I’m going on the possibly wrong assumption that, if the IAEA did not take this evidence seriously, the IAEA would not have asked Iran to give clarifications on the studies that “Member States” and “countries” [in the plural] finally allowed the Agency, as the IAEA likes to refer to itself, to put to Iran in two stages this month — just before completing its latest report on Iran’s past and present nuclear program, which will now be used to impose a third set of sanctions against the Islamic Republic for, at least, its “defiance” of previous UN Security Council sanctions resolutions.
That is, the IAEA must have done some checking on its own to see whether or not the evidence of these studies is credible, and clean –mustn’t it?
I mean, it wouldn’t just hold Iran up to these new measures, just on the basis of the word of one or possibly more major powers?
Or, even just to shut up the information being put out everywhere possible in the media saying that the evidence clearly shows that Iran did have a nuclear weaponization program at one point in the past, even if it might have changed its mind since?
Or, even just as leverage to push Iran to take the final step and ratify the Additional Protocol it drafted, and signed, in 2003 that — if ratified — would allow more intrusive and snap IAEA inspections in Iran?
The IAEA wouldn’t just be trying to become, or remain, a player in this dangerous drama, would it?
And, why wouldn’t Iran respond to the second set of IAEA queries about these studies in February? Was it just that Iran felt that all the questions put to it in the August 2007 Work Plan — which were supposed to be the final questions — had been answered? [“The Agency agreed to provide Iran with all remaining questions according to the above work plan. This means that after receiving the questions, no other questions are left. Iran will provide the Agency with the required clarifications and information”. The full Work Plan is posted here.]
Or was it more than that — was Iran informed about which specific “Member States” and “countries” had provided the “evidence” (apparently on a single Laptop) of these studies, and did Iran have objections to any dealings with these people?
[What is the Laptop? See this posting here, found through at-Largely here.]
Other perhaps more substantive questions were mentioned in a NYTimes report published Friday:”The most suspicious-looking document in the collection turned over to the IAEA was a schematic diagram showing what appeared to be the development of a warhead, with a layout of internal components. ‘This layout has been assessed by the agency as quite likely to be able to accommodate a nuclear device’, the IAEA wrote. But that does not prove it was a nuclear warhead, and Iran argued that its missile program used ‘warheads only’. The report referred to other documents drawn from the laptop — though the source of the material was never mentioned — that included documents describing how to test ‘high-voltage detonator firing equipment’ and technology to fire multiple detonators at one time, which is required to trigger a nuclear reaction by forcing a nuclear core to implode. The report also described work on whether a detonation could be triggered in a 400-meter-deep shaft from a distance of 10 kilometers, or about six miles, leading to suspicions that the Iranian scientists were already thinking about nuclear testing. But it is unclear whether the shaft would have been wide enough for a nuclear weapon … In a briefing for reporters and nuclear experts on Friday, a senior IAEA official said that the agency had reached no independent conclusions about whether the documents added up to an effort to build a nuclear weapon, or whether those efforts were suspended more than four years ago, as the National Intelligence Estimate concluded. ‘At this point in time we don’t make any conclusion’ about the documents, the official said. David Albright, a former weapons inspector who now runs the Institute for Science and International Security, said that ‘The issue now is whether this is symptomatic of a comprehensive nuclear weapons effort, or just individual projects. Is it part of a plan to design and develop a weapon that can fit on a nuclear missile? And if so, why are so many pieces missing?’ ” This NYTimes report is posted here.
This NYTimes article, in addition, suggests that my assumptions are wrong, and the IAEA just put these questions to Iran without having made its own estimation of the validity of the “evidence”.
A recent article in the Washington Post pokes even more holes in the “evidence”: “Drawings of the unbuilt test site, not disclosed publicly before, appear to U.S. officials to signal at least the ambition to test a nuclear explosive. But U.S. and UN experts who have studied them said the undated drawings do not clearly fit into a larger picture. Nowhere, for example, does the word ‘nuclear’ appear on them. The authorship is unknown, and there is no evidence of an associated program to acquire, assemble and construct the components of such a site. ‘The diagram is consistent with a nuclear test-site schematic’, one senior U.S. source said, noting that the drawings envision a test control team parked a safe 10 kilometers — more than six miles — from the shaft. As far as U.S. intelligence knows, the idea has not left the drawing board … U.S. intelligence considers the laptop documents authentic but cannot prove it. Analysts cannot completely rule out the possibility that internal opponents of the Iranian leadership could have forged them to implicate the government, or that the documents were planted by Tehran itself to convince the West that its program remains at an immature stage. CIA analysts, some of whom had been involved only a year earlier on the flawed assessments of Iraq’s weapons programs, initially speculated that a third country, such as Israel, may have fabricated the evidence. But they eventually discounted that theory. British intelligence, asked for a second opinion, concurred last year that the documents appear authentic. German and French officials consider the information troubling, sources said, but Russian experts have dismissed it as inconclusive. IAEA inspectors, who were highly skeptical of U.S. intelligence on Iraq, have begun to pursue aspects of the laptop information that appear to bolster previous leads. ‘There is always a chance this could be the biggest scam perpetrated on U.S. intelligence’, one U.S. source acknowledged. ‘But it’s such a large body of documents and such strong indications of nuclear weapons intent, and nothing seems so inconsistent’ … Mohamed ElBaradei, the director general of the IAEA, said that after three years of investigation, he still cannot judge Iran‘s program ‘exclusively peaceful’. At the same time, Iran is ‘not an imminent threat’, he said in a recent interview. ‘To develop a nuclear weapon, you need a significant quantity of highly enriched uranium or plutonium, and no one has seen that in Iran‘ … Over coffee in December in ElBaradei’s Vienna office, Iran‘s chief nuclear negotiator was asked about the drawings, sources said. Ali Larijani called them ‘baseless allegations’. When IAEA inspectors went to Iraq last month, the CIA agreed to let them confront Iran with some of the evidence. Iranian officials dismissed the material but said they would follow up with clarifications at a later date, according to an IAEA report issued yesterday [7 February]. Several sources with firsthand knowledge of the original documents said the facility, if constructed, would give Iran additional capabilities to produce a substance known as UF4, or ‘green salt‘, an intermediate product in the conversion of uranium to a gas. Further refined in a large-scale enrichment plant, such as the one Iran says it intends to build for its energy program, the material could become usable for the core of a bomb”…
This WPost article states that Iranian officials “learned 14 months ago that the United States had the documents on the laptop”. This WPost article is published here.
The IAEA report itself says that the IAEA just recently got the “alleged studies” and is still looking into it … and according to the NY TImes the US didn’t even provide the full version of the documents only only selective “sanitized” versions. And, the last batch of the documents were delivered to the IAEA on Feb 15, a few days before the IAEA report was published.
Suppose I draw for you a picture of a three-headed unicorn, and demand that you prove that you’re not planning on secretly hiding one…
The US has been shopping this Laptop of Death around for over 3 years now…and never once bothered to provide it to the IAEA.
This was obviously an attempt to blind-side the Iranians as well as the IAEA, to keep the “threat” alive and prevent the IAEA from giving Iran a clean bill of health (note that the alleged studes are the only reamining issue)
As for other nations providing intelligence — so what? Who knows if that was any “good” intelligence, or whether it backed up what the Laptop says.
Remember Bush’ s infamous “16 words” lie:
“THE BRITISH GOVERNMENT has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa…”
THE BRITISH were the source of that info. What Bush didn’t say was that the same BRITISH had already discounted the same claim.
So just because another state says something doesn’t mean much.
The US has been shopping this Laptop around for over 3 years, and everybody who was interested knew something about it — though maybe not all the details that have just been revealed in mid-February. Some details were apparently communicated last September, after the Iran-IAEA Work Plan was adopted, so Iran wasn’t exactly completely blind-sided.
Still, the last-minute timing still appears to be either bad faith, or desperation, or both, just as Iran’s lack of response over the past week is intriguing.
AFP has just reported that Iran’s Ambassador to the IAEA, Ali Asghar Soltanieh, was “hopping mad at a key IAEA briefing on Monday, diplomats said. ‘He seemed angry … He seemed rather exercised to me’, one western diplomat said, speaking on condition of anonymity, given the closed-doors nature of the briefing. Tehran’s envoy to the International Atomic Energy Agency was so enraged and went on at such length, that the IAEA’s deputy director general Olli Heinonen, who was chairing the meeting, intervened twice to ask him to make his point, the diplomat added…[However] Quizzed by reporters, Iranian ambassador Soltanieh denied having been angry during the meeting. But he did acknowledge that he was ‘upset’ and had ‘forcefully’ warned the other board members that the allegations, because they were connected with activities not directly of a nuclear nature, were outside the mandate of the IAEA. Soltanieh dismissed the documents and slides shown to the meeting as amateurish, saying they could easily have been drawn up ‘by any undergraduate’.” http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20080225/wl_mideast_afp/irannuclearpoliticsiaeabriefing_080225185521;_ylt=Asza.aaXM53QeKoxajtJiX0UewgF
By “activities not directly of a nuclear nature” and thus “outside the mandate of the IAEA”, Soltanieh must mean the missile “studies” that are mentioned.
An unspecified Western diplomat and the British Ambassador, however, seem to be more concerned, and Britain’s Ambassador Simon Smith told AFP that “The board had been presented with a lot more detailed information with illustrative examples ‘of those parts of the Iranian programme which give particular concern’, he said — in other words, more information and examples than given in the IAEA report.
Smith said, according to the AFP, that “The material shown suggested that there was ‘detailed work put into the designing of the warhead, studying how that warhead would perform, how it would be detonated and how it would be fitted to a Shahab-3 missile’…”.
AP reported rather tersely tha, after today’s IAEA briefing, Smith “says some of the alleged work attributed to the Iranians was performed after 2003. But a U.S. intelligence summary released last year says Tehran froze such programs that year”.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080225/ap_on_re_mi_ea/nuclear_iran;_ylt=AqPIaESmVXgUdOoA6tt5TGdvaA8F
Which other state provided the intelligence will be very interesting to know — that other state may well have come up with the Laptop, as well.
If it happens to be Israel, that may explain why the U.S. was so reluctant to pass the information to Iran for comment (though they were talking about it wherever they found a receptive audience). If it is Israel, that may explain why Iran did not want to provide any answers, and why Soltanieh is so “hopping mad”. If it is Israel, it may also explain the unusual statement issued Saturday night by the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs. And, if it is Israel, it may also indicate how close we all are to seeing an Israeli attack on Iran.
All Iran could have known about it were rumours from second-hand sources since Iran was never advised of the charges, and neither was the IAEA. In fact the IAEA still has not actually seen the Laptop or the full contents, let alone Iran. Yes, that’s being blindsided.
Why is Iran’s lack of a reponse any more “intruiging” than the questionable provenance of the alleged Laptop and the fact that the US has thus far failed to provide it to the IAEA?
Incidentally I should point out that even if Iran was designing nuclear warheads, that’s still not a violation of the NPT which requires an actual “diversion of fissile material for nonpeaceful uses” — which the IAEA has repeatedly said is not the case with Iran.
Note what others have said about this last-minute “evidence” provided by the US to the IAEA:
FROM ASSOCIATED PRESS:
US Gives IAEA More Iran Nuclear Details;Diplomats Doubt Value
VIENNA (AP)
…But much of it shed little new light on what the U.S. says have been attempts by Iran to develop nuclear weapons. “It’s not the amount but the quality that counts,” said one of the diplomats who was dismissive of the new U.S. file.
Another diplomat said senior agency officials also had dismissed the information as relatively insignificant and coming too late.
Several of the diplomats suggested the U.S. was disingenuous in providing such a large amount of what they described as questionable information just days before ElBaradei was to complete his report.
What you say, Hass, about designing nuclear warheads not being violations of the NPT (as, you say, there is no evidence reported of diversion of fissile material for nonpeaceful purposes) is interesting.
The same could be said of designing missiles, or even something as mysterious as a “missile re-entry vehicle” (is this something that would be involved in targetting a missile armed with a nuclear warhead?) — though these projects are cited as more and more proof of the evidence of a nuclear weapons program.
But the bigger problem at the moment is the UN Security Council, which has required Iran to stop its enrichment program and to revel all about its past nuclear programs, whatever they were…
The IAEA report says that it was able to carry out a first inventory of enriched uranium at the Natanz plant in December, and was told that “Since the beginning of operations in February 2007, a total of 1670 kg of UF6 had been fed into the cascades. The operator presented, inter
alia, about 75 kg of UF6 as the product, with a stated enrichment of 3.8% U-235 … well below its declared design capacity”.
The IAEA report also states that “On 15 January 2008, Iran informed the Agency about the planned installation of the first new generation subcritical centrifuge (IR-2) at the Pilot Fuel Enrichment Plant (PFEP) and provided relevant design information. On 29 January 2008, the Agency confirmed that a single IR-2 test machine and a 10-machine IR-2 test cascade had been installed at PFEP. Iran reported that about 0.8 kg of UF6 had been fed to the single machine between 22 and 27 January 2008. Iran has continued
to test P-1 centrifuges in one single machine, one 10-, one 20- and one 164-machine cascade at PFEP.
Between 23 October 2007 and 21 January 2008, Iran fed a total of about 8 kg of UF6 into the single P-1 and the 10-machine P-1 cascade; no nuclear material was fed into the 20- and 164-machine cascades. At the end of January 2008, the single P-1 machine and the 10- and 20-machine P-1 cascades were dismantled and the space was used for the new IR-2 machines. All activities took place
under Agency containment and surveillance”.
And, the IAEA report says that “During the current conversion campaign at UCF, which began on 31 March 2007,
approximately 120 tonnes of uranium in the form of UF6 had been produced as of 2 February 2008. This brings the total amount of UF6 produced at UCF since March 2004 to 309 tonnes, all of which remains under Agency containment and surveillance. Iran has stated that it is carrying out no uranium conversion related R&D activities other than those at Esfahan”.
As a result — and even though the uranium conversion and the operations of the centrifuge cascades have been carried out under conditions of IAEA “containment and surveillance”,
the IAEA report says that “Contrary to the decisions of the Security Council, Iran has not suspended its enrichment related activities, having continued the operation of PFEP and FEP. In addition, Iran started the development
of new generation centrifuges”.
AP, incidentally, has just put out a report in which Iran’s UN Ambassador in NY seems to be pointing the finger at the MEK as the supplier of this new and questionable “evidence”…
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080225/ap_on_re_eu/nuclear_iran;_ylt=AvA2XuFuiMI9DffS_n5_QNVvaA8F
Most people knew that the MEK was the source — there is additional speculation that the ISraelis were the ultimate source but fed the info to the MEK (the two have cooperated in the past — Israel provides satellite broadcast facilities to the MEK, and it is said that the MEK’s “exposure” of the still-under-construction facilities at Natanz/Arak in 2003 was sourced from Israel) so I would not be surprised one bit.
The UNSC resolution can say whatever it wants but when it comes to the NPT itself, building warheads etc is not a violation. Nor is the UNSC resolution on Iran necessarily valid, legal or binding.
In any case I am not sure what your long recounting of the enrichment process in Iran means — Iran is not keeping that a secret, the IAEA monitors it 24 hours. Iran has made it clear since the late 1970s that it seeks the full nuclear cycle, and this was never hidden nor secret.
Let me point out something else to you: it has been 20 years that the Israelis and US have claimed that Iran is
“just 2 years away” from building a nuke (or “obtaining the capacity” to do so, whatever that means) But when Pakistan decided to build a bomb, they did so in just 5 years — and Pakistan was far less technologically developed then than Iran is today. If Iran wanted nukes, don’t you think they too could have built it yet?
Of course the standard response is that Iran is seeking an “breakout capability” but the same can be attributed to about 40 other countries since the theoretical “capability” to build a bomb is simply inherent in the civilian technology. Brazil, Argentina, South Africa…Japan is a “long weekend” away from building a bomb.
For what it’s worth, I am not one of those who is convinced that Iran is working on weaponization — and I have never written anything to suggest that I suppost this position, either here, or in my published articles on Iran.
However, all the arguments to the contrary have to be considered and dealt with, somehow. “Most people knowing”, or “everybody knowing”, just isn’t good enough.
As to my long recounting of the enrichment process in Iran — this is from the latest IAEA report, of course — it does clearly show that the IAEA is on top of the enrichment situation. And this may be interesting for others, though you know it already.
Iran did keep its enrichment program a secret longer than the sponsors of the UNSC resolutions liked — though Iran argued that it did not violate any of its obligations to report or to disclose, under the NPT.
The question of why the UNSC has said Iran must stop has been the heart of this issue, and often gets lost in the process.
One of the U.S. arguments is that there is no “right to enrich” in the NPT. This is linked, of course, to the concept of the “confidence deficit” concerning Iran …
But, discriminatory and unfair though it may be, the UNSC has adopted these last two sanctions resolutions under Chapter VII, which does indeed make them binding (though you could argue about their legality).
The other reason to cite the relevant phrases on enrichment from the latest IAEA report is to bring up this piece of information, acquired during an “inventory” at Natanz in December, that after about ten months of effort: “The operator presented, inter alia, about 75 kg of UF6 as the product, with a stated enrichment of 3.8% U-235 … well below its declared design capacity”.
Interesting that you say there is speculation that Israel was the ultimate source behind the MEK’s 2003 revelations about Iran’s nuclear program that started this whole thing…