamed ElBaradei as director general of the IAEA and the NAM candidate was bitter and divisive, and won by the West’s candidate.
This is a long list. Nonetheless, my hunch is that NAM members would want to give Iran a hard time if credible evidence of current (not pre-dating 2003) non-compliance were to be laid before the IAEA board by a credible IAEA member state (not Israel, the political leadership of which is seen as unscrupulous, and possibly not the US, UK and France, none of whose reputations for integrity have prospered in recent years).
So fate may be handing the West the best opportunity in years to achieve renewed Iranian suspension and reapplication of the additional protocol. There’s a twist, though.
The trigger for NAM pressure on Iran would be credible evidence of a second Iranian betrayal of NAM trust. That same second betrayal of trust would deepen Iran’s confidence deficit with the rest of the world and would increase the number of Westerners – including me, I suspect – who would be convinced that Iran cannot be left in possession of enrichment technology, even with the best guarantees in place against diversion of nuclear material. A long-term settlement based on the NPT, at the end of a suspension during which the IAEA completes its additional protocol investigations, would probably turn out to be as elusive as ever. We still would not be out of the thickets into which the Islamic Republic’s insecurity has driven us.
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