By Farhang Jahanpour
OXFORD, Sep 9 2015 (IPS)

Iran has had a nuclear programme since 1959 when the United States gave a small reactor to Tehran University as part of the “Atoms for Peace” programme during Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi’s reign.  When the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) was introduced in 1968 and entered into force in 1970, Iran was one of the first signatories of that Treaty.

Farhang Jahanpour

The Shah had made extensive plans for using nuclear energy in order to free Iran’s oil deposits for export and also in order for use in petrochemical industries to receive more revenue. The Shah had planned to build 22 nuclear reactors to generate 23 million megawatts of electric power.  By 1977, the Atomic Energy Organisation of Iran (AEOI) had more than 1,500 highly paid employees, with a budget of 1.3 billion dollars, making it the second biggest public economic institution in the country.

In 1975, the Gerald Ford administration in the United States expressed support for the Shah’s plan to develop a full-fledged nuclear power programme, including the construction of 23 nuclear power reactors.

President Gerald Ford has been reported as having “signed a directive in 1976 offering Tehran the chance to buy and operate a U.S.-built reprocessing facility for extracting plutonium from nuclear reactor fuel. The deal was for a complete ‘nuclear fuel cycle’.”“Iran has had a nuclear programme since 1959 when the United States gave a small reactor to Tehran University as part of the “Atoms for Peace” programme during Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi’s reign”

The Shah donated 20 million dollars to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) to train Iranian nuclear experts, many of whom are still working for Iran’s Nuclear Energy Organisation, including the current head of the organisation and one of the chief negotiators, Dr. Ali Akbar Salehi.  In 1975, Iran also paid 1.18 billion dollars to buy 10 percent of Eurodif, a French company that produces enriched uranium. In return, Iran was supposed to receive enriched uranium for its reactors, a pledge that the French government reneged on after the Iranian revolution.

In 1975, Germany’s Kraftwerk Union AG started the construction of two reactors in Bushehr at an estimated cost of 3-6 billion dollars. Kraftwerk Union stopped work on the Bushehr reactors after the start of the Iranian revolution, with one reactor 50 percent complete, and the other 85 percent complete. The United States also cut off the supply of highly enriched uranium (HEU) fuel for the Tehran nuclear reactor.

After the revolution, the Islamic Republic initially stopped all work on the nuclear programme. However, in 1981, Iranian officials concluded that after having spent billions of dollars on their programme it would be foolish to dismantle it. So, they turned to the companies that had
signed agreements with Iran to complete their work. Nevertheless, as the result of political pressure by the U.S. government, all of them declined. Iran also turned to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) for help to no avail.

In the late 1980s, a consortium of companies from Argentina, Germany and Spain submitted a proposal to Iran to complete the Bushehr-1 reactor, but pressure by the United States stopped the deal. In 1990, U.S. pressure also stopped Spain’s National Institute of Industry and Nuclear Equipment from completing the Bushehr project.  Later on, Iran set up a bilateral cooperation on fuel cycle-related issues with China but, under pressure from the West, China also discontinued its assistance.

Therefore, it was no secret to the West that Iran was trying to revive its nuclear programme.

Having failed to achieve results through formal and open channels, Iranian officials turned to clandestine sources, and using their own domestic capabilities.  A major mistake was to receive assistance from A.Q. Khan, the father of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons programme.  In 1992, Iran invited IAEA inspectors to visit all the sites and facilities they asked. Director General Hans Blix reported that all activities observed were consistent with the peaceful use of atomic energy.

On Feb. 9, 2003, Iran’s programme and efforts to build sophisticated facilities at Natanz were revealed allegedly by Iranian dissident group, the National Council of Resistance of Iran, the political wing of the Mojahedin-e Khalq Organisation (MKO), for years regarded as a terrorist organisation by the West. It has been strongly suggested that MKO had received its information from Israeli intelligence sources.

President Mohammad Khatami announced the existence of the Natanz (and other) facilities on Iranian television and invited the IAEA to visit them. Then, in late February 2003, Dr. Mohammad El-Baradei, the head of IAEA, accompanied by a team of inspectors, visited Iran.  In November 2003, the IAEA reported that Iran had systematically failed to meet its obligations under its NPT safeguards agreement to report its activities to the IAEA, although it also reported no evidence of links to a nuclear weapons programme.

It should be noted that at that time Iran was only bound by the provisions of the NPT, which required the country to inform the IAEA of its nuclear activities only 180 days before introducing any nuclear material into the facility.  So, according to Iranian officials, building the Natanz facility and not declaring it was not illegal, but the West regarded it as an act of concealment and violation of the NPT’s Additional Protocol, which Iran had not signed. In any event, the scale of Iran’s nuclear activities surprised the West, and it was taken for granted that Iran was developing nuclear weapons.

In May 2003, in a bold move, the Khatami government in Iran sent a proposal to the U.S. government through Swiss diplomatic channels for a “Grand Bargain”, offering full transparency, as well as withdrawal of support for Hamas and Hezbollah, and resumption of diplomatic relations, but the offer went unanswered.

In October 2003, the United Kingdom, France and Germany undertook a diplomatic initiative to resolve the problem. The foreign ministers of the three countries and Iran issued a statement known as the Tehran Declaration, according to which Iran agreed to cooperate with the IAEA and to implement the Additional Protocol as a voluntary confidence-building measure. Iran even suspended enrichment for two years during the course of the negotiations.  On Mar. 23, 2005, Iran submitted to the EU Troika” a plan of “objective guarantees” with the following elements:

(1) Spent reactor fuels would not be reprocessed by Iran.

(2) Iran would forego plutonium production through a heavy water reactor.

(3) Only low-enriched uranium would be produced.

(4) A limit would be imposed on the enrichment level.

(5) A limit would be imposed on the amount of enrichment, restricting it to what was needed for Iran’s reactors.

(6) All the low-enriched uranium would be converted immediately to fuel rods for use in reactors (fuel rods cannot be further enriched).

(7) The number of centrifuges in Natanz would be limited, at least at the beginning.

(8) The IAEA would have permanent on-site presence at all the facilities for uranium conversion and enrichment.

In early August 2005, the EU Troika” submitted the “Framework for a Long-Term Agreement” to Iran, recognising Iran’s right to develop infrastructure for peaceful use of nuclear energy, and promised collaboration with Iran. However, as the result of extreme U.S. pressure, the EU Troika was unable to respond to Iran’s call for nuclear collaboration, and subsequently Iran withdrew its offer and resumed enrichment.

The rebuff by the West to President Khatami’s outstretched hand resulted in the weakening of the Reformist Movement and the election of hardline candidate Mahmud Ahmadinezhad as the next president of Iran in June 2005. (END/COLUMNIST SERVICE)

Edited by Phil Harris   

The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of, and should not be attributed to, IPS – Inter Press Service. 

Excerpt:

By Farhang Jahanpour
OXFORD, Sep 4 2015 (IPS)

Iran’s nuclear programme has been the target of a great deal of misinformation, downright lies and above all myths. As a result, it is often difficult to unpick truth from falsehood. 

Farhang Jahanpour

As President John F. Kennedy said in his Yale University Commencement Address on 11 June 1962: “For the great enemy of the truth is very often not the lie – deliberate, contrived and dishonest – but the myth – persistent, persuasive, and unrealistic. Too often we hold fast to the cliché of our forebears. We subject all facts to a prefabricated set of interpretations. We enjoy the comfort of the opinion without the discomfort of thought.”

In order to understand the pros and cons of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) agreed by Iran and the P5+1 (United States, United Kingdom, Russia, China, France and Germany) on 14 July 2015, and the subsequent U.N. Security Council Resolution 2231 passed unanimously on 20 July 2015 setting the agreement in U.N. law and rescinding the sanctions that had been imposed on Iran, it is important to study the background to the whole deal.

The Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) regulates the activities of the countries that wish to make use of peaceful nuclear energy. The NPT was enacted in 1968 and it entered into force in 1970. Its objective is to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons, while promoting the peaceful use of nuclear technology. Iran was one of the first signatories to that Treaty, and so far 191 states have joined the Treaty.“Iran’s nuclear programme has been the target of a great deal of misinformation, downright lies and above all myths. As a result, it is often difficult to unpick truth from falsehood”

It has been one of the most successful disarmament treaties in history. Only three U.N. member states – Israel, India and Pakistan – did not join the NPT and all of them proceeded to manufacture nuclear weapons. North Korea, which acceded to the NPT in 1985, withdrew in 2003 and has allegedly manufactured nuclear weapons.

This treaty was a part of the move known as “atoms for peace”, which allowed different nations to have access to nuclear power for peaceful purposes, but prevented them from manufacturing nuclear weapons.

The treaty was a kind of bargain between the five original countries that possessed nuclear weapons (all the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council) and the non-nuclear countries that agreed never to acquire nuclear weapons in return for sharing the benefits of peaceful nuclear technology.

The Treaty is based on four pillars:

Pillar One – Non-Proliferation:  Article 1 of the NPT states that nuclear weapon state countries (N5) should not transfer any weapon-related technology to others.

Pillar Two – Ban on possession of nuclear weapons by non-nuclear states: Article 2 states the other side of the coin, namely that non-nuclear states should not acquire any form of nuclear weapons technology from the countries that possess it or acquire it independently.

Pillar Three – Peaceful use of nuclear energy: Article 4 not only allows the use of nuclear technology for peaceful purposes, but even stresses that it is “the inalienable right” of every country to do research, development and production, and to use nuclear energy for peaceful purposes, without discrimination, as long as Articles 1 and 2 are satisfied.

It further states that all parties can exchange equipment, material, and science and technology for peaceful purposes. It calls on the nuclear states to assist the non-nuclear states in the use of peaceful nuclear technology.

Pillar Four – Nuclear disarmament: Article 6 makes it obligatory for nuclear states to get rid of their nuclear weapons. The Treaty states that all countries should pursue negotiations on measures relating to cessation of the nuclear arms race and “achieving nuclear disarmament”.

While nuclear powers have worked hard to prevent other countries from acquiring nuclear weapons, they have not abided by their side of the bargain and have been reluctant to give up their nuclear weapons. On the contrary, they have further developed and upgraded those weapons, and have made them more capable of use on battlefields.

Sadly, 37 years after its final ratification, the number of nuclear-armed countries has increased, and at least four other countries have joined the club.

After it was realised that unfettered access to enrichment could lead some countries, such as Iraq and North Korea, to gain knowledge of nuclear technology and subsequently develop nuclear weapons, the NPT was amended in 1977 with the Additional Protocol, which tightened the regulations in order to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons.

According to the Additional Protocol, which Iran has agreed to implement as part of the JCPOA, “Special inspections may be carried out in circumstances according to defined procedures. The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) may carry out such inspections if it considers that information made available by the State concerned, including explanations from the State and information obtained from routine inspections, is not adequate for the Agency to fulfil its responsibilities under the safeguards agreement.” 

However, as the above paragraph makes clear, these inspections will be carried out only in exceptional circumstances when there is valid cause for suspicion that a country has been violating the terms of the agreement, and only if the IAEA decides that the explanations provided by the State concerned are not adequate. Also, such inspections will be carried out on the basis of “defined procedures”

The countries that have ratified the Additional Protocol have agreed to “managed inspections”, and the Iranian authorities have also said that such managed and supervised inspections can be carried out. This of course does not mean “anytime, anywhere” inspections, but inspections that are in keeping with the provisions of the Additional Protocol as set out above.

Meanwhile, in addition to the nuclear states, there are 19 other non-weapons states which are signatories to the NPT and which actively enrich uranium. They have vastly more centrifuges than Iran ever had. Iran’s array of 19,000 centrifuges (only 10,000 of them were operational) prior to the agreement was paltry compared with the capabilities of other countries that enrich uranium.

During the talks between Iran and the P5+1, Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali  Khamenei said that Iran wanted to have at least 190,000 centrifuges in order to get engaged in industrial scale enrichment.

It should be remembered that the sale of nuclear fuel is a lucrative business and the countries that do not have enrichment facilities but which have nuclear reactors, are forced to purchase fuel from the few countries that have a monopoly of enriched uranium. Iran had openly stated that it wished to join that club, or at least to be self-sufficient in nuclear fuel.

However, under the JCPOA, Iran has given up the quest for industrial scale enrichment and is even reducing the number of its operational centrifuges from 19,000 to just over 5,000. (END/COLUMNIST SERVICE)

Edited by Phil Harris   

The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of, and should not be attributed to, IPS – Inter Press Service. 

Excerpt:

The United Nations has come under criticism from medical experts and members of civil society for what these critics consider inaccurate statements about the effects of lingering radioactivity on local populations.

Ana Pancenko, one of the many Ukrainian children affected by the Chernobyl disaster. Credit: José Luis Baños/IPS

Scientists and doctors met with top U.N. officials last week to discuss the effects of radioactivity in Japan and Ukraine, and the U.N. has enlisted several of its agencies, including the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the World Health Organisation (WHO) and the U.N. Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation (UNSCEAR), to address the matter.

In May, UNSCEAR stated that radiation exposure following the 2011 Fukushima-Daichii nuclear disaster in Japan poses “no immediate health risks” and that long-term health risks are “unlikely”.

“I think it’s ridiculous,” said Helen Caldicott, an Australian doctor and dissident, in response to the UNSCEAR report.

“There have been health effects. A lot of people have experienced acute radiation illness, including bleeding noses, hair loss, nausea and diarrhoea,” she told IPS.

The UNSCEAR report followed a February WHO report, which also predicted low health risks and normal cancer rates in Japan after the Fukushima disaster, even while noting that long-term studies are still needed. WHO warned instead of resulting psychosocial damage to the population.

Asked why UNSCEAR and WHO released such statements if they were medically inaccurate, Caldicott referred to a 1959 WHO-IAEA agreement that gives the IAEA – an organisation that promotes nuclear power – oversight when researching nuclear accidents.

“The WHO is a handmaiden to the IAEA,” said Caldicott, who engaged in a 2011 debate on the subject with The Guardian’s George Monbiot. Monbiot had argued that nuclear plants are a viable alternative to coal plants. "A lot of people have experienced acute radiation illness, including bleeding noses, hair loss, nausea and diarrhoea."
-- Helen Caldicott

“It’s a scandal which has not really been exposed in general literature and to the public,” said Caldicott of the WHO-IAEA agreement.

When the U.N. General Assembly proclaimed 2006-2016 the “Decade of Recovery and Sustainable Development of the Affected Regions”, it committed to a “development approach” to redress the areas affected by the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear fallout in the former Soviet Union.

The U.N.’s action plan was based on scientific studies from the 2005 Chernobyl Forum, which brought member states Belarus, Russia and Ukraine together with experts from the IAEA and seven of the world’s most influential development agencies, including the World Bank Group, WHO and UNSCEAR.

The Chernobyl Forum noted that the Chernobyl nuclear accident was a “low-dose event”. It stated, “The vast majority of people living in contaminated areas are in fact highly unlikely to experience negative health effects from radiation exposure and can safely raise families where they are today.”

Caldicott said of WHO, “They didn’t do any studies of Chernobyl, they just did estimates.” She cited a 2009 report by the New York Academy of Sciences, which painted a different picture.

Radiation from uranium mining

The IAEA promotes “safe, responsible development of uranium resources”, the raw materials used to fuel nuclear reactors and build nuclear bombs.

For Ashish Birulee, a Ho tribal resident of Jadugoda, India, safe uranium mining in his community is far from reality, and the health effects of radiation are as clear as the photographs he has taken to document them.

Birulee, a student and photojournalist, lives next to a tailings dam, filled with radioactive waste from a uranium purification plant operated by the Uranium Corporation of India.

“Lung cancer, skin cancer, tumours, congenital deformities, down syndrome, mental retardation, megacephaly, sterility, infertility in married couples, thalassemia [and] rare birth defects like Gastroschisis [are] common in the area,” he told IPS.

“We are like guinea pigs here,” he said, citing government negligence on the matter. “I’m experiencing everyday radiation exposure and also witnessing how my people are suffering.”

Radiation from nuclear tests

During the Cold War, the Soviet Union conducted 456 nuclear tests at the Semipalatinsk test site in present day Kazakhstan.

“Based on information collected during the missions and subsequent research, there is sufficient evidence to indicate that most of the area has little or no residual radioactivity directly attributed to nuclear tests in Kazakhstan,” according to the IAEA.

But the IAEA narrative differs from those who live around Semipalatinsk. According to the preparatory committee for the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty Organization (CTBTO),”A number of genetic defects and illnesses in the region, ranging from cancers to impotency to birth defects and other deformities, have been attributed to nuclear testing.”

“There is even a museum of mutations at the regional medical institute in Semey, the largest city near the old nuclear testing site,” it noted.

“What radiation does – gamma, alpha or beta – is it either kills the cell or changes the biochemistry of the DNA molecule,” Caldicott, who has worked on nuclear issues for 43 years, explained. “One day [the cell] will start to divide by mitosis in an unregulated way, producing literally trillions and trillions of [mutated] cells, and that’s a cancer,” she said.

“You don’t know you’ve been exposed to radiation,” Caldicott pointed out. “You can’t taste or see radioactive elements in the food, and when the cancer develops, of course it doesn’t denote its origin.”

Fukushima on the Hudson

Meanwhile, two nuclear plants at Indian Point Energy Centre – just 60 kilometres upriver from U.N. headquarters in New York – are fighting for new licences, making the health and radiation question more relevant to diplomats from the 193 U.N. member states who live and work in the area.

Critics have dubbed Indian Point, which sits on two fault lines, as “Fukushima on the Hudson”, in reference to the nuclear disaster in Japan that was sparked by an earthquake and a tsunami.

However, there are a few differences between Fukushima and Indian Point. “Fukushima was directly over the ocean, and the winds were favourable. They were blowing most of the radiation out to sea,” said Manna Jo Greene, environmental director for Hudson River Sloop Clearwater, noting that the remaining radiation was still disastrous.

But the winds in New York would blow plumes of radiation from north to south and from east to west. “There are 20 million people living within [100 kilometres], and there are 9 million people between Indian Point and the nearest ocean,” Greene told IPS.

“If there was a problem at Indian Point,” she added, “there’s a very good chance that the radiation could move in a southeasterly direction and expose millions of people to radiation before it blew out to sea.”

Four U.S. non-proliferation specialists are urging the Obama administration to impose tougher economic sanctions against Iran and issue more explicit threats to destroy its nuclear programme by military means.

In a 155-page report, the specialists, who were joined by the head of a right-wing pro-Israel lobby group, the Foundation for the Defence of Democracies (FDD), said Washington should declare its intent to institute a “de facto international embargo on all investments in, and trade with” Iran, excepting food and medicine, if it does not freeze its nuclear-related work.

The calls come amidst speculation over a critical meeting between Iran and the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council – the United States, Britain, France, China and Russia – plus Germany (P5+1), which have met over the last two months in an apparent effort to unify their positions before meeting with Iran. That meeting has not yet been scheduled, but most observers believe it will take place at the end of the month.

The report, “U.S. Nonproliferation Strategy for the Changing Middle East,” also said Washington should “increase Iranian isolation, including through regime change in Syria” and “undertake…overt preparations for the use of warplanes and/or missiles to destroy Iran’s nuclear capabilities with high explosives”.

Only if Tehran provided “meaningful concessions”, among them suspending all uranium enrichment and heavy water-related projects, closing the underground enrichment facility at Fordow, and accepting a highly intrusive International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) inspections regime – should sanctions relief be considered, said the report, which was co-authored by FDD’s president, Mark Dubowitz, and David Albright, a physicist who heads the Institute for Science and International Security (ISIS).

In that respect, the recommendations appeared to reflect more the position held by Israel than that of the Obama administration, which has suggested that it will not necessarily insist on a total suspension of uranium enrichment – a demand that Iran has consistently rejected and which many Iran specialists believe is a deal-killer – as a condition for possible sanctions relief.

“The report does not offer a realistic formula for negotiating a satisfactory agreement on limiting Iran’s nuclear programme,” said Greg Thielmann, a senior fellow at the Arms Control Association (ACA) and a former top State Department analyst on proliferation issues. “It would require Iran to capitulate on virtually all fronts.”

“Some of the measures it suggests would be likely to disrupt P5+1 unity….and the maximalist requirements it cites for an agreement could convince Tehran that the U.S. objective is regime change, rather than full compliance with its obligations to the IAEA,” he noted.

In at least one respect, however, the report departed from Israel’s views. Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, who has repeatedly threatened to attack Iran’s nuclear facilities, warned in September that Tehran could reach what the report called the “critical capability” to quickly build a bomb without detection as early as this spring. The reported concluded that mid-2014 was more likely, although it noted an earlier date was also possible.

“The focal point wasn’t to say, ‘Saddle up, we’re going to war in six months,'” said Leonard Spector, deputy director of the James Martin Centre for Nonproliferation Studies and a co-chair of one of the five task forces that contributed to the report. “This was a more careful assessment of how much time we had, and it allows the sort of (sanctions) pressure, which has been mounting, to have more impact.”

Iranian officials have suggested over the last several months that they are willing to make major concessions, including halting their enrichment of uranium up to 20 percent, transferring a substantial portion of their 20-percent enriched stockpile out of the country, and accepting enhanced IAEA inspections, provided they receive major sanctions relief in exchange. But they have also insisted that their right to enrichment of up to five percent is nonnegotiable.

The P5+1 appear divided over how much sanctions relief to offer and in what sequence. Recent reports indicate that Washington and Paris are pressing to require Iran to implement all of these measures, as well as closing Fordow and clearing up all questions raised by the IAEA regarding alleged military dimensions of Iran’s nuclear programme, before any major easing of sanctions can happen.

The new report, which came out of a series of “roundtables” that included presentations by senior administration officials, clearly favours an even tougher stance.

It explicitly endorsed a letter – reportedly drafted by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) – to Obama signed by 73 U.S. senators last month that warned, “There should be absolutely no diminution of pressure on the Iranians until the totality of their nuclear problem has been addressed.” The report called for intensified sanctions and more explicit military threats by the administration.

It also called for stepping up covert action against Tehran’s nuclear and missile programmes and exerting greater pressure on China, Hong Kong, Turkey, and the Gulf kingdoms to halt all commerce with Iran.

While the report covered other non-proliferation issues in the Middle East and North Africa, it skipped lightly over Israel, the region’s only nuclear power, noting merely that the Jewish state will consider disarmament initiatives only after all its neighbours make peace with it.

The dearth of attention to Israel, which, unlike Iran, is not a signatory to the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), was described by Thielmann as “conspicuous” given the intended scope of the report.

The report also said Washington should threaten the Islamist-led government in Cairo with tough sanctions if it takes steps to gain nuclear capability.

That the report’s recommendations coincided closely with Israel’s positions may have been due in part to the heavy involvement in the project by staff members from both FDD, which has been a leading proponent of “economic warfare” against Iran, and the Dershowitz Group, a media relations firm with FDD shares office space and reportedly cooperates closely.

Several Dershowitz account executives included in the report’s acknowledgments have previously been associated with Hasbara Fellowships, a group set up by the right-wing, Israel-based Aish HaTorah International, to counter alleged anti-Israel sentiment at U.S. universities. IPS inquiries into the project’s sources of funding went unanswered.

The endorsement by Albright, who is frequently cited by mainstream U.S. media as an expert on the technical aspects of Iran’s nuclear programme, of the report’s policy-oriented recommendations, such as making a military attack on Iran more credible, came as a surprise to some proliferation experts, including two who participated in the roundtables but asked to remain anonymous because of the off-the-record nature of the proceedings.

“His expertise is a technical one, but this is mostly a political paper,” noted one expert. “This covers areas that go far beyond his expertise.”

The suspect graph of a nuclear explosion reportedly provided to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) as evidence of Iranian computer modeling of nuclear weapons yields appears to have been adapted from a very similar graph in a scholarly journal article published in January 2009 and available on the internet.

Graph published by the scholarly journal Nuclear Engineering and Design, Volume 239, Issue 1, January 2009, Pages 80–86.

The graph, published in a Nov. 27 Associated Press story but immediately found to have a mathematical error of four orders of magnitude, closely resembles a graph accompanying a scholarly article modeling a nuclear explosion. It provides a plausible explanation for the origins of the graph leaked to AP, according to two nuclear physicists following the issue closely.

The graph in the scholarly journal article was well known to the IAEA at the time of its publication, according to a knowledgeable source.

That means that the IAEA should have been able to make the connection between the set of graphs alleged to have been used by Iran to calculate yields from nuclear explosions that the agency obtained in 2011 and the very similar graph available on the internet.

The IAEA did not identify the member countries that provided the intelligence about the alleged Iran studies. However, Israel provided most of the intelligence cited by the IAEA in its 2011 report, and Israeli intelligence has been the source of a number of leaks to the AP reporter in Vienna, George Jahn.

Graph published by the Associated Press on Nov. 27, 2012, reportedly as evidence of Iranian computer modeling of nuclear weapons yields.

The graph accompanying an article in the January 2009 issue of the journal Nuclear Engineering and Design by retired Swiss nuclear engineer Walter Seifritz displayed a curve representing power in a nuclear explosion over fractions of a second that is very close to the one shown in the graph published by AP and attributed by the officials leaking it to an Iranian scientist.

Both graphs depict a nuclear explosion as an asymmetrical bell curve in which the right side of the curve is more elongated than the left side. Although both graphs are too crudely drawn to allow precise measurement, it appears that the difference between the two sides of the curve on the two graphs is very close to the same in both graphs.

The AP graph appears to show a total energy production of 50 kilotonnes taking place over about 0.3 microseconds, whereas the Seifritz graph shows a total of roughly 18 kilotonnes produced over about 0.1 microseconds.

The resemblance is so dramatic that two nuclear specialists who compared the graphs at the request of IPS consider it very plausible that the graph leaked to AP as part of an Iranian secret nuclear weapons research programme may well have been derived from the one in the journal article.

Scott Kemp, an assistant professor of nuclear science and engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), told IPS he suspects the graph leaked to AP was “adapted from the open literature”. He said he believes the authors of that graph “were told they ought to look into the literature and found that paper, copied (the graph) and made their own plot from it.”

Yousaf Butt, a nuclear scientist at the Monterey Institute, who had spotted the enormous error in the graph published by AP, along with his colleague Ferenc Dalnoki-Veress, said in an interview with IPS that a relationship between the two graphs is quite plausible, particularly given the fact they both have similar asymmetries in the power curve.

“Someone may just have taken the Seifritz graph and crudely adapted it to a 50-kilotonne yield instead of the 18 kilotonnes in the paper,” Butt said.

He added that “it’s not even necessary that an actual computer model was even run in the production of the AP graph.”

Apparently anticipating that the Seifriz graph would soon be discovered, the source of the graph given to AP is quoted in a Dec. 1 story as acknowledging that “similar graphs can be found in textbooks, the internet and other public sources.”

Butt said that he doesn’t know whether the AP graph is genuine or not, but that it could well be a forgery.

“If one wanted to plant a forgery,” he wrote, “it would make sense to manufacture something that looked like the output from the many unclassified ‘toy-models’ available on-line or in academic journals, rather than leak something from an actual high-fidelity classified study.”

The Seifritz graph came to the attention of the IAEA secretariat soon after it was published and was referred to the staff specialist on nuclear weapons research, according to a source familiar with the IAEA’s handling of such issues.

The source, who refused to be identified, told IPS the reaction of the official was that the graph represented fairly crude work on basic theory and was therefore not of concern to the agency.

The agency was given the alleged Iranian graph in 2011, and a “senior diplomat” from a different country from the source of the graph said IAEA investigators realised the diagramme was flawed shortly after they received it, according to the Dec. 1 AP story.

The IAEA’s familiarity with the Seifritz graph, two years before it was given graphs that bore a close resemblance to it and which the agency knew contained a huge mathematical error, raise new questions about how the IAEA could have regarded the Israeli intelligence as credible evidence of Iranian work on nuclear weapons.

Yukiya Amano, the director-general of the IAEA, refused to confirm or deny in an appearance at the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington Dec. 6 that the graph published by AP was part of the evidence of Iranian “activities” related to nuclear weapons cited by the agency in its November 2011 report. .

Amano responded to a question on the graph, “I can’t discuss this specific information.”

In its November 2011 report, the IAEA said it had “information” from two member states that Iran had conducted “modeling studies” aimed at determining the “nuclear explosive yield” associated with components of nuclear weapon. It said the “information” had identified “models said to have been used in those studies and the results of these calculations, which the Agency has seen”.

The “senior diplomat” quoted by AP said the IAEA also had a spreadsheet containing the data needed to produce the same yield as shown on the graph – 50 kilotonnes – suggesting that the spreadsheet is closely related to the graph.

Butt observed, however, that the existence of the spreadsheet with data showing the yield related to a 50 kilotonne explosion does not make the graph any more credible, because the spreadsheet could have been created by simply plugging the data used to produce the graph.

Kemp of MIT agreed with Butt’s assessment. “If it’s simply data points plotted in the graph, it means nothing,” he told IPS.

After Butt and Dalnoki-Veress identified the fundamental error in the graph AP had published as evidence of Iranian work on a 50-kilotonne bomb, the Israeli source of the graph and an unidentified “senior diplomat” argued that the error must have been intentionally made by the Iranian scientist who they alleged had produced the graph.

A “senior diplomat” told AP the IAEA believed the scientist had changed the units of energy used by orders of magnitude, because “Nobody would have understood the original….”

That explanation was embraced by David Albright, who has served as unofficial IAEA spokesman in Washington on several occasions. But neither Albright nor the unidentified officials quoted by Jahn offered any explanation as to why an accurate graph would have been more difficult for Iranian officials to understand than one with such a huge mathematical error.

Further undermining the credibility of the explanation, Jahn’s sources suggested that the Iranian scientist whom they suspected of having devised the graph was Dr. Majid Shahriari, the nuclear scientist assassinated by the Israeli intelligence agency Mossad in 2010.

No evidence has been produced to indicate that Shahriari, who had a long record of publications relating to nuclear power plants and basic nuclear physics, had anything to do with nuclear weapons research.

*Gareth Porter, an investigative historian and journalist specialising in U.S. national security policy, received the UK-based Gellhorn Prize for journalism for 2011 for articles on the U.S. war in Afghanistan.

The U.S. Senate approved a new round of economic sanctions against Iran Friday, ignoring warnings by the White House that the additional measures could prove counter-productive to the goal of persuading Iran to curb its nuclear programme.

The 94-0 vote, which was immediately praised by the powerful American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), marked a rebuff to President Barack Obama who has argued that piling on too many sanctions risks undermining the international coalition that has backed U.S. efforts to pressure Iran.

“As we focus with our partners on effectively implementing these efforts, we believe additional authorities now threaten to undercut these efforts,” said Tommy Vietor, the spokesman for the National Security Council.

The new sanctions, which came in the form of an amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), would impose sanctions against foreign companies or individuals engaged in trade with Iran in several sectors, including energy, ports, shipping, and shipbuilding, that allegedly support Tehran’s nuclear or arms programmes.

Among other provisions, they would also penalise foreign buyers of Iranian oil and natural gas if they pay for them with gold or other precious metals – a measure apparently aimed specifically at Turkey, a key U.S. ally, which reportedly exported 6.4 billion dollars in gold to Iran in exchange for natural gas during the first nine months of this year.

“With today’s overwhelmingly bi-partisan action, we underscore our serious commitment to preventing Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons capability,” said Democratic Sen. Robert Menendez, one of the amendment’s co-sponsors.

“Yes, our current sanctions are having a demonstrable affect on the Iranian economy, but Iran is still working just as hard to develop nuclear weapons. That’s why it’s imperative for us to… adapt our policies to tighten the economic noose,” he added.

The new measures must still be reconciled with another set of anti-Iran measures included in another version of the NDAA approved earlier this fall by the House of Representatives.

The final bill could also be vetoed by the White House, which has already warned that a number of measures unrelated to Iran that have been included in the Senate version will indeed be sent back to Congress if they survive the House-Senate conference committee.

The Senate action comes amidst heightened speculation about the likelihood that negotiations between Iran and the so-called P5+1 (the U.S., Britain, France, Russia, China, and Germany) will soon resume, especially now that Obama, who stressed his strong preference for a diplomacy in dealing with Iran during the campaign, has been re-elected.

Washington’s top negotiator, Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs Wendy Sherman, met her P5+1 counterparts in Brussels last week to discuss a common negotiating position, as well as the desirability of direct bilateral talks between Washington and Tehran, a possibility that Obama himself raised earlier this month.

Most analysts here believe a negotiated settlement to the nuclear issue can be reached if each side is prepared to compromise.

The outlines of such a settlement would include Iran’s agreement to halt all uranium enrichment above five percent, ship out its stockpile of 20-percent enriched uranium, clear up outstanding questions from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) about possible military dimensions to its nuclear programme, and accept a stricter IAEA inspection regime.

In return, the P5+1 would be expected to provide a number of guarantees regarding the supply of nuclear material and other assistance and, most crucially, to ease and eventually lift economic sanctions that, among other things, have reduced exports of Iranian oil by about one million barrels a day and cut the riyal’s value by more than 60 percent.

Whether the two sides can agree on such terms – and their sequencing – within what many analysts believe is a relatively short timeframe looms over the prospective talks.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has repeatedly threatened to attack Iran’s nuclear facilities, indicated in late September that he was willing to hold off until next spring or summer. Many analysts, however, believe that Netanyahu, whose Likud Party faces elections in January, is unlikely to take military action without a green light from Washington.

But the U.S. is also acting as if time is short. On Thursday, its envoy to the IAEA, Robert Wood, said Washington intended to refer Iran to the U.N. Security Council if, by March, it had not “begun substantive co-operation” with the agency’s investigation into possible military dimensions of its nuclear programme.

In addition to signaling mounting frustration with Tehran, his remarks were also interpreted as an expression of concern that Iran’s leadership may become too involved by its own presidential election in June, campaigning for which is expected to follow the Mar. 20 New Year holiday (Nowruz), to gain the necessary consensus from its many factions, particularly hard-liners, for serious negotiations to take place.

“The deadline increases the pressure for an early breakthrough in the P5+1 talks,” Daryl Kimball, director of the Arms Control Association here, told IPS.

Like Iran’s leadership, the administration also faces resistance from hard-liners in both parties in Congress where the Israel lobby wields its greatest influence.

The initiators and co-sponsors of Friday’s sanctions amendment insist that their efforts are designed to give Washington maximum leverage in dealing with Iran.

“What the sanctions say to Iran is that we’re going to bring down your economy …and we’re going to do it fast,” Mark Dubowitz, director of the Likudist Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD) who has drafted much of the sanctions legislation, told ‘Congressional Quarterly’ this week.

“The only choice you have at this point is to return to the table and reach an agreement that with us that satisfies your obligations under international law,” he added.

Indeed, the amendment’s initial version brought to the Senate by Menendez and another Israel lobby loyalist, Republican Sen. Mark Kirk, called for virtually across-the-board sanctions against foreign companies doing any business with Iran with the apparent aim of imposing a de facto trade embargo.

It also was designed to drastically reduce or, in some cases, eliminate the president’s ability to “waive” sanctions against certain countries on grounds of “national interest”.

After several days of talks, however, the administration and its allies succeeded in watering down the draft and preserving the president’s waiver authority in some cases; although the White House’s reaction Friday indicated that it would try to dilute the amendment even more when the bill goes to conference.

Still, many analysts see the legislation as designed to reduce, if not sabotage, any possibility of a compromise agreement that would permit Iran to enrich uranium at any level, a long-held Netanyahu demand.

In that view, additional punitive measures – particularly those that reduce Obama’s ability to ease U.S. sanctions and offer positive incentives for a deal – will serve only to strengthen hard-liners in Tehran who also oppose an agreement.

“With every new sanctions bill that Congress passes, the president’s flexibility is reduced, and doubts solidify about whether sanctions can ever be leveraged for a diplomatic deal,” noted Jamal Abdi, policy director of the National Iranian American Council (NIAC).

“This is what we saw happen with Iraq in the 1990s. Unbending sanctions do not buttress negotiations; they make diplomacy impossible and war inevitable.”

*Jim Lobe’s blog on U.S. foreign policy can be read at http://www.lobelog.com.

News stories on the latest International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) report suggested new reasons to fear that Iran is closer to a “breakout” capability than ever before, citing a nearly 50-percent increase in its stockpile of 20-percent enriched uranium and the installation of hundreds of additional centrifuges at the Fordow enrichment installation.

But the supposedly dramatic increase in the stockpile of uranium that could theoretically be used to enrich to weapons grade is based on misleading figures in the Nov. 16 IAEA report. The actual increase in the level of that stockpile appears to be 20 percent.

The coverage of the completion of the installation of 2,800 centrifuges at Fordow, meanwhile, continued the media practice of ignoring the linkage between large numbers of idle centrifuges and future negotiations on the Iranian nuclear programme.

The latest round of media coverage of the Iran issue again highlights the failure of major news outlets to reflect the complexity and political subtleties of the Iranian enrichment programme.

The IAEA report created understandable confusion about the stockpile of uranium enriched to 20-percent – also called 20 percent LEU (low enriched uranium). It does not use the term “stockpile” at all. Instead, it says Iran produced 43 kg of 20-percent enriched uranium during the three months since the August report and cited a total of 135 kg of 20-percent uranium now “in storage”, compared with only 91.4 kg in August.

Based on those figures, Reuters suggested that Iran might already be two-thirds of the way to the level of 200-250 kg that “experts say” could be used to build a bomb. The Guardian’s Julian Borger wrote that Iran was enriching uranium at a pace that would reach the Israeli “red line” in just seven months.

But analysis of the figures in the last two reports shows that the IAEA total for 20-percent LEU “in storage” actually includes 20-percent LEU that has been sent to the Fuel Plate Fabrication Plant in Esfahan for conversion to powder for fuel plates to be used by Iran’s medical reactor but not yet converted.

The November IAEA report includes the information that, as of Sep. 26 – six weeks after the data in the August report were collected – the total amount of 20-percent LEU fed into conversion process in Esfahan stood at 82.7 kg.

That figure is 11.5 kg more than the total of 71.25 kg fed into the conversion process as of the August report.

The difference between the two indicates that 11.5 kg had been taken out of the stockpile and sent to the Fuel Plate Fabrication Plant at Esfahan during September 2012.

In another indicator of the difference between the IAEA’s “in storage” figure and the actual stockpile size, the current IAEA report gives the figure of 73.7 kg of 20-percent LEU from the Fordow facility “withdrawn and verified” by the IAEA over the entire period of such enrichment. That total is 23.7 kg higher than the total of 50 kg from Fordow “withdrawn and verified” given in the August report.

A total of 23.7 kg of 20-percent LEU was evidently taken out of the stockpile available for higher level enrichment and sent for conversion to powder for fuel plates during the last quarter.

The current IAEA report nevertheless uses the same overall total of 96.3 kg of 20-percent LEU fed into the conversion process that it used in the August report.

Subtracting the 23.7 kg additional uranium “withdrawn and verified” by the IAEA during the quarter from the total 20-percent enriched uranium production of 43 kg during the quarter reduces the amount added to the stockpile of 20-percent LEU to 19.3 kg.

Adding the 19.3 kg to the August total of 91.4 kg gives a total for the stockpile of 110.7 kg – a 20-percent increase over the August level rather than the nearly 50-percent increase suggested by news stories.

The IAEA declined to respond to the substance of an IPS e-mail query citing the apparent inconsistencies in the data presented in the last two reports. IAEA Press Officer Greg Webb said in an e-mail that safeguards department officials who had been sent the query “reply that the report is clear and accurate as it stands”.

However, the Institute for Science and International Security in Washington, D.C., which normally supports everything in IAEA reports, said in a Nov. 16 commentary that the current report “does not make it clear if Iran has sent additional near 20 percent LEU hexafluoride to the Esfahan conversion site after August 2012.”

The Washington think tank added, “However, it if did, the near 20 percent LEU remains in the form of hexafluoride.” The comment implied that the IAEA may have included 23.7 kg of 20-percent enriched uranium sent to the Fuel Plate Fabrication Plant during the quarter as being “in storage”.

The IAEA report also said Iran had halted its conversion of 20-percent LEU for fuel plates during the quarter, although it did not indicate how long the halt might last.

Reuters cited that halt as “another potentially worrying development”. But in light of the actual level of the stockpile, that halt could simply reflect the fact that Tehran is content to keep the figure from rising too far above 100 kg.

The spokesman for the Iranian Parliament’s National Security and Foreign Affairs Committee, Hossein Naqavi, said Oct. 6 that Iran was taking “a serious and concrete confidence-building measure” by converting some of the 20-percent LEU into powder for fuel plates.

More surprisingly, an Israel official leaked to an Israeli daily that Iran was believed to have consciously avoided allowing its stockpile of 20-percent enriched uranium to go much beyond 110 kg by diverting much of it for conversion to fuel for its scientific research reactor.

Citing “defense sources”, Ha’aretz military correspondent Amos Harel wrote Oct. 9 that the Israeli policymakers had new information they considered “highly reliable” that each time new production of 20-percent enriched uranium could have brought the total above 130 kg, Iran had “diverted 15 or 20 kg to scientific use”.

Harel indicated that the new information was the justification for the Israeli position that the threat of Iranian threat of a breakout capability had receded for many months.

Media coverage of the addition of the last of 2,800 centrifuges added to Fordow enrichment facility over the past year played up the idea that the centrifuges could become operational at any time. “They can be started any day,” a “senior diplomat” from an unnamed country was quoted by Reuters as saying.

The fact that half of those centrifuges have not been put into operation was treated as a mystery. The Los Angeles Times said, “For unknown reasons, Iran has not begun feeding uranium hexafluoride gas into more than half of the machines….”

None of the stories mentioned the obvious connection between Iran’s continuing to add centrifuges but not putting them into operation and its maneuvering for a deal with the United States.

Iran has been suggesting both publicly and privately throughout 2012 that it is open to an agreement under which it would halt all 20-percent enrichment and agree to other constraints on its enrichment programme in return for relief from harsh economic sanctions now levied on the Iranian economy.

Iranian strategists evidently view the unused enrichment capacity at Fordow facility as an incentive for the United States and the P5+1 to seek such an agreement.

*Gareth Porter, an investigative historian and journalist specialising in U.S. national security policy, received the UK-based Gellhorn Prize for journalism for 2011 for articles on the U.S. war in Afghanistan.

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.

*Gareth Porter, an investigative historian and journalist specialising in U.S. national security policy, received the UK-based Gellhorn Prize for journalism for 2011 for articles on the U.S. war in Afghanistan.

Iran has again offered to halt its enrichment of uranium to 20 percent, which the United States has identified as its highest priority in the nuclear talks, in return for easing sanctions against Iran, according to Iran’s permanent representative to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).

Ali Asghar Soltanieh, who has conducted Iran’s negotiations with the IAEA in Tehran and Vienna, revealed in an interview with IPS that Iran had made the offer at the meeting between EU Foreign Policy Chief Catherine Ashton and Iran’s leading nuclear negotiator Saeed Jalili in Istanbul Sep. 19.

Soltanieh also revealed in the interview that IAEA officials had agreed last month to an Iranian demand that it be provided documents on the alleged Iranian activities related to nuclear weapons which Iran is being asked to explain, but that the concession had then been withdrawn.

“We are prepared to suspend enrichment to 20 percent, provided we find a reciprocal step compatible with it,” Soltanieh said, adding, “We said this in Istanbul.”

Soltanieh is the first Iranian official to go on record as saying Iran has proposed a deal that would end its 20-percent enrichment entirely, although it had been reported previously.

“If we do that,” Soltanieh said, “there shouldn’t be sanctions.”

Iran’s position in the two rounds of negotiations with the P5+1 – China, France, Germany, Russia, Britain, the United States and Germany – earlier this year was reported to have been that a significant easing of sanctions must be part of the bargain.

The United States and its allies in the P5+1 ruled out such a deal in the two rounds of negotiations in Istanbul and in Baghdad in May and June, demanding that Iran not only halt its enrichment to 20 percent but ship its entire stockpile of uranium enriched to that level out of the country and close down the Fordow enrichment facility entirely.

Even if Iran agreed to those far-reaching concessions the P5+1 nations offered no relief from sanctions.

Soltanieh repeated the past Iranian rejection of any deal involving the closure of Fordow.

“It’s impossible if they expect us to close Fordow,” Soltanieh said.

The U.S. justification for the demand for the closure of Fordow has been that it has been used for enriching uranium to the 20-percent level, which makes it much easier for Iran to continue enrichment to weapons grade levels.

But Soltanieh pointed to the conversion of half the stockpile to fuel plates for the Tehran Research Reactor, which was documented in the Aug. 30 IAEA report.

“The most important thing in the (IAEA) report,” Soltanieh said, was “a great percentage of 20-percent enriched uranium already converted to powder for the Tehran Research Reactor.”

That conversion to powder for fuel plates makes the uranium unavailable for reconversion to a form that could be enriched to weapons grade level.

Soltanieh suggested that the Iranian demonstration of the technical capability for such conversion, which apparently took the United States and other P5+1 governments by surprise, has rendered irrelevant the P5+1 demand to ship the entire stockpile of 20-percent enriched uranium out of the country.

“This capacity shows that we don’t need fuel from other countries,” said Soltanieh.

Iran began enriching uranium to 20 percent in 2010 after the United States made a virtually non-negotiable offer in 2009 to provide fuel plates for the Tehran Research Reactor in return for Iran’s shipping three-fourths of its low-enriched uranium stockpile out of the country and waiting for two years for the fuel plates.

The P5+1 demand for closure of the Fordow enrichment plant was also apparently based on the premise the facility was built exclusively for 20-percent enrichment. But Iran has officially informed the IAEA that it is for both enrichment to 20 percent and enrichment to 3.5 percent.

The 1,444 centrifuges installed at Fordow between March and August – but not connected to pipes, according to the Washington-based Institute for Science and International Security – could be used for either 20-percent enrichment or 3.5-percent enrichment, giving Iran additional leverage in future negotiations.

Soltanieh revealed that two senior IAEA officials had accepted a key Iranian demand in the most recent negotiating session last month on a “structured agreement” on Iranian cooperation on allegations of “possible military dimensions” of its nuclear programme – only to withdraw the concession at the end of the meeting.

The issue was Iran’s insistence on being given all the documents on which the IAEA bases the allegations of Iranian research related to nuclear weapons which Iran is expected to explain to the IAEA’s satisfaction.

The Feb. 20 negotiating text shows that the IAEA sought to evade any requirement for sharing any such documents by qualifying the commitment with the phrase “where appropriate”.

At the most recent meeting on Aug. 24, however, the IAEA negotiators, Deputy Director General for Safeguards Herman Nackaerts and Assistant Director General for Policy Rafael Grossi, agreed for the first time to a commitment to “deliver the documents related to activities claimed to have been conducted by Iran”, according to Soltanieh.

At the end of the meeting, however, Nackaerts and Grossi “put this language in brackets”, thus leaving it unresolved, Soltanieh said.

Former IAEA Director General Mohamed ElBaradei recalls in his 2011 memoirs that he had “constantly pressed the source of the information” on alleged Iranian nuclear weapons research – meaning the United States – “to allow us to share copies with Iran”. He writes that he asked how he could “accuse a person without revealing the accusations against him?”

ElBaradei also says Israel gave the IAEA a whole new set of documents in late summer 2009 “purportedly showing that Iran had continued with nuclear weapons studies until at least 2007″.

Soltanieh confirmed that the other unresolved issue is whether the IAEA investigation will be open-ended or not.

The Feb. 20 negotiating text showed that Iran demanded a discrete list of topics to which the IAEA inquiry would be limited and a requirement that each topic would be considered “concluded” once Iran had answered the questions and delivered the information requested.

But the IAEA insisted on being able to “return” to topics that had been “discussed earlier”, according to the February negotiating text.

That position remains unchanged, according to Soltanieh. The Iranian ambassador quoted an IAEA negotiator as asking, “What if next month we receive something else — some additional information?’”.

“If the IAEA had its way,” Soltanieh said, “It would be another 10 or 20 years.”

Soltanieh told IPS a meeting between Iran and the IAEA set for mid-October had been agreed before the IAEA Board of Governors earlier this month with Nackaerts and Grossi.

The Iranian ambassador said the IAEA officials had promised him that Director General Yukia Amano would announce the meeting during the Board meeting, but Amano made no such announcement.

Instead, after a meeting with Fereydoun Abbasi, Iran’s Vice President and head of the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran, Amano only referred to the “readiness of Agency negotiators to meet with Iran in the near future.”

“He didn’t keep the promise,” said Soltanieh, adding that Iran would have to “study in the capital” how to respond.

Soltanieh elaborated on Abassi’s suggestion last week that the sabotage of power to the Fordow facility the night before an IAEA request for a snap inspection of the facility showed the agency could be infiltrated by “terrorists and saboteurs”.

“The objection we have is that the DG isn’t protecting confidential information,” said Soltanieh. “When they have information on how many centrifuges are working and how many are not working (in IAEA reports), this is a very serious concern.”

Iran has complained for years about information gathered by IAEA inspectors, including data on personnel in the Iranian nuclear programme, being made available to U.S., Israeli and European intelligence agencies.

*Gareth Porter, an investigative historian and journalist specialising in U.S. national security policy, received the UK-based Gellhorn Prize for journalism for 2011 for articles on the U.S. war in Afghanistan.

Diplomats from an unidentified country and a Washington research organisation considered close to the International Atomic Energy Agency have alleged in recent weeks that Iran has covered two buildings at a military site to hide a clean-up of evidence of nuclear weapons related testing.

But two former intelligence analysts with experience in interpreting satellite photographs of military facilities say the coverings on the two buildings in published images of the site don’t appear to be aimed at hiding anything.

The images show bright pink coverings on the buildings, which the former intelligence officers say are a clear signal of an Iranian desire to focus U.S. and Western attention on the site – probably to ensure that it would not be focused on activities at another site at the huge Parchin military base.

Meanwhile, the IAEA has not been able to explain why Iran would only begin a clean-up of the Parchin site after the IAEA requested access in January 2012 if it was hiding activities linked to a Ukrainian scientist whose work with Iran had been revealed in the news media beginning as early as October 2008.

The site in question at Parchin military base is where the IAEA said in a report last November that Iran had installed a large explosives containment vessel supposedly to test nuclear weapons designs. The IAEA has been requesting access to the base to see if there is evidence of such tests.

Former IAEA team leader in Iraq Robert Kelley, one of the few genuine specialists in the world on remote detection of nuclear activities, has noted a host of reasons for doubting that such a vessel ever resided at the Parchin site.

The latest episode in the months-long media story of alleged Iranian “sanitisation” of the site at Parchin began with an Aug. 22 story by the Associated Press Vienna correspondent, George Jahn, who has long served as a conduit for a stories leaked by Israeli officials.

The story quoted two “senior diplomats” from countries which the writer could not identify as saying that the “sanitisation” of the site by Iran to remove evidence of past nuclear weapons-related research was now in its “final stages”, and that some of the clean-up was being “hidden from spy satellite views by screens set up over the site”.

Two days later, satellite images of the site dated Aug. 15 published by the Institute for Science and International Security (ISIS) showed that the “screens over the site” were actually pink coverings on two buildings.

A Reuters article published earlier that day reported unidentified “diplomatic sources” saying the building which the IAEA believed housed an explosives chamber had been wrapped in “scaffolding and tarpaulin” that was “hiding any sanitisation or other activity there from satellite cameras”.

ISIS director David Albright speculated in an Aug. 24 commentary that the purpose of the pink coverings on the buildings “could be to conceal further cleanup activity from overhead satellites or to contain the activity inside”. He even suggested that the pink tarp “could provide a cover for the demolition of the buildings, or portions of them while also containing the spread of potentially contaminated debris.”

The Aug. 30 IAEA report, after listing the “activities and resultant changes” at the site since January, referred to the images as showing two buildings had been “shrouded” and declared that its “ability to verify the information on which its concerns are based has been adversely affected”.

The former intelligence analysts, however, have told IPS the suggestion the pink shrouds are meant to hide clean-up activities from satellite cameras lacks credibility. Both asked not to be identified in this article.

One of the former officers, who is familiar with efforts by foreign states seeking to cloak military activities from U.S. spy satellites said, “Someone in Iran wanted the two buildings to be imaged.”

The pink covers suggest “misdirection”, he said, likening it to past efforts by the former Soviet Union and North Korea to focus the attention of U.S. intelligence on a specific site in order to keep it away from activities elsewhere.

Another former intelligence analyst with expertise on photo imagery said the pink shrouds “are exactly the opposite of concealment activities”. The Iranians “know perfectly well that the site is being imaged”, the former officer said.

“This is the ‘shiny object’ that the Iranians want ISIS, the gullible Western press and others to pay attention to,” he explained, most likely to distract attention from activities elsewhere.

New information in the Aug. 30 IAEA report further undermines the credibility of the larger allegation that Iran has been trying to “sanitise” the site in question in 2012. The report notes that the agency notified Iran of that location only in January 2012, and that satellite imagery of the site for the period from February 2005 to January 2012 shows “virtually no activity at or near the building housing the containment vessel”.

If Iran were actually hiding nuclear experiments using an explosives containment vessel at the site, it would have been forced to take action on the site after October 2008, when it learned that Western intelligence agencies had already identified the Ukranian scientist the IAEA claims helped build the container.

The New York Times reported Oct. 9, 2008 that IAEA officials were “investigating whether a Russian scientist helped Iran conduct complex experiments on how to detonate a nuclear weapon, according to European and American officials.”

That was an obvious reference Vyacheslav Danilenko, a Ukrainian who had worked for decades in the Soviet nuclear weapons complex, although he specialised in nanaodiamond production from explosives, before working in Iran from 1996 to 2000.

Danilenko’s first name and first initial of his last name, as well as the fact that he had worked in Iran in the late 1990s, were published in Der Spiegel Jun. 17, 2010.

If Danilenko had indeed been collaborating with Iran on a containment vessel for tests of nuclear weapons designs at Parchin, those news media reports would have triggered Iranian efforts to clean up the site years earlier. But nothing happened – even after the IAEA November report, which discussed the alleged vessel – until the IAEA informed Iran that it wanted to visit Parchin and provided Iran with the specific location in January.

Robert Kelley, who has been top nuclear inspector for the IAEA and project leader for nuclear intelligence at Los Alamos National Laboratory and director of the U.S. Department of Energy’s Remote Sensing Laboratory, has expressed strong scepticism about the idea that the site shown in a series of satellite images has anything to do with high explosives, much less nuclear weapons-related work.

“The building in question is not a classical HE (high explosives) building, that is for sure,” Kelley told this writer in late May.

Kelley and the two former intelligence officers agree that the building is far too close to a major divided highway to be involved in such sensitive testing activity. The ex-intelligence analysts also said there are no special security features as would be expected of a top secret facility.

In an article in Jane’s Intelligence Review Jun. 18, Kelley noted that the presence of a berm only on one side of the building is consistent with standard radiation shielding for an X-ray machine to check the quality of missile components manufactured at Parchin rather than high explosives experiments.

Kelley also noted a number of reasons why the story of the containment vessel at Parchin doesn’t add up.

If Iran were testing nuclear weapons designs, Kelley wrote, it is doubtful that it would have done so with a containment vessel such as the one described by the IAEA, noting that the U.S., Soviet Union, China, Iraq and South Africa did such experiments in the open in remote secret locations, because it enabled them to make more rapid progress.

The UK used a containment vessel, he wrote, only because of the absence of such remote locations.

David Albright has argued that Iran needed the vessel to hide its experiments from spy satellites, but Kelley pointed out that Iran could have simply used a temporary tent to cover the experiments.

*Gareth Porter, an investigative historian and journalist specialising in U.S. national security policy, received the UK-based Gellhorn Prize for journalism for 2011 for articles on the U.S. war in Afghanistan.

The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) report made public Thursday reveals that Iran has actually reduced the amount of 20-percent enriched uranium available for any possible “breakout” to weapons grade enrichment over the last three months rather than increasing it.

Contrary to the impression conveyed by most news media coverage, the report provides new evidence that Iran’s enrichment strategy is aimed at enhancing its bargaining position in negotiations with the United States rather than amassing such a breakout capability.

The reduction in the amount of 20-percent enriched uranium in the Iranian stockpile that could be used to enrich to weapons grade is the result of a major acceleration in the fabrication of fuel plates for the Tehran Research Reactor, which needs 20-percent enriched uranium to produce medical isotopes.

That higher level enriched uranium has been the main focus of U.S. diplomatic demands on Iran ever since 2009, on the ground that it represents the greatest threat of an Iranian move to obtain a nuclear weapon capability.

When 20-percent uranium is used to make fuel plates, however, it is very difficult to convert it back to a form that can enriched to weapons grade levels.

When data in the Aug. 30 IAEA report on the “inventory” of 20-percent enriched uranium is collated with comparable data in the May 25 IAEA report, it shows that Iran is further from having a breakout capability than it was three months earlier.

The data in the two reports indicate that Iran increased the total production of 20-percent enriched uranium from 143 kg in May 2012 to 189.4 kg in mid-August. But the total stockpile of 20-percent enriched uranium that could be more easily enriched to weapons grade – and which has been the focus of U.S. diplomatic demands on Iran ever since 2009 – fell from 101 kg to 91.4 kg during the quarter.

The reduction in the stockpile available for weapons grade enrichment was the result of the conversion of 53.3 kg of 20-percent enriched uranium into fuel plates – compared with only 43 kg in the previous five months.

Iran was thus creating fuel plates for its medical reactor faster than it was enriching uranium to a 20-percent level.

But although that reduction of the stockpile of enriched uranium of greatest concern to the United States was the real significance of the new report, it was not conveyed by the headlines and leads in news media coverage. Those stories focused instead on the fact that production of 20-percent enriched uranium had increased, and that the number of centrifuges at the underground facility at Fordow had doubled.

“Nobody has put out the story that their stockpile is shrinking,” said Joe Cirincione, president of the Ploughshares Fund and a leading independent specialist on nuclear weapons policy, in an interview with IPS.

David Sanger and William Broad of the New York Times asserted in an Aug. 30 story that Iran had “doubled the number of centrifuges installed” at Fordow and had “cleansed” the site where the IAEA believed there had been nuclear weapons development work. The story made no reference to fuel plates or the effective stockpile of 20-percent enriched uranium.

A second story by Sanger and Jodi Rudoren on the same day, datelined Jerusalem, was even more alarmist and inaccurate. It declared that the nuclear programme was “speeding up” and that Iran was “close to crossing what Israel has said is its red line: the capacity to produce nuclear weapons in a location invulnerable to Israeli attack.”

Reuters and AP stories also focused on the doubling of centrifuges as the main message in the IAEA report, and Reuters also said Iran “seems to be struggling to develop more efficient nuclear technology that would shorten the time it would need for any atom bomb bid”.

The Washington Post headline said that Iran was “speeding up” uranium enrichment, and the lead said Iran had “substantially increased the production of a more enriched form of uranium in recent months”. But in the second paragraph, it added, somewhat cryptically, that Iran “appeared to take steps that would make it harder to use its uranium stockpile to make nuclear bombs”.

Only a few paragraphs later was it made clear that the lead was misleading, because the IAEA had found that Iran had “converted much of the new material to metal form for use in a nuclear research reactor.” It even quoted an unnamed Barack Obama administration officials said it could not be “further enriched to weapons-grade material….”

In fact the IAEA data showed that it had converted all of the uranium enriched to 20 percent during the quarter to fuel plates, and had converted some of the production from previous quarters as well.

The media reports of a doubling of the number of centrifuges at the underground facility at Fordow were also misleading. When the information is examined more carefully, it actually provides further evidence that Iran is not striving to amass the higher level uranium needed for a breakout capability but is maneuvering to prepare for a later negotiated settlement.

Although the IAEA report shows that the number of centrifuges in place in Fordow has increased from 696 to 2,140 over the past six months, it also makes it clear that the number of centrifuges actually operating has not changed during that period.

The reason for that striking anomaly in the deployment at Fordow does not appear to be technical problems with the centrifuges. The 1,444 centrifuges that are not operating were never even connected by pipes, as the Institute for Science and International Security (ISIS) observed in its Aug. 30 commentary on the report.

The noncommittal character of the deployment of centrifuges at Fordow suggests that Iran has not decided whether those 1,444 centrifuges are to be committed to 3.5-percent enrichment or to 20-percent enrichment.

The Obama administration appears to understand that this uncertainty about the purpose of the centrifuges is aimed at strengthening Iran’s diplomatic hand in future negotiations. “They have been very strategic about it,” a senior U.S. official told the New York Times just before the report was made public. “They are creating tremendous capacity, but they are not using it.”

The official added, “That gives them leverage, but they think it also stops short of creating the pretext for an attack.”

Cirincione agrees with that senior official’s analysis. “The Iranians are excellent chess players. They are moving their pieces very carefully,” he said. “They are continuing to enhance the value of their bargaining chips.”

The implication of the IAEA report, Cirincione believes, is that Iran is still maneuvering to position itself for a more advantageous agreement in future negotiations. “If you were the Iranians, why would you negotiate right now?” asked Cirincione. “You would want to wait for a better deal.”

In previous rounds of negotiations with Iran in 2012, the United States demanded an end to all 20-percent enrichment and even the closure of the Fordow facility but offered no alleviation of the harsh financial sanctions now being imposed on Iran.

*Gareth Porter, an investigative historian and journalist specialising in U.S. national security policy, received the UK-based Gellhorn Prize for journalism for 2011 for articles on the U.S. war in Afghanistan.

The catastrophe following the meltdown of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power reactor in March 2011 has turned the old debate on nuclear power into a war of words between international agencies and independent experts with diametrically opposed views.

In their newest Uranium report, released Jul. 26, the Nuclear Energy Agency (NEA) and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) all but ignored the lessons learned from Fukushima, predicting that by the year 2035, world nuclear electricity generating capacity will grow by 99 percent.

This forecast also effectively dismisses the financial constraints caused by the ongoing global economic crisis, which has brought countries in the eurozone to the brink of collapse.

Both agencies, mostly financed by industrialised countries, say that during the next two decades nuclear power will grow between 44 and 99 percent, and that uranium reserves, despite higher costs of extraction, are more “than adequate to meet (the) high-case requirements through 2035 and well into the foreseeable future.”

But for independent experts, these optimistic forecasts are typical of the sustained delusions of both agencies.

Mycle Schneider, co-author of the new ‘World Nuclear Industry Status Report 2012’ (WNISR), recalled that both agencies have a long history of exaggerated forecasts that never came true. “In 1973-1974, the IAEA forecast an installed nuclear capacity of 3,600-5,000 gigawatt (GW) in the world by 2000, ten times what it is today,” Schneider told IPS.

Schneider, a Paris-based consultant on energy and nuclear policy, has been a consultant to practically every Western European government, the European Union, the European Parliament, and numerous leading environmental organisations.

A member of the International Panel on Fissile Materials (IPFM), based at Princeton University, he is considered an international expert on nuclear policy.

“Even after the accident of Chernobyl, in 1985, the NEA forecast an installed nuclear capacity of 497-646 GW for the year 2000, still between 40 and 80 percent above reality,” Schneider added.

In sharp contrast to the NEA and IAEA, the WNISR, released Jul. 1, sees a collapsing nuclear power industry in most parts of the world, and gives it only marginal significance in the present and future global energy mix.

Particularly in the context of financial instability and ever-higher costs of construction, not to mention tight security requirements for nuclear reactors and a growing market for renewable energy resources, the report does not place nuclear power anywhere close to the top of the energy agenda.

“Nuclear electricity generation reached a maximum in 2006 with 2,660 terawatts per hour (TWh) and dropped to 2,518 TWh in 2011 (down 4.3 percent compared to 2010), while the nuclear share in the world’s power generation declined steadily from a historic peak of 17 percent in 1993 to about 11 percent in 2011,” the report says.

In addition, the report notes that, “Installed worldwide nuclear capacity decreased in the years 1998, 2006, 2009 and again in 2011, while the annual installed wind power capacity increased by 41 GW in 2011 alone.”

In contrast, global investment in renewable energy totaled 260 billion dollars in 2011, five percent above the previous year and almost five times the 2004 amount, the report indicates.

“The total cumulative investment in renewables has risen to over one trillion dollars since 2004 according to Bloomberg New Energy Finance,” Schneider told IPS. “Compare this to our estimate of nuclear power investment decisions of approximately 120 billion dollars over the same time period,” he added.

Schneider said that such contradictory developments show that “renewables and natural gas energy sources increasingly are more affordable and much faster to install” than nuclear power.

While the WNISR considers the Fukushima catastrophe to be a turning point in the development of nuclear power, the Uranium report by the NEA and the IAEA see it only as “bump in the road.”

As NEA’s Director General, Luis Echávarri, put it, “The Fukushima Daiichi accident … has had the effect of delaying the development of nuclear power programmes worldwide as the lessons from the accident are analysed and implemented.”

“Although most countries have reaffirmed their commitment to continue using nuclear power, a few have opted to phase out or not to reintroduce its use,” Echávarri added.

The NEA and IAEA repeat again earlier references to supposed plans for new nuclear power plant construction, “with the strongest expansion expected in China, India, the Republic of Korea and the Russian Federation,” and take nuclear power growth in other countries for granted.

However, the NEA and IAEA refuse to comprehensively quantify such growth. “(Its) speed and magnitude in generating capacity elsewhere is still to be determined,” the NEA and IAEA claim.

Such optimism can only be explained by a purposeful denial of actual energy developments since the accident at Fukushima, says Antony Froggatt, senior research fellow on energy, environment and resources at the London-based independent think-tank, Chatham House.

“The most significant post-Fukushima policy change outside of Japan has been in Germany,” Froggatt told IPS. “Within four months of the accident Germany adopted legislation that reintroduced and accelerated a previous phase-out plan for nuclear power.”

Germany’s phase-out of nuclear energy should be complete by Dec. 2022. Japan is also considering phasing out nuclear power within the next two decades.

“Other countries in Europe, including Belgium, Italy and Switzerland, have moved away from nuclear as well,” Froggatt added. In the developing world, countries such as Egypt, Jordan, Kuwait, and Thailand “have also dropped plans to develop nuclear power.”

However, Froggatt pointed out that other governments, in the Czech Republic, France, Hungary and Britain, as well as India and Pakistan, have declared their intentions to continue developing nuclear power.

A good example of the uncertainty of the global energy sector is the People’s Republic of China.

“China is building 26 reactors, 40 percent of the global total,” Froggatt said. “Yet, it has suspended new construction to undertake further assessments and testing.”

Such uncertainty is already a strong argument against the NEA and IAEA’s optimistic forecasts. For nuclear electricity generation to actually increase by 99 percent during the next 23 years, hundreds of new nuclear power plants would have to be built in that period.

Present reality and immediate perspectives could not be farther from that kind of growth.  As Schneider’s report points out, since 2011, only nine reactors actually started up – against 21 that were shut down.

Additionally, Schneider said, “Of the 59 units presently under construction in the world, at least 18 are experiencing multi-year delays, while the remaining 41 projects were started within the past five years or have not yet reached projected start-up dates, making it difficult to assess whether they are running on schedule.”

(END)

The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) is “significantly underfunded”, warns a new report released here on Monday.

The agency is labouring under a three-decade-old budget cap that, the report says, is significantly hampering the organisation’s ability to function at the necessary level.

Under several of its mandates, the IAEA is the only organisation in the world tasked with such oversight. It remains entirely funded by voluntary contributions from its member states.

“In spite of (a) well-deserved reputation and its apparently starry prospects, the Agency remains relatively undernourished, its powers significantly hedged and its technical achievements often overshadowed by political controversy,” warns the report, released by the Centre for International Governance Innovation (CIGI), a Canadian think tank.

Currently, the IAEA’s regular budget stands at 321 million euros (around 400 million dollars), which pays for a staff of around 2,300.

“This is tiny, considering what it does,” the report’s author, Trevor Findlay, said on Monday at the Washington offices of the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute.

What that budget currently does, according to Findlay’s research, is oversee nuclear safeguards at 949 facilities in 175 countries, as of 2010. That same year alone, the organisation engaged in more than 2,100 on-site inspections.

Indeed, the IAEA has garnered surprisingly widespread accolades since its creation in 1953. At the same time, much of this praise has inherently acknowledged the agency’s relative budgetary limitations, choosing to laud its efficiency.

In 2006, the U.S. government office tasked with assisting the president create the federal budget gave the IAEA a perfect score in terms of its value for money. In 2004, a U.N. panel cited the agency as an “extraordinary bargain”.

Yet while Findlay notes that the IAEA has repeatedly been called out as “one of the better-run agencies in the U.N. system”, he warns that the organisation’s capped budget is having negative ramifications across its several mandates.

Zero real growth

The funding problems stem from a United Nations-wide policy instituted during the mid-1980s called zero real growth, which halted budgets from growing beyond the median rate of inflation. This came about due to pressure from the so-called Geneva Group, comprised of the largest contributing countries to the U.N.

In the IAEA’s case, this policy essentially froze the budget until 2003, when small though incremental increases were made to the agency’s budget, particularly as a result of U.S. pressure.

Indeed, in this regard the United States remains one of the agency’s most powerful proponents, with President Barack Obama having pushed to double the IAEA’s budget and significantly raising the U.S.’s own voluntary contributions.

Even as its budget has remained stuck, the IAEA has been called on to take on a growing spectrum of responsibilities. Further, the agency’s own estimates suggest a doubling of nuclear power over the next 20 years.

Inevitably, these budgetary constraints have had wide-ranging ramifications, Findlay reports. He calls for a shift to a needs-based budgeting system, in order to support the full range of activities in which the agency has become involved.

“The Agency has not been provided with the latest technologies and adequate human resources,” the report notes. “Most alarming of all, the Agency has failed, by its own means, to detect serious non-compliance by Iraq, Iran and Libya with their safeguards agreements.”

A particular wake-up call came surrounding the disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant in March 2011, following which the agency was proved unable to respond for more than 24 hours.

For many observers, this highlighted not only a dangerous failing within the IAEA, but also the continued lack of any other international body to take on the mantle of the world’s “hub” on nuclear safety.

Political obstacles

For many, the Fukushima and ongoing Iran issues have highlighted the critical need for a re-examination of the IAEA’s functioning.

“After years of crucial Agency involvement with Iran, that country is closer to acquiring nuclear weapons than ever before,” the report states, with Finlay expressing anxiety over the IAEA’s lack of capacity to deal with protracted issues of non-compliance.

But rectifying the budgetary issues is only part of the overall problem, he says. His report, based on two years of work, offers 20 recommendations, broken down by the range of actors that would be expected to make the changes.

Of these recommendations, the Iran issue particularly highlights the fact that the IAEA’s governance has become dangerously divisive, particularly in recent years.

“Politicisation has debilitated the agency’s governing bodies,” Finlay says, noting that cases involving non-compliance have proven to be particularly incapacitating. He puts this down particularly to the Iran stalemate, though he also cites contentious votes on Israel’s nuclear programme, safeguards throughout the Middle East and other issues.

“Increasing politicization may be partly attributed to the more active role of the developing countries in Agency affairs,” the report suggests. It points to the increased heft of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM), a bloc that purportedly functions as Iran’s “diplomatic bulwark”.

Yet the report hastens to add that “the West is also guilty of politicizing the IAEA … Nicholas Burns, US undersecretary of state for political affairs, reportedly told (former IAEA chief Mohamed) ElBaradei, in pressing him to toe the US line on Iran, that ‘we pay 25 percent of your budget.'”

While the report offers a few strategies for attenuating this divisiveness, Finlay is clear that the intrusion of politics is also inevitable. Given that it is the member states that established and pay for the IAEA’s services, he concludes that “it is they that ultimately control its destiny.”

“(The IAEA) can in some respects strengthen and reform itself. But ultimately, it is constrained by the strong preferences of its membership as a whole or those of key, active member states. It is therefore to the member states that we must look to trigger and sustain lasting strengthening and reform.”

The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and Western governments acted this week to escalate their accusations that Iran has “sanitised” a site at its Parchin military complex to hide evidence of nuclear weapons work, showing satellite images of physical changes at the site to IAEA member delegations.

The nature of the changes depicted in the images and the circumstances surrounding them suggest, however, that Iran made them to gain leverage in its negotiations with the IAEA rather than to hide past nuclear experiments.

The satellite images displayed to IAEA member delegations last week by Deputy Director General Herman Nackaerts, head of the agency’s Safeguards Department, showed a series of changes that have been the subject of leaks to the news media: a stream of water coming out of building at a site at Parchin, the demolition of two small buildings nearby the larger building said by the IAEA to have housed a bomb containment chamber, and earth moved from locations north and south of the site to be dumped further north.

After seeing the pictures, U.S. Permanent Representative to the IAEA Robert Wood declared, “It was clear from some of the images that were presented to us that further sanitisation efforts are ongoing at the site.”

But the activities shown in those satellite images show activities appear to be aimed at prompting the IAEA, the United States and Israel to give greater urgency and importance to a request for an IAEA inspection visit to Parchin in the context of negotiations between Iran and the IAEA.

The latest round in those negotiations, on a framework for Iran’s cooperation with the IAEA in clearing up allegations of Iranian covert nuclear weapons work, failed to reach agreement on Friday.

Greg Thielmann, former director of Strategic, Proliferation and Military Affairs Office of the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research, said in an interview with IPS that he didn’t know whether the changes shown in satellite images were part of a conscious Iranian negotiating strategy.

But Thielmann, now a senior fellow at the Arms Control Association, said the effect of the changes is to “increase the interest of the IAEA in an inspection at Parchin as soon as possible and to give Iran more leverage in the negotiations”.

Nuclear scientist Dr. Behrad Nakhai, who has worked at Oak Ridge National Laboratory and has closely followed the Iranian nuclear programme, suggested that Iran’s overt moves on the ground in Parchin were a way of ensuring that “the IAEA will be enticed to give more value to an inspection of Parchin”.

Muhammad Sahimi, who tracks news coverage and comments on Iran’s nuclear programme for the PBS Frontline website “Tehran Bureau”, agrees that Iranians have made physical changes at Parchin “so that when they allow the IAEA in, it will be at a higher price.”

Access to Parchin has been recognised implicitly by both sides as Iran’s primary leverage in those negotiations. The IAEA has insisted in the past that a Parchin visit must come before reaching the broader agreement on Iran’s cooperation, while Iran has refused to permit a visit to the site until after the agreement is completed.

The primary issue in the wider negotiations has been whether the IAEA inquiry would end if and when Iran answered all the questions that have been raised by the IAEA or whether the agency could go back to issues as often and whenever it wishes.

The charge that Iran is “sanitising” the site assumes that Iran believes that the activities depicted would actually eliminate traces of radioactivity left by past testing at the site. The IAEA’s November 2011 report said a bomb containment chamber at the site in Parchin was used for “hydrodynamic tests”, which utilise natural or depleted uranium as a substitute for fissile materials.

David Albright, director of the Institute for Science and International Security (ISIS), suggested in a May 11 commentary on the organisation’s website that if Iran were to grind down the surfaces inside the building, collect the dust, wash, repair and repaint the building, and remove dirt around the building, it “could be effective in defeating environmental sampling”.

But nuclear experts have contradicted that statement.

Pierre Goldschmidt, IAEA deputy director general for safeguards from 1999 to 2005, responding to an e-mail query from IPS, said, “Of course there would be no way to remove the traces of a nuclear test.”

Robert Kelley, who has also managed the U.S. Department of Energy’s Remote Sensing Laboratory, which specialises in high-tech detection of nuclear activities, and was twice head of the IAEA’s Iraq inspection group, has pointed out that Syria was sent to the U.N. Security Council over a site that had been bulldozed a year earlier, because of the discovery of tiny microscopic particles of radioactive material found at the site.

Nuclear scientist Nakhi told IPS, “It’s virtually impossible to clean up radiation from a nuclear test completely.”

Referring to the charges of “sanitisation” of evidence of nuclear device testing at the Parchin site, Seyed Hossein Mousavian, Iran’s lead nuclear negotiator with the European states in 2005, told IPS, “Iranians know very well they couldn’t eliminate traces of such activities even after 10 years.”

Mousavian, now a visiting scholar at Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School, added, “I personally cannot imagine there were such activities (at Parchin).”

Nakhai told IPS in an interview that Iranian officials are also acutely aware of the fact that everything they are doing at the site is being tracked by Western intelligence agencies through spy satellites. The physical changes that have been carried out at Parchin, he suggests, have been deliberately staged for IAEA and Western governments.

“The only thing missing is somebody waving to the satellite,” Nakhai said.

Former nuclear negotiator Mousavian would not comment directly on whether Iran is making changes at Parchin to increase the negotiating value of permitting an IAEA inspection. But he told IPS that, in the end, “Iran will be able to prove to international opinion that this accusation is false.”

The satellite images shown to the IAEA member states were published May 8 and May 30 by ISIS. The earlier picture, dated Apr. 9, showed the stream of water emanating from the building. The later images, dated May 25, showed the demolished buildings and evidence of earth having been moved.

The changes at the site shown on the satellite images appear to have one thing in common: they all lead the IAEA directly to places on or near the site where environmental sampling can be done easily by an IAEA team.

The water shown in the Apr. 9 image appears to collect in a ditch a short distance away from the building. Former IAEA senior inspector Kelley observed in a May 23 article on the website of the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute that the IAEA team would have an “enhanced opportunity” to find uranium particles if they were present.

The May 25 image appears to show soil that was moved from two areas roughly 200-300 feet north of the building and 100-200 feet south of it. But the soil appears to have been carried only a few hundred feet further north of the former area where it is shown to have been dumped, offering another inviting target for environmental sampling.

The fragments of the two small buildings demolished at the site appear in the May 25 image to have been left intact on the ground, offering yet another easy objective for a visit.

Meanwhile, the building in which the IAEA reported last November that a bomb containment chamber had been used for hydrodynamic testing and the soil south and east of it remain undisturbed.

The claim that such a chamber was installed at a site in Parchin in 2000 to carry out hydrodynamic testing appears to depend entirely on unspecified information from unidentified countries. The claim has been challenged by Kelley, making no sense on the basis of technical inconsistencies.

*Gareth Porter is an investigative historian and journalist specialising in U.S. 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.

Negotiations between Iran and the United States and other members of the P5+1 group in Baghdad ended in fundamental disagreement Thursday over the position of the P5+1 offering no relief from sanctions against Iran.

The two sides agreed to meet again in Moscow Jun. 18 and 19, but only after Iran had threatened not to schedule another meeting, because the P5+1 had originally failed to respond properly to its five-point plan.

The prospects for agreement are not likely to improve before that meeting, however, mainly because of an inflexible U.S. diplomatic posture that reflects President Barack Obama’s need to bow to the demands of Israel and the U.S. Congress on Iran policy.

The U.S. hard line in the Baghdad talks and the failure to set the stage for an early agreement with Iran means that Iran will not only increase but accelerate its accumulation of 20-percent enriched uranium, which has been the ostensible reason for wanting to get Iran to the negotiating table quickly.

Iran’s enrichment to 20 percent, which Tehran has justified over the past two years as needed by its Tehran Research Reactor to produce medical isotopes, can be turned into high enriched uranium more quickly than the 3.5 percent enriched uranium for Iran’s nuclear power programme.

But although Iran has let it be known that it is open to making a deal to end its 20 percent enrichment and even to let go of its stockpile if offered the right incentive, the Obama administration has opted not to go for such a deal by refusing to offer any corresponding reduction in sanctions.

The U.S. demand for the closure of the Fordow facility, which is now under surveillance by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), was a direct response to pressure from Israel. Prime Minister Benjamen Netanyahu declared that demand one of his “benchmarks” for the talks on Mar. 2.

In discussions with the U.S. in late March, Defence Minister Ehud Barak insisted on the closure of Fordow as one of the Israeli demands, as he revealed Apr. 4. That was a quid pro quo for Israeli acceptance of a focus in the first stage on halting Iran’s uranium enrichment to 20 percent rather than demanding an end to all uranium enrichment, as Reuters reported Apr. 4.

That agreement clearly implied that the Obama administration would do nothing to dismantle any sanctions against Iran unless Iran ended all uranium enrichment.

The administration’s refusal to entertain any removal of sanctions as part of its diplomatic strategy with Iran also recognised the fact that it would have to pay a steep political price merely to request any change in sanctions legislation and would be unlikely to prevail over the deeply entrenched interests of Israel in both houses.

After being lobbied by 12,000 activists attending the conference of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) in March, the House of Representatives passed a resolution demanding a policy of preventing Iran from having a “nuclear weapons capability” by a vote of 401-11.

The U.S. understandings with Israel were sharply at odds with a deal with Iran based on a “step by step” approach which had been proposed by Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov. Under that approach, each move by Iran to satisfy Western concerns about its nuclear programme should be rewarded by a relaxation of sanctions.

As Michael Adler revealed in The Daily Beast Mar. 7, however, the Obama administration was unwilling to reduce sanctions gradually as the Russians wanted. Adler’s account implied that it could only come at the end of the process in response to a complete suspension of all uranium enrichment by Iran as a “confidence building measure”.

For Iran, 20 percent enrichment has been largely an exercise in increasing its bargaining leverage with the United States by creating a level of enrichment that the U.S has said is threatening.

Iran has made a series of policy statements since it began that enrichment suggesting that the objective has been to trade those bargaining chips for negotiating concessions that would benefit Iran – mainly moves to reduce sanctions and the recognition of its right to enrich.

The demand that the 20 percent enrichment be ended and that Fordow facility be closed without any easing of economic sanctions would represent a double diplomatic defeat which Iran has strenuously rejected.

“Giving up 20 percent enrichment levels in return for plane spare parts is a joke,” Iranian analyst Hasan Abadini was quoted as saying.

There was some discussion before the Baghdad meeting, initiated by Europeans, of at least offering to suspend a European ban on insuring oil tankers, which threatens some of Iran’s oil trade with Asian countries, in conjunction with a deal, according to the New York Times May 18. But that was evidently rejected by Washington.

The U.S. rejection of the “step by step” approach in favour of a stance that leans heavily toward Israeli preferences leads to apparent contradictions in U.S. policy.

That stance is sharply at odds with the official U.S. stance suggesting ending Iran’s 20 percent enrichment is an urgent requirement. A senior U.S. official was quoted by Associated Press Thursday as saying, “We are urgent about this, because every day we don’t figure this out, they keep going forward with a nuclear program.”

The contradiction was further highlighted by reports that Iran is further increasing its capability for 20 percent enrichment at the Fordow facility. A Reuters story from Vienna Thursday said that Iran may have already put 350 more centrifuges into Fordow since February, on top of the almost 700 already operating there.

Associated Press reported a senior U.S. official in Baghdad explaining that sanctions were likely to increase the pressure on Iran to agree to U.S. terms in the next round of talks. “Maximum pressure is not yet being felt by Iran,” the official was quoted as saying.

But few diplomatic observers believe that Iran’s Supreme Leader, who makes the crucial decisions, could afford to bow to the U.S. demands as presented in Baghdad.

Meanwhile, the U.S. strategy of drawing out the talks to wait for the impact of sanctions to work on the Iranians allows Iran to continue adding “facts on the ground”.

Ironically, U.S. strategists have argued publicly in the past that Iran was using negotiations to “play for time” while it increased its nuclear capabilities.

In another seeming contradiction between U.S. diplomatic posture and its declared interest in ensuring that Iran prove the non-military character of its nuclear programme, U.S. officials dismissed as irrelevant the news that Iran and IAEA Director General Yukia Amano are close to an agreement on the terms of Iranian cooperation in clarifying allegations of past nuclear weapons work.

A “senior U.S. official” said the United States welcomed the signs of progress, but then carefully differentiated the purpose of the P5+1 negotiations and those of the IAEA, according to Al-monitor May 22.

“The IAEA is about accounting for the past and for naming what is,” the official explained. “It is not about what is the nature of Iran’s nuclear program and what will Iran’s nuclear program look like going forward, and will it be peaceful.”

That statement abruptly reversed previous U.S. insistence that Iran’s cooperation with the IAEA represented a central element in a diplomatic settlement of the conflict over Iran’s nuclear programme.

The idea that U.S. negotiations with Iran would not be affected by whatever it did to prove allegations of past nuclear weapons work wrong implies that Washington is firmly committed to its present diplomatic course mainly in order to placate Israel and the U.S. Congress.

*Gareth Porter is an investigative historian and journalist specialising in U.S. 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.

(END)

As a result of the diplomatic momentum geared to disarm international suspicions over the explosive issue of Iran’s nuclear programme, the one country not directly party to the two-track negotiation process feels more isolated than Iran.

Following the putative breakthrough reached by the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, Yukiya Amano, according to which Iran would permit the nuclear watchdog to inspect secret Iranian military sites (including the Parchin base where nuclear weapons’ testing was apparently conducted in 2003), Israel fears the international community will lower its guard.

“The Iranians are serial agreement violators,” warned an Israeli official. “We know from past experiences how all these agreements between the IAEA and Iran end.”

“The world’s leading countries must show determination, not weakness,” urged the Israeli Prime Minister before the positive development.

Israel suspects that as part of a confidence-building package, the P5+1 will accede to Tehran’s request to ease the strict regime of sanctions due to become even stricter on Jul. 1. “They don’t need make concessions to Iran,” Netanyahu added, “They need to set clear and unequivocal demands before it.”

For its part, Israel unequivocally demands that the success of the Baghdad talks between the P5+1 (the five Security Council members plus Germany) and the Islamic Republic be contingent on a complete “freeze of all enrichment inside Iran” (not just of its-already enriched 20 percent uranium); the “removal of all enriched material outside of Iran” (not simply most of it); and, the “dismantlement” of the Fordow facility (not merely a suspension of the underground site’s enrichment activities).

“Israel’s position has not, and won’t, change,” stressed Netanyahu. “Obviously, nothing would be better than to see this issue resolved diplomatically. But I have seen no evidence that Iran is serious about stopping its nuclear weapons programme,” he also stated.

The real test lies in the implementation of any putative agreement, be it on inspections of nuclear sites or on uranium enrichment, emphasise Israeli leaders. In any case, inspections of secret facilities would come after a comprehensive agreement was reached on Iran’s 20 percent-enriched uranium stockpile. And, the diplomatic haggling could last months.

Iran “may try to go from meeting to meeting with empty promises. It may agree to something in principle but not implement it. They might even agree to implement something that doesn’t materially derail their nuclear weapons programme,” was Netanyahu’s presumption.

“When this goal’s achieved, I’ll be the first to applaud. Until then, count me among the sceptics,” Netanyahu added.

A western diplomat involved in the Baghdad talks qualified the sceptical attitude “unwarranted cynicism” as he stressed that any deal with IAEA would require Iran to take immediate and concrete steps.

But Israel’s fears run deeper – that in order to avert a head-on confrontation, in the coming months each of the players in the nuclear chess game – Iran, the IAEA, the P5+1, especially the U.S. – will be playing a double-barrelled game.

To assuage its Mideast ally, the U.S. ambassador to Israel declared last week that Washington was not just willing to use military force to stop Iran from developing nuclear weapons. “It would be preferable to resolve this diplomatically and through the use of pressure than to use military force,” Dan Shapiro stressed. “But that doesn’t mean that option isn’t fully available. And not just available, but it’s ready. The necessary planning has been done to ensure that it’s ready.”

But then, following the visit to Washington of Israeli Defence Minister Ehud Barak, the Joint Chiefs of Staff suggested that defence rather than offence is the recommended strategy.

“If the president were to ask me what we could do to respond to an Iranian provocation, I would have a menu of options,” Gen. Martin Dempsey assured in an interview to the Chicago Tribune on Friday. Yet, he cautioned: “Our stance (…) is one of preparedness and deterrence. It’s not a stance that’s based on offensive action.”

And, an alarming analysis published a fortnight ago by the Washington-based Centre for Strategic and International Studies and quoted in the Israeli media suggested that ultimately, Iran could manage to address the nuclear standoff successfully.

In an article entitled Rethinking Our Approach to Iran’s Search for the Bomb, Anthony Cordesman writes that “Iran’s efforts are part of a far broader range of efforts that have already brought it to the point where it can pursue nuclear weapons development through a range of compartmented and easily concealable programmes without a formal weapons programme, and even if it suspends enrichment activity.”

Relying solely on unrestricted sources (among them the Nov. 2011 IAEA report), Cordesman estimates that even if Iran’s enrichment facilities were inspected (in case of an agreement) or destroyed (in absence of agreement), that in and of itself would not necessarily end the Ayatollah regime’s nuclear capability as it “would take an amazing amount of intelligence access to prevent” Iran from creating replacement enrichment facilities…”

Moreover, “Iran could appear to agree to arms control or appear to have had its programmes destroyed and still go on creating better future enrichment capability.

“In the case of preventive strikes, it means recognising that even a major first round of strikes is unlikely to have a lasting effect and might well push Iran into a far larger nuclear effort unless Iran realises that any such effort would result in follow-on attacks,” concludes the strategic analyst.

Up until now, Netanyahu and Barack quite successfully managed to convince the international community that if it didn’t act to quell Iran’s nuclear programme, Israel would.

Now that the world is seriously engaged in talks with Iran, the realisation is that the two-track diplomacy – IAEA-Iran and P5+1-Iran – is aimed at neutralising not only Iran’s nuclear effort, but also Israel’s threat of a unilateral strike. (END)

The head of the U.N. nuclear watchdog has said he expects to sign a deal with Iran soon on investigating suspected weapons activities connected to the country’s nuclear programme.

Amano also said that Saeed Jalili, Iran’s chief nuclear negotiator, had assured him that “the existing differences will not be an obstacle to the agreement”.

The IAEA wants access to sites, officials and documents to shed light on activities in Iran that could be used to develop the capability to make nuclear weapons, especially at the Parchin military complex southeast of Tehran.

Amano said that access to the Parchin military site would “be addressed”.

Iran has repeatedly said that Parchin is not a designated nuclear site and thus it is not obliged to permit IAEA inspections. Iran has rejected Western accusations that it is removing evidence at the site.

Scepticism over deal

Some Western diplomats have voiced dissatisfaction with the outcome of Amano’s latest negotiations with Iran.

One diplomat told the AFP new agency that there had been “no breakthrough” in Amano’s visit.

Another said the trip appeared disappointing but that they were waiting for a “clearer picture” at meetings in the Austrian capital later on Tuesday.

Israel, which like the U.S. has not ruled out air attacks to stop Iran’s atomic progress if it deems diplomacy has failed, has said it is “highly sceptical” about the latest agreement between the IAEA and Iran.

Amano met the head of Iran’s nuclear energy organisation, Fereydoun Abbasi-Davani, hours after his pre-dawn arrival on Monday, according to the ISNA news agency.

After the talks, Abbasi-Davani’s office issued a statement saying issues were raised “in a frank manner and proposals were made to remove ambiguities and to develop co-operation,” the AFP news agency reported.

During his visit, Amano also met Ali Akbar Salehi, Iran’s foreign minister, in advance of a crucial meeting on Iran’s nuclear-weapons programme in Baghdad on Wednesday between Iran and a group of world powers.

In Baghdad, the powers’ main goal will be to get Iran to stop the higher-grade uranium enrichment it started two years ago and has since expanded, shortening the time needed for any weapons bid.

Iran says it needs the uranium enriched to a fissile concentration of 20 per cent for its medical research reactor.

No notable progress

Two meetings between Iran and senior Amano aides in Tehran in January and February failed to make any notable progress.

Such a deal would also not be enough to allay international concerns. World powers want Iran to curb uranium enrichment, which can have both civilian and military purposes.

Iran insists its nuclear programme is intended only to generate electricity and other civilian uses.

Unlike Israel, assumed to have the Middle East’s only nuclear arsenal, Iran is a signatory to treaties that oblige it to work with the IAEA.

Leaders of the G8, worried about the effect of high oil prices on their faltering economies, raised the pressure on Iran on Saturday, conveying their readiness to tap into emergency oil stockpiles this summer if tougher new sanctions on Tehran strain supplies.

By promising cooperation with U.N. inspectors, diplomats say Iran might aim for leverage ahead of the broader negotiations, where the U.S. and its allies want Iran to halt works they say are cover for developing nuclear weapons.

Western sanctions on Iran’s energy exports, and threats by Israel and the U.S. of military action, have pushed up world oil prices.

*Published under an agreement with Al Jazeera.

(END)

Opposition to Iran’s possible acquisition of nuclear weapons is widespread, although support for taking military action to prevent it appears to have fallen in several key countries over the past two years, according to a new poll of public opinion in 21 countries released here Friday by the Pew Research Center’s Global Attitudes Project.

The poll, some of whose questions were sharply criticised as biased by several experts, was released just five days before Iran meets with the so-called P5+1 nations – the U.S., Britain, France, China, Russia, and Germany – in Baghdad to discuss the future of its nuclear programme.

Hopes that the Baghdad meeting could produce agreement on a number of confidence-building measures, including a possible freeze by Iran of its enrichment of uranium to 20 percent, have risen since the two sides met in Istanbul last month.

The announcement in Vienna Friday that the director-general of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) Yukiya Amano will travel to Tehran Sunday – apparently to sort out the terms for a visit by his inspectors to a military base suspected of housing a nuclear-related testing facility – has fuelled those hopes.

The poll, which was conducted between mid-March and mid-April, was part of Pew’s annual series on global attitudes that has run over the last 12 years.

The latest survey questioned more than 26,000 people in 21 countries about a range of issues beyond those having to do with Iran and its nuclear programme. Other findings by the survey are expected to be released in the coming weeks and months, but Pew released the Iran- related results in light of heightened public interest surrounding next week’s meetings.

In addition to the P5+1 countries themselves, the countries covered by the poll included five other European countries – Spain, the Czech Republic, Italy, Poland, and Greece; six predominantly Muslim nations – Turkey, Jordan, Egypt, Lebanon, Tunisia, and Pakistan; as well as Japan, India, Brazil, and Mexico.

Critics of the survey charged that key questions about Iran’s nuclear programme and what to do about it contained factual assumptions – for example, that Iran’s nuclear programme is designed to develop nuclear weapons – that were themselves questionable.

Tehran has steadfastly insisted – most recently by Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khomeini – that its programme is intended for civilian uses only. The U.S. and Israeli intelligence communities have also assessed that no decision has been taken by Iran’s leadership to build a weapon, although aspects of its nuclear programme – notably its enrichment of uranium – would certainly be relevant if such a decision were taken.

In its poll, Pew found majorities ranging from 54 percent (China and Turkey) to 96 percent (Germany and France) in 18 of the countries said they were opposed to Iran “acquiring nuclear weapons”. The three exceptions were Pakistan, where only 11 percent said they opposed such a development; India, where 34 percent opposed a nuclear-armed Iran, and 51 percent said they had no opinion; and Tunisia where opponents and supporters were evenly split.

When respondents who said they opposed a nuclear-armed Iran were asked how such an eventuality might be prevented, there was far less agreement.

Asked about using “tougher international economic sanctions on Iran to try to stop it from developing nuclear weapons,” majorities in 16 countries ranging from 56 percent in India to 80 percent in the U.S. and Germany said they approved. But majorities in Tunisia, Turkey, Pakistan, and, significantly, China (54 percent) disapproved, while in Russia, a slight plurality said they approved.

Particularly notable, however, was the fact that, compared to the answers to the same question two years ago, support for sanctions has generally declined, most dramatically in Russia (from 67 percent approval to 46 percent); China (from 58 percent to 38 percent), and Turkey (from 44 percent to 34 percent) despite the deterioration in Ankara’s relations with Tehran over the past year.

As might be expected, Pew found less support among those respondents opposed to a nuclear-armed Iran about using military force to prevent it from acquiring a weapon.

Asked which was more important: “preventing Iran from developing nuclear weapons, even if it means taking military action or avoiding a military conflict with Iran, even if it means they may develop nuclear weapons,” pluralities or majorities ranging from 46 percent (Lebanon) to 55 percent (Brazil) in 14 countries, including Mexico, Egypt, Jordan, and all but Russia in Europe chose the military option. In addition, the U.S. was the most hawkish by far at 63 percent.

On the other hand, a 69 percent majority in Tunisia gave greater importance to avoiding military conflict, as did pluralities in Pakistan (29 percent), China (39 percent), Turkey (42 percent), Russia (41 percent), and Japan (49 percent).

Remarkably, support for military action fell in most of the countries that were polled on the same question in 2010; most notably in four of the six P5+1 countries, including Russia (from 32 percent to 24 percent), China (from 35 percent to 30 percent), France (from 59 percent to 51 percent), and the U.S. (from 66 to 63 percent).

The question itself, however, came under fire from a number of critics here who said that its “either/or” phrasing presents a false choice: military action that would prevent a nuclear-armed Iran or living with a nuclear-armed Iran.

“There are non-military options for preventing a nuclear-Iran,” said Daryl Kimball, executive director of the Arms Control Association (ACA) here.

He also noted that the question assumed that the use of force “would be successful in preventing a nuclear-armed Iran, while the consensus among U.S. European, and Israeli military experts is that a military attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities would at best delay Iran’s programme by a couple of years or so, but would not ‘prevent a nuclear-armed Iran’.”

Similarly, Steven Kull, the director of the University of Maryland’s Program on International Polling Attitudes (PIPA), criticised the questions, noting that “other polls (including some that PIPA has conducted) that offer a menu of options (for dealing with Iran’s nuclear programme), including diplomacy and sanctions, have found that only small minorities elect to take military action.”

Moreover, he said, the question about economic sanctions – do you approve or disapprove of tougher international economic sanctions on Iran to try to stop it from developing nuclear weapons – “implies that Iran is in the process of developing nuclear weapons. This is actually contrary to the conclusions of the U.S. intelligence community. It is implicitly making a statement about Iran’s intentions.”

Richard Wike, the Pew Project’s associate director, told IPS: “As with all of our polls, the questions in this study are worded to explore people’s opinions about issues being debated; their formulation is similar to questions used in past polls in order to examine and maintain trends.”

*Jim Lobe’s blog on U.S. foreign policy can be read at http://www.lobelog.com.

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In meetings with Iranian officials in Vienna this week, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) apparently intends to hold up agreement on a plan for Iran’s full cooperation in clarifying allegations of covert nuclear weapons work by insisting that it must first let the nuclear agency visit Parchin military base.

That demand, coupled with the IAEA’s insistence in the talks on being able to prolong the inquiry on Iran’s alleged nuclear weapons work indefinitely, make the failure of the current talks very likely. Iran has made it clear that it wants assurances that the IAEA inquiry on the allegations will allow it to achieve closure on an agreed timetable by responding fully to IAEA questions.

That intention was signaled by IAEA Director General Yukia Amano’s handling of the previous round of negotiations in February in an interview with Michael Adler in The Daily Beast Mar. 11. Amano told Adler that what he called the “standoff” over access to Parchin “has become like a symbol” and vowed to “pursue this objective until there’s a concrete result”.

But the “standoff” was not over access to Parchin itself but whether the IAEA would insist that the cooperation plan be held hostage to such a visit.

Adler cited an “informed source” as saying that the IAEA rejects any linkage between a visit to Parchin and the rest of the plan for cooperation being negotiated and insists that a visit to Parchin must come first before any agreement.

Iran had implicitly been using the IAEA’s desire for the Parchin visit as a bargaining chip in negotiations over the terms of their cooperation – and especially the question of whether the process is to have an agreed endpoint.

Amano and Western officials have justified the insistence on immediate access to the Parchin site to investigate an alleged explosive containment vessel for testing related to a nuclear weapon by suggesting that satellite photographs show Iran may be trying to “clean up” the site.

David Albright, who has frequently passed on information and arguments originating with the IAEA on the website of the Institute for Science and International Security, was quoted by the Associated Press Sunday as arguing that a clean-up of the Parchin site “could involve grinding down the surfaces inside the building, collecting the dust and then washing the area thoroughly”.

Albright further suggested that Iran could remove “any dirt around the building thought to contain contaminants”.

But former senior IAEA nuclear inspector Robert Kelley told IPS that IAEA inspectors “will find uranium particles at a site like this if they ever were there.”

Kelley, who worked in U.S. nuclear weapons programmes at Livermore and Los Alamos national laboratories and was director of the Remote Sensing Laboratory in Las Vegas, recalled that Syria had been sent to the U.N. Security Council “on the basis of tiny miscroscopic particles found at a site that had been bulldozed a year after the event”.

Access to Parchin has not been the issue in Iran’s negotiations with the IAEA. Iran’s permanent representative to the IAEA, Ambassador Ali Asghar Soltanieh, has said that Iran is willing to grant access to Parchin as part of an agreed plan for Iranian cooperation with the IAEA.

The unfinished text of the agreement as of the end of February round of talks reveals that the real conflict is over whether the IAEA can prolong the process of questioning Iran about allegations of covert nuclear weapons work indefinitely.

On Mar. 8, in response to a presentation by Soltanieh to the IAEA Board of Governors detailing the negotiations, Amano confirmed, in effect, that the agency was insisting on being able to extend the process by coming up with more questions, regardless of Iran’s responses to the IAEA’s questions on the agreed list of topics.

He complained that Iran had sought to force the agency to “present a definitive list of questions” and to deny the agency “the right to revisit issues….”

Amano’s demands for immediate access to Parchin and for a process without any clear endpoint appear to be aimed at allowing the United States and its allies to continue accusing Iran of refusing cooperation with the IAEA during negotiations between Iran and the P5+1 group scheduled to resume in Baghdad May 23.

Amano was elected to replace the more independent Mohamed ElBaradei in 2009 with U.S. assistance and pledged to align the agency with U.S. policy on Iran as well as other issues, as revealed by WikiLeaks cables dated July and October 2009.

The draft negotiating text as of Feb. 21, which has been posted on the website of the Arms Control Association, shows Iran seeking a final resolution of the issues within a matter of weeks but the IAEA insisting on an open-ended process with no promise of such an early resolution.

The unfinished negotiating draft explains why Iran is holding on to Parchin access as a bargaining chip to get an agreement which will give Iran some tangible political benefit in return for information responding to a series of IAEA allegations.

The still unfinished draft represents the original draft from the IAEA, as modified by Iran during the last round of talks, according to Soltanieh in an interview with IPS on Mar. 15.

The negotiating draft shows that Iran and the IAEA had proposed and Iran agreed that the very first issues on which Iran would respond were “Parchin” and the “foreign expert”.

The issue of whether or not the plan would provide for a clear-cut closure if Iran provided satisfactory answers comes up repeatedly in the draft. The IAEA draft refers to “a number of actions that are to be undertaken before the June 2012 meeting of the IAEA Board of Governors, if possible”.

But the draft appears to anticipate a process without any specific terminal point. “Follow up actions that are required of Iran,” it says, “to facilitate the Agency’s conclusions regarding the peaceful nature of Iran’s nuclear programme will be identified as this process continues.”

Iran amended that paragraph so that the process would be completed by the June 2012 IAEA board meeting. The entire sentence providing for identification of further actions required of Iran during the process is struck out in the text.

Iran agreed in the draft agreement to “facilitate a conclusive technical assessment of all issues of concern to the Agency.” But Iran inserted the sentence, “There exist no issues other than those reflected in the said annex.”

A crucial element of the plan presented by the IAEA is a provision under which the agency “may adjust the order in which issues and topics are discussed, and return to those that have been discussed earlier, given that the issues and topics are interrelated.” In other words, there would be no promise of closure on an issue, regardless of what information Iran provides on the topic or topics.

Iran deleted the language allowing the return to issues that had been discussed earlier. The IAEA draft envisions a process that would begin with an Iranian “initial declaration”, after which the IAEA would “provide…initial questions and a detailed explain of its concerns”.

But the draft shows an Iranian strikethrough on the word “initial”, rejecting the IAEA’s right to come up with more questions even after the initial questions were answered.

The IAEA draft provided that, after Iran had responded to questions and requests, and the IAEA had analysed the responses, “the Agency will discuss with Iran any further actions to be taken.”

But Iran rewrote the sentence to read “(T)he agency will discuss and agree with Iran on actions to be taken on each topic. After implementation of action on each topic, it will be considered concluded and then the work on the next topic will start”.

*Gareth Porter is an investigative historian and journalist specialising in U.S. 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.

(END)