May 14, 2005
The Iran Crisis in Global Context
by Dilip Hiro and Tom Engelhardt
Tom
Dispatch
At a moment when the North
Koreans claim to have just "harvested
a nuclear reactor for weapons fuel," the latest flare-up
in the Iranian/European Union negotiations involving the
"Iranian bomb," well described below by Dilip Hiro, only
highlights the increasingly precarious state of nuclear
proliferation on our poor planet. It's almost impossible to tell
quite who is doing what, but many countries from China and Israel
to the United States and Russia are stirring and, in one fashion
or another, planning or upgrading.
As the 7th "review" conference of Nonproliferation
Treaty (NPT) signees continues in New York – one
week in and the 188 parties evidently can't even agree on an
agenda – the treaty itself, like some dam overflowing and
beginning to structurally degrade, looks shaky indeed. The NPT,
the major instrument of nuclear safety (other than "mutual
assured destruction") that the planet has developed these
last decades, is in danger of biodegrading, and the Bush
administration can thank itself for at least a reasonable part of
the nuclear fix that we're now in. We are clearly at the edge of
an all-nuclear-all-the-time world, and our leaders, who – thank
you, John Bolton – have wanted to keep every nuclear
"edge" possible while shutting off much of the rest of
the world, long ago opted for an improbable military solution to
the globe's nuclear proliferation problems. It seems this includes
planning
for the possible use of nuclear weapons to stop
"rogue" nuclear programs. As a recently leaked Pentagon
document put the matter, the U.S. arsenal is to be "so
numerous, advanced, and reliable that the U.S. retains an
unassailable edge for the foreseeable future."
Saddam Hussein's nuclear-weaponless Iraq was supposed to be
the test case for the administration's anti-proliferation
policies, which involved the threatening of, and then launching
of, proliferation wars to rein in proliferation, and we can see
where that got us. If anything, it only confirmed the value of
actually possessing nuclear weapons, which turned out to be the
coin of the realm of power in the age of the younger Bush. In
fact, for all of Washington's official and unofficial bluster,
however eager officials there might be to take military action
against Iran, the U.S. might be incapable of doing so, given the
situation in neighboring Iraq (and forget about North Korea).
The split between the U.S. and non-nuclear signees of the
NPT that Dilip Hiro analyzes below is growing. As with so many
treaties and agreements, the Bush administration is interested in
this one, if at all, only as a one-way street. As Richard Butler,
the Australian former head of the UN Special Commission to Disarm
Iraq, wrote
recently:
"The Bush administration has not only refused to
adhere to its obligations under the treaty … but has now
embarked on what is anathema under the treaty – the production
of a new generation of nuclear weapons. These are the new, more
compact, nukes the administration says it needs for the so-called
war on terrorism. It beggars belief that the administration
appears to believe it can succeed in restraining Iran while it
proceeds to violate its obligations."
According to American intelligence, Iran
is probably still seven years away from producing a nuclear
weapon (assuming that's what it's intent on doing, which is not at
all clear) – and yet Iran may prove the fulcrum on which the NPT
is cracked open. In the meantime, the Bush administration is in
search of that new generation of mini-nukes (while
protecting nuclear allies, in particular transforming
post-9/11 Pakistan from
a "nuclear outlaw to 'major non-NATO ally'"), while
Israel, with an estimated nuclear arsenal of 200-300 weapons,
ranging from ones small enough to imagine using in war-fighting
situations to those large enough to level any city in the Middle
East, evidently continues to quietly upgrade. In fact, it seems
that once any country has such weaponry, the urge to build and
upgrade is almost irresistible, even when militarily completely
pointless. Tom
The Iranian Nuclear Issue in a Global Context
by Dilip Hiro
With the Iranians threatening
to resume some nuclear activities in the near future, their
European Union (EU) interlocutors are threatening to break off
their six-month long negotiations to resolve the nuclear issue
diplomatically. They have called an emergency meeting of the
35-member Board of Governors of the International Atomic Energy
Agency (IAEA) in Vienna at which they are likely to join the
United States in recommending that the Iranian situation be
referred to the United Nations Security Council.
But they are unlikely to get their way. The Europeans –
represented in the negotiations by the troika of Britain, France,
and Germany – claim that before the latest round of talks,
starting in mid-November, Tehran promised to freeze "all
uranium enrichment-related activities." What the Iranians
have, in fact, done is not to start the actual enrichment of
uranium hexafluoride (UF6 gas), but to convert uranium yellowcake
into a precursor for UF6. According to a non-European diplomat in
Vienna, the nonaligned governors of the IAEA Board will accept the
Iranian argument that this is uranium-conversion work and not
uranium-enrichment work.
The emerging crisis is the result of a stalemate between
Iran and the EU troika. The Europeans are aiming to get Tehran to
cease all uranium-related activity permanently and depend instead
exclusively on imports of low-enriched fissile material produced
by the Europeans for Iran's civilian nuclear program. This is
totally unacceptable to the Iranians.
On May 3, addressing the UN conference to review the nuclear
Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT), Iran's Foreign Minister Kamal
Kharrazi hinted at the real reason for the devolving Iranian
nuclear situation. He spoke of the demands being made on Iran as
"arbitrary and self-serving criteria and thresholds regarding
proliferation-proof and proliferation-prone technologies"
which violate "the spirit and letter of the NPT and destroy
the balance between the rights and obligations in the
Treaty."
At the core of the Nonproliferation Treaty is Article IV. It
gives any signatory "an inalienable right to develop,
research, produce, and use nuclear energy for peaceful
purposes," and to acquire technology to this effect from
fellow signatories. In practical terms, removing Article IV from
the NPT – as some in the Unites States have proposed – would
mean terminating the right of the signatory to "the nuclear
fuel cycle."
Fueling What?
This nuclear fuel cycle consists of mining uranium ore,
processing it into uranium oxide (yellowcake), transforming
yellowcake first into uranium tetrafluoride (UF4) gas and then
into uranium hexafluoride (UF6) gas, followed by the enrichment of
UF6 to varying degrees of purity for the lighter U235 isotopes:
3.5 to 4 percent for use in nuclear power reactors; 10-20 percent
for research reactors; and 90 percent-plus pure for use in the
building of nuclear weapons.
After the fuel rods in a nuclear power plant have yielded
their energy, transforming water into steam to run
electricity-generating turbines, they are called "spent
rods." They can then be reprocessed with the aim of
extracting from them plutonium (Pu239 or Pu241), which can be used
as yet more fissile material. Nuclear fuel thus produces both
electric power and more nuclear fuel, and is therefore in
principle a renewable source of energy.
"The termination of the fuel cycle activities demanded
of Iran [by the EU] means you have killed off the nuclear NPT,"
said Hassan Rouhani, Iran's chief negotiator with the EU troika
and secretary of the country's Supreme National Security Council (SNSC).
"If you take out Article IV, all developing countries will
step out of the treaty."
This is not a fanciful scenario. Just before the UN
conference of 188 countries opened in New York on May 2 to review
the Nonproliferation Treaty, the non-nuclear weapons signatories
to the NPT met in Mexico City under the auspices of the New Agenda
Coalition (NAC).
Seven foreign ministers from Asian, African, European, and
South American countries that do not have nuclear weapons
summarized the NAC's stance in the International Herald Tribune
in the following fashion: "When the nuclear NPT came into
force 35 years ago, the central bargain was that
non-nuclear-weapons states like us would renounce their right to
develop nuclear weapons while retaining the inalienable right to
undertake research into nuclear energy and to produce and use it
for peaceful purposes … while the five declared nuclear-weapon
states reduced and then eliminated their nuclear weapons [Article
VI]."
By now, it has become crystal clear that this bargain has
not been – and will not be – kept. The New Agenda Coalition
criticized the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) for
spending all its time and energy monitoring and enforcing
compliance by non-nuclear-weapon countries suspected of wanting to
develop such weapons, while overlooking the obvious – that the
nuclear powers have not implemented the commitments they made at
the NPT review conferences of 1995 and 2000 .
For instance, in 2000 the U.S. government pledged to ratify
the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty but has not done so yet and
shows no signs that it will. It also promised to sign a verifiable
accord to end the production of new fissile material for nuclear
weapons but has failed to do so. To make matters worse, the Bush
administration has been trying for two years to get Congressional
authorization to fund research on a new generation of nuclear
weapons including small yield mini-nukes and nuclear bunker
busters. It has also mandated nuclear labs in the U.S. to come up
with ways of upgrading the present nuclear arsenal by making it
more robust and longer lasting.
U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Stephen Rademaker
carefully pointed out to the NPT review conference that the Bush
administration's Moscow Treaty with Russia in 2002 required sharp
reductions in the number of operationally deployed nuclear
warheads it retained by 2012. What he failed to say was that these
warheads would be mothballed, not destroyed, and that the
bilateral treaty lacks verification procedures.
The New Agenda Coalition representatives also brought up
another sore point for non-nuclear NPT signatories. They
highlighted the 2000 NPT review conference where nuclear-weapon
countries once again formulated an "unequivocal"
undertaking to completely eliminate their nuclear arsenals.
"This goal is all the more important in a world in which
terrorists seek to acquire weapons of mass destruction," they
wrote. "The nuclear-weapons states should acknowledge that
disarmament and nonproliferation [are] mutually reinforcing
processes: What does not exist cannot proliferate."
In contrast, the three western nuclear-weapon counties (the
United States, Britain, and France) are primarily interested in
closing what they see as loopholes in the NPT that, in their view,
can be exploited by non-nuclear-weapon states to fabricate nuclear
arms – especially, of course, "the inalienable right"
to acquire dual-use technology which could then be deployed for
civilian or military ends. For example, centrifuges used for
enriching uranium to 3.5 to 4 percent purity for nuclear-power
plants or 10-20 percent purity for research reactors can also be
harnessed to produce 90 percent-plus pure uranium for weapons.
Iranian Moves
In the case of Iran, its leaders have publicly offered the
EU troika "objective guarantees" regarding the peaceful
intentions of its uranium-enrichment program (to be monitored by
the IAEA). Washington, on the other hand, insists that Tehran is
using the NPT as a cover to go to the brink of nuclear weapons
production; that it intends to withdraw from the NPT at a time of
its own choosing (just as North Korea did) and then assemble a
nuclear weapon within weeks. By so doing, Iran would break the
nuclear weapons monopoly Israel has enjoyed in the Middle East
since 1968. Both the Bush administration and Israel are determined
to maintain this monopoly.
Washington also argues that Tehran has forfeited any rights
under the treaty by misleading the IAEA over the nature of its
uranium-enrichment program. Iran does not accept this assessment
nor have the remaining 34 members of the IAEA's board of
governors.
Iran attributes its cat-and-mouse behavior in the past to
the economic sanctions applied against it by the Europeans and the
Americans that deprived it of access to civilian nuclear
technology to which it is entitled as a signatory to the NPT.
These days, however, Iranian leaders are learning that
transparency has its virtues. Following the publication in the
March 13 Sunday Times of a leak from Israeli Prime Minister
Ariel Sharon's office regarding his country's possible plans to
raid Iran's uranium enrichment facility at Natanz, President
Muhammad Khatami escorted a party of 30 local and foreign
journalists to the underground facility.
That dispelled some of the fear-filled mystique about the
place created by the story Israeli officials had planted. Among
the structures the visiting journalists saw was a huge empty hall
meant for the installation of thousands of centrifuges at some
future date. A few weeks later, Iran broke another taboo. It took
Elahe Mohtasham, a representative of the London-based
International Institute of Strategic Studies, on a day-long visit
to the Uranium Conversion Facility in Isfahan.
In a long report she published in the Sunday Times on
May 1, she described not just the equipment and buildings she saw,
but also her conversations in Persian with scientists and other
officials at the site. The facility, completed in March 1998, is
visited by the IAEA every three or four weeks. It was there that,
in March 2004, the Iranians converted yellowcake into uranium
hexafluoride gas UF6 for the first time. Iran thus became the
tenth country in the world to do so – the five members of the
initial nuclear club, the U.S., Russia, Britain, France, and
China; and later, Israel, India, Pakistan, and Brazil.
Within three months, the Isfahan facility had produced 45 kg
of UF6. By October, its stock of UF6 rose to 3,000 kg. The
scientists and technicians, including women, had also managed to
transform UF6 gas into liquid. It was then, with Iran entering
talks with the EU Troika, that all such activity was suspended.
When asked whether they would be able to produce enough UF6 to
feed the prospective 50,000 centrifuges at Natanz, 90 miles to the
northeast, the scientists replied, "Yes."
According to the IAEA, between April and October 2004, the
number of centrifuge rotors in Iran rose from 1,140 to 1,274. And
Rouhani revealed that the government had built and assembled all
those centrifuges in a year and several months. Later, he stated
that the reports of protective tunnels and underground facilities
being built by Iran for its nuclear facilities "might be
true."
The scientists at the Isfahan uranium conversion plant were
familiar with the Sunday Times story about Israeli plans to
attack Iran's nuclear facilities. They told Mohtasham that they
had no protection against military attack and that the tunnels
were actually very narrow, just enough for two people to squeeze
through. They believed, however, that any attack by the U.S. or
Israel would destabilize the whole region and, at that point, Iran
would probably withdraw from the Nonproliferation Treaty and start
a genuine nuclear-weapons program.
The European negotiators seem aware of the dire consequences
of military attacks on Iran by Israel or the United States. Until
now, they seemingly wanted to keep the talks simmering along,
hoping that a pragmatic winner in the presidential election on
June 17 could open the way for accommodation on the issue.
"Pragmatic" is their code word for Ali Akbar Hashemi
Rasfanjani, a wily politician who, along with Supreme Leader Ali
Khamanei, is now the only surviving member of the top leadership
that was instrumental in bringing about the Islamic revolution in
1979.
The Iranians do not seem unduly worried that the emergency
meeting of the IAEA governors will postpone the discussion of the
Europeans' complaint to their regular quarterly meeting, due to
take place just a few days before the Iranian presidential
election. Even if the issue is referred to the UN Security
Council, there is a very strong chance that China and Russia will
veto any resolution imposing sanctions on Iran. Overall, the
Iranians feel that this issue, if pushed into the international
arena, will cause a global divide between the developing world and
the Western world. It may be that they are overestimating, but
there is no doubt that this is an issue of paramount importance in
international affairs.
Dilip Hiro is the author of The
Iranian Labyrinth: Journeys Through Theocratic Iran and Its Furies
(just now being published by Nation Books) and The
Essential Middle East: A Comprehensive Guide.
A printed version of this article is available in The
Middle East International, no. 750.
Copyright 2005 Dilip Hiro
