As the U.S. Congress prepares to vote next month on the landmark Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), which was agreed on July 14 between the world’s leading powers and Iran, and has been approved by the U.N. Security Council, eminent nuclear non-proliferation experts are mobilising international support for its immediate implementation.

In a joint statement, more than 70 of the world’s leading nuclear non-proliferation specialists outline why the JCPOA “is a strong, long-term, and verifiable agreement that will be a net-plus for international nuclear non-proliferation efforts.”

The non-proliferation specialists’ statement, organised by Daryl G. Kimball, executive director of the Arms Control Association, point out that the July 14 agreement, “ … advances the security interests of the P5+1 nations (China, France, Germany, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States), the European Union, their allies and partners in the Middle East, and the international community.”

The joint statement is endorsed by former U.S. nuclear negotiators, former senior U.S. non-proliferation officials, a former director-general of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), a former member of the U.N. Panel of Experts on Iran, and leading nuclear specialists from the United States and around the globe.

The experts “… urge the leaders of the P5+1 states, the European Union, and Iran to take the steps necessary to ensure timely implementation and rigorous compliance with the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action.”

The statement concludes: “… we believe the JCPOA meets key nonproliferation and security objectives and see no realistic prospect for a better nuclear agreement.”

“This statement … underscores, as President Barack Obama recently noted, the majority of arms control and non-proliferation experts support the P5+1 and Iran nuclear deal,” said the Arms Control Association’s executive director Daryl G. Kimball in a new release on Tuesday.

It said: “The JCPOA will establish long-term, verifiable restrictions on Iran’s sensitive nuclear fuel cycle activities, many of which will last for 10 years, some for 15 years, some for 25 years, with enhanced IAEA monitoring under Iran’s additional protocol agreement with the IAEA and modified code 3.1 safeguards provisions lasting indefinitely.”

When implemented, eminent nuclear non-proliferation experts say, the JCPOA will establish long-term, verifiable restrictions on Iran’s enrichment facilities and research and development, including advanced centrifuge research and deployment.

“Taken in combination with stringent limitations on Iran’s low-enriched uranium stockpile, these restrictions ensure that Iran’s capability to produce enough bomb-grade uranium sufficient for one weapon would be extended to approximately 12 months for a decade or more,” they add.

“Moreover,” the experts say in a joint statement, “the JCPOA will effectively eliminate Iran’s ability to produce and separate plutonium for a nuclear weapon for at least 15 years, including by permanently modifying the Arak reactor, Iran’s major potential source for weapons grade plutonium, committing Iran not to reprocess spent fuel, and shipping spent fuel out of the country.”

Edited by Kitty Stapp

Nuclear power plant in Cattenom, France. The IAEA has reported cases of random malware-based attacks at nuclear plants. Credit: Stefan Kühn/cc by 2.0

By Thalif Deen
UNITED NATIONS, Aug 17 2015 (IPS)

As hackers continue to rampage through closely-guarded information systems and databases with monotonous regularity, there is a tempting new target for cyber-attacks: the world’s nuclear facilities.

A warning has already been sounded by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), which has urged the world community to intensify efforts to protect nuclear facilities from possible attacks.“We need to drain the swamp and stop developing technologies that are vulnerable to catastrophic attacks." -- Randy Rydell

Pointing out the nuclear industry was not immune to such attacks, IAEA Director-General Yukiya Amano says there should be a serious attempt at protecting nuclear and radioactive material – since “reports of actual or attempted cyber-attacks are now virtually a daily occurrence.”

The United States, whose defence networks at the Pentagon and also its intelligence agencies have already been compromised by hackers largely from Russia and China, is increasingly concerned about possible cyber-attacks by terrorist organisations – specifically the Islamic State (IS) with its heavy and sophisticated presence on social media.

Ironically, the United States reportedly collaborated with Israel to launch a virus attack on Iran’s nuclear enrichment programme years ago.

Tariq Rauf, director of the Disarmament, Arms Control and Non-Proliferation Programme at the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), told IPS nuclear power plants and the nuclear industry rely intensively on computer systems and computer codes.

“Any corruption, malware or targeted attacks potentially could have catastrophic consequences for nuclear safety and security,” he warned.

In this regard, he said, it is deplorable that Israel and the United States targeted Iran’s uranium enrichment programme in past years with malware and viruses, thus initiating unprovoked cyber warfare, he added.

Stuxnet, the computer virus introduced into the Iranian nuclear programme by these two countries, has now escaped into other programmes in other countries, said Rauf, the former head of IAEA’s Verification and Security Policy Coordination unit.

“This clearly demonstrates that cyber warfare agents cannot be contained, can spread uncontrollably and can potentially create many hazards for critical infrastructure in the nuclear field,” he said.

He said cyber warfare at the state level is much more dangerous and difficult to defend against than cyber-attacks by hackers, though the hacking of nuclear safety and security systems by amateurs or criminals also pose major risks for radioactive and nuclear materials.

Randy Rydell, a former senior political officer at the U.N’s Office of Disarmament Affairs (ODA), told IPS the real question here is not capabilities but motivation: “Why would someone wish to launch such an attack?”

The answer, he said, is political.

“We need to drain the swamp and stop developing technologies that are vulnerable to catastrophic attacks,” said Rydell, former senior counsellor and Report Director of the Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) Commission.

IAEA’s Amano pointed out that last year alone there were cases of random malware-based attacks at nuclear power plants, with such facilities being specifically targeted.

He said staff responsible for nuclear security should know how to repel cyber-attacks and to limit the damage, if systems are actually penetrated.

“The IAEA is doing what it can to help governments, organisations, and individuals adapt to evolving technology-driven threats from skilled cyber adversaries,” he added.

At the next IAEA ministerial conference, scheduled for December 2016, one of the topics for discussion should be how best to elaborate a Code of Conduct for Cyber Security for the Nuclear Industry.

Asked about the cyber capability of terrorist groups and their use of social media, Admiral Cecil Haney, commander U.S. Strategic Command, told reporters last March the Islamic State (IS) and various other organisations have been able to recruit and threaten – “and so we see more and more sophistication associated with that.”

“This is something that we look at very, very closely,” he said, pointing out that U.S. Cyber Command, as well as its interagency team, is working on this.

“And, quite frankly, it is looked at on a day-to-day basis,” he added.

In one of the major breaches of security, the U.S. Office of Personnel Management, which maintains security clearance for millions of federal employees, was one of the targets of hackers last year.

“The threat we face is ever-evolving,” Josh Earnest, the White House press secretary, told reporters last June. “We understand that there is persistent risk out there and we take it seriously,” he added.

But cyber-attacks are also increasingly a policy decision by governments in the United States, Western Europe, Russia and China, as a means of fighting back when attacked.

SIPRI’s Rauf said the IAEA is recognised as playing the central role in setting nuclear security standards for peaceful nuclear activities and has issued guidance documents in this regards for operators of nuclear facilities.

Addressing the IAEA International Conference on Computer Security in a Nuclear World, held in Vienna on June 1, Amano correctly drew attention to the risks and dangers of actual or attempted cyber-attacks against nuclear power plants and the nuclear industry, he noted.

Amano said that “computers play an essential role in all aspects of the management and safe and secure operation of nuclear facilities, including maintaining physical protection, and thus it is vitally important that all such systems are properly secured against malicious intrusions”.

In a statement released last month, the White House said that from the beginning of his current administration, President Barack Obama “has made it clear that cyber security is one of the most important challenges we face as a nation.”

In response, “the U.S. Government has implemented a wide range of policies, both domestic and international, to improve our cyber defences, enhance our response capabilities, and upgrade our incident management tools.”

As the cyber threat continues to increase in severity and sophistication, so does the pace of the Administration’s efforts, the White House noted.

Edited by Kitty Stapp

The writer can be contacted at thalifdeen@aol.com

Western diplomats have reportedly faulted Iran in recent weeks for failing to provide the International Atomic Energy Agency with information on experiments on high explosives intended to produce a nuclear weapon, according to an intelligence document the IAEA is investigating.

But the document not only remains unverified but can only be linked to Iran by a far-fetched official account marked by a series of coincidences related to a foreign scientist that that are highly suspicious.“We’ve been taken for a ride on this whole thing.” -- Robert Kelley, chief of IAEA teams in Iraq

The original appearance of the document in early 2008, moreover, was not only conveniently timed to support Israel’s attack on a U.S. National Intelligence Estimate on Iran in December that was damaging to Israeli interests, but was leaked to the news media with a message that coincided with the current Israeli argument.

The IAEA has long touted the document, which came from an unidentified member state, as key evidence justifying suspicion that Iran has covered up past nuclear weapons work.

In its September 2008 report the IAEA said the document describes “experimentation in connection with symmetrical initiation of a hemispherical high explosive charge suitable for an implosion type nuclear device.”

But an official Iranian communication to the IAEA Secretariat challenged its authenticity, declaring, “There is no evidence or indication in this document regarding its linkage to Iran or its preparation by Iran.”

The IAEA has never responded to the Iranian communication.

The story of the high explosives document and related intelligence published in the November 2011 IAEA report raises more questions about the document than it answers.

The report said the document describes the experiments as being monitored with “large numbers of optical fiber cables” and cited intelligence that the experiments had been assisted by a foreign expert said to have worked in his home country’s nuclear weapons programme.

The individual to whom the report referred, Ukrainian scientist Vyacheslav Danilenko, was not a nuclear weapons expert, however, but a specialist on nanodiamond synthesis. Danilenko had lectured on that subject in Iran from 2000 to 2005 and had co-authored a professional paper on the use of fiber optic cables to monitor explosive shock waves in 1992, which was available online.  

Those facts presented the opportunity for a foreign intelligence service to create a report on high explosives experiments that would suggest a link to nuclear weapons as well as to Danilenko.  Danilenko’s open-source publication could help convince the IAEA Safeguards Department of the authenticity of the document, which would otherwise have been missing.

Even more suspicious, soon after the appearance of the high explosives document, the same state that had turned it over to the IAEA claimed to have intelligence on a large cylinder at Parchin suitable for carrying out the high explosives experiments described in the document, according to the 2011 IAEA report.

And it identified Danilenko as the designer of the cylinder, again basing the claim on an open-source publication that included a sketch of a cylinder he had designed in 1999-2000.

The whole story thus depended on two very convenient intelligence finds within a very short time, both of which were linked to a single individual and his open source publications.

Furthermore, the cylinder Danilenko sketched and discussed in the publication was explicitly designed for nanodiamonds production, not for bomb-making experiments.

Robert Kelley, who was the chief of IAEA teams in Iraq, has observed that the IAEA account of the installation of the cylinder at a site in Parchin by March 2000 is implausible, since Danilenko was on record as saying he was still in the process of designing it in 2000.

And Kelley, an expert on nuclear weapons, has pointed out that the cylinder would have been unnecessary for “multipoint initiation” experiments. “We’ve been taken for a ride on this whole thing,” Kelley told IPS.

The document surfaced in early 2008, under circumstances pointing to an Israeli role. An article in the May 2008 issue of Jane’s International Defence Review, dated Mar. 14, 2008, referred to, “[d]ocuments shown exclusively to Jane’s” by a “source connected to a Western intelligence service”.

It said the documents showed that Iran had “actively pursued the development of a nuclear weapon system based on relatively advanced multipoint initiation (MPI) nuclear implosion detonation technology for some years….”

The article revealed the political agenda behind the leaking of the high explosives document. “The picture the papers paints,” he wrote, “starkly contradicts the US National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) released in December 2007, which said Tehran had frozen its military nuclear programme in 2003.”

That was the argument that Israeli officials and supporters in the United States had been making in the wake of the National Intelligence Estimate, which Israel was eager to discredit.

The IAEA first mentioned the high explosives document in an annex to its May 2008 report, shortly after the document had been leaked to Janes.

David Albright, the director of the Institute for Science and International Security, who enjoyed a close relationship with the IAEA Deputy Director Olli Heinonen, revealed in an interview with this writer in September 2008 that Heinonen had told him one document that he had obtained earlier that year had confirmed his trust in the earlier collection of intelligence documents. Albright said that document had “probably” come from Israel.

Former IAEA Director General Mohamed ElBaradei was very sceptical about all the purported Iranian documents shared with the IAEA by the United States. Referring to those documents, he writes in his 2011 memoirs, “No one knew if any of this was real.”

ElBaradei recalls that the IAEA received still more purported Iranian documents directly from Israel in summer 2009. The new documents included a two-page document in Farsi describing a four-year programme to produce a neutron initiator for a fission chain reaction.

Kelley has said that ElBaradei found the document lacking credibility, because it had no chain of custody, no identifiable source, and no official markings or anything else that could establish its authenticity—the same objections Iran has raised about the high explosives document.

Meanwhile, ElBaradei resisted pressure from the United States and its European allies in 2009 to publish a report on that and other documents – including the high explosive document — as an annex to an IAEA report. ElBaradei’s successor as director general, Yukia Amano, published the annex the anti-Iran coalition had wanted earlier in the November 2011 report.

Amano later told colleagues at the agency that he had no choice, because he promised the United States to do so as part of the agreement by Washington to support his bid for the job within the Board of Governors, according to a former IAEA official who asked not to be identified.

Gareth Porter is an independent investigative journalist and winner of the 2012 Gellhorn Prize for journalism. He is the author of the newly published Manufactured Crisis: The Untold Story of the Iran Nuclear Scare. He can be contacted at porter.gareth50@gmail.com

Edited by Kitty Stapp

Credit: United Nations Information Service Vienna

By Martin Nesirky and Linda Petrick
VIENNA, Aug 8 2014 (IPS)

Austrians call it “UNO-City”. The United Nations calls it the Vienna International Centre (VIC). Both names give a hint of the scale and scope of the U.N’s headquarters in the Austrian capital, but not the full story.

As the VIC marks its 35th anniversary, it is worth reflecting on the U.N. family’s work here and its crucial role as one of the U.N.’s four global headquarters.Increasingly, sustainable development is a thread running through the work of all U.N. bodies, including those in Vienna.

The VIC’s three Y-shaped, interlinked buildings are certainly a product of their time. There is a retro 1970s feel to the orange-coloured lifts and to some of the corridors.

Yet the VIC has of course been modernised over the years to host a broad range of major events and more than 4,000 staff working at 14 bodies on topics ranging from nuclear safety to outer space affairs and from combatting drugs and crime to promoting sustainable industrial development and energy.

Six years ago Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, a former South Korean ambassador to Vienna, opened an additional state-of-the-art conference building that he said further underscored Austria’s commitment to multilateralism, a commitment that highlights the country’s neutrality and geopolitical location.

When it comes to news, many people link Vienna with the International Atomic Energy Agency. Yet while it has often made headlines because of Iran, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) or Fukushima, the Agency’s work covers much more – including supporting the peaceful uses of nuclear technology in health and agriculture.

Other parts of the U.N. family in Vienna make headlines in their own way.

The Preparatory Commission for the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty Organisation promotes the treaty that bans all nuclear explosions and is establishing global verification to ensure no such blast goes undetected. Indeed, its monitoring picks up not just nuclear explosions such as those most recently conducted by the DPRK but also earthquakes like the one that caused a tsunami to hit Japan in 2011.

Atoms apart, the United Nations in Vienna is well known for its work tackling drugs and crime, including through a network of field offices and through its flagship World Drug Report. The U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) also plays a vital role in promoting security and justice for all.

Increasingly, sustainable development – a top priority for the Secretary-General and Member States – is a thread running through the work of all U.N. bodies, including those in Vienna. The United Nations Industrial Development Organisation, whose presence in Austria predates the VIC by more than a decade, is a good example, along with UNODC.

Far newer but weaving that same vital thread is the Sustainable Energy for All initiative. Its headquarters are just outside the VIC in an adjacent emerging office and residential district but it is a dynamically growing organisation that is very much a part of the U.N. constellation.

The U.N. Office for Outer Space Affairs is also heavily geared to playing its part in sustainable development as it promotes international cooperation in the exploration and peaceful uses of outer space.

Smaller offices include the U.N. Postal Administration, the Interim Secretariat of the Carpathian Convention (United Nations Environment Programme), the International Commission for the Protection of the Danube River, the Office for Disarmament Affairs Vienna Office, the U.N. Register of Damage Caused by the Construction of the Wall in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, the U.N. Commission on International Trade Law, the U.N. Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation and the International Narcotics Control Board.

They may not always grab media attention but their targeted technical work has a concrete impact in their respective fields.

The United Nations Information Service Vienna helps to coordinate public information work by those U.N. bodies based in Austria, and is a good starting point for those wanting to know more. It also serves as an information centre for the public, media, civil society and academia in Austria, Hungary, Slovakia and Slovenia, and provides guided tours at the VIC.

In case anyone wonders, the international bodies based at the VIC split the running costs and pay Austria an annual rent of seven euro cents – it used to be one Austrian Schilling. Needless to say, Vienna is enriched by hosting the United Nations – and other international bodies such as the Organisation of Petroleum-Exporting Countries, the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe and the European Union’s Fundamental Rights Agency.

Certainly for the United Nations family, Vienna offers a tremendous venue for technical work, mediation and decision-making that contribute to the global goals of peace and security, sustainable development and human rights. And it is all done in what the Director-General for the U.N. Office at Vienna, Yury Fedotov, likes to call the Vienna Spirit – a spirit of pulling together to decide and then take action.

Next Friday, Aug. 15, a joint-U.N.-Austrian celebration will take place to commemorate the 35th anniversary, which falls on Aug. 23.

Martin Nesirky is Acting Director, United Nations Information Service Vienna.

Edited by : Kitty Stapp

P5+1 foreign ministers after negotiations about Iran's nuclear capabilities concluded on Nov. 24, 2013 in Geneva. Credit: U.S. Dept of State/CC by 2.0

By Gareth Porter
WASHINGTON, Jul 1 2014 (IPS)

With only a few weeks remaining before the Jul. 20 deadline, the Barack Obama administration issued a warning to Iran that it must accept deep cuts in the number of its centrifuges in order to demonstrate that its nuclear programme is only for peaceful purposes.

U.S. officials have argued that such cuts are necessary to increase the “breakout” time – the time it would take Iran to enrich enough uranium to weapons grade level to build a single bomb – from what is said to be two to three months at present to as long as a year or even more.Given the past record of political interference in fuel agreements, Washington knows it faces a tough sell trying to get Iran to accept the U.S. insistence on reliance on foreign suppliers.

Tehran has made it clear that it will not accept such a demand. Dismantling the vast majority of the centrifuges that Iran had installed is a highly symbolic issue, and the political cost of acceptance would be extremely high.

But a closer examination of the issues under negotiation suggests that the ostensible pressure on Iran is part of a strategy aimed at extracting concessions from Iran on the issue of its longer-term enrichment capability.

The Obama administration has been aware from the beginning of the talks that the “breakout” period could be lengthened to nearly a year without requiring the removal of most of the 10,000 centrifuges that have been used over the past two and a half years.

U.S. officials were well aware that reducing the amount of low enriched uranium and oxide powder now stockpiled by Iran to close to zero and avoiding any future accumulation would have the same effect – and that Iran was willing to accept such restrictions.

David Albright of the Institute for Science and International Security and Olli Heinonen, the former International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) deputy director general for Safeguards, warned in a Jun. 3 article against a deal that would allow Iran to have more than 4,000 centrifuges in return for reducing its stocks of UF6 and oxide powder (UO2).

But they acknowledged that, if the Iranian LEU stockpile were reduced from the present level of 8,475 kg to 1,000 kilogrammes, the breakout time for 10,000 IR-1 centrifuges would be six months. And if the stockpile were reduced to zero, the breakout time would increase to close to a year, according to one of the graphs accompanying the article.

Experts from the Department of Energy as well as from the intelligence community certainly briefed policymakers on the fact that lengthening the breakout timeline to between six and 12 months could be achieved through reducing either centrifuges or the stockpile of low enriched uranium (LEU), according to Steve Fetter, who was assistant director at large for the White House Office of Science and Technology from 2009-12.

Eliminating the existing LEU stockpile and avoiding any further accumulation is the intent of an Iranian proposal formally handed over to EU Foreign Policy Chief Catherine Ashton by Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif in Istanbul last month. Under that proposal, which Zarif revealed in an interview with IPS in Tehran Jun. 3, Iran would convert all UF6 to Uranium oxide powder (U02) and then convert the U02 to fuel plates for Bushehr.

Iran has expressed the desire to fabricate fuel plates for Bushehr itself, but has not yet mastered the technology. The proposal would therefore involve shipping either UF6 enriched to 3.5 percent or the U02 to Russia for conversion into fuel plates until the expiration of the contract with Russia for fuel fabrication for Bushehr expires in 2021.

In the interim agreement, Iran committed to begin converting UF6 enriched to 3.5 percent to oxide powder as soon as its line for such conversion became operational. The Enriched U02 Powder Plant began operating in May, but the time required to reduce the existing stockpile to zero will depend on the capacity of the plant, which has not been announced.

Zarif told IPS he had unveiled the basic idea underlying the Iranian proposal in his PowerPoint presentation to European officials in Geneva in mid-October.

When Secretary of State John Kerry declared in April that he would demand a major increase in the existing “breakout” period to somewhere between to six and 12 months, therefore, he had good reason to believe that Washington could achieve that objective without cutting Iran’s centrifuges to a few thousand.

An agreement to freeze the existing level of 10,000 operating centrifuges while reducing the LEU stockpile to zero could place the 9,000 centrifuges that have never been operated in storage under IAEA seal. Those used centrifuges include 1,000 advanced IR-2 centrifuges that are estimated to be three to five times more efficient than the IR-1 model.

Iran’s policy of introducing thousands of centrifuges into the Natanz and Fordow enrichment facilities that were never used was aimed at accumulating negotiating chips for eventual negotiations on its nuclear programme.

In late August 2012, a senior U.S. official told the New York Times that Iran was being “very strategic” by “creating tremendous [enrichment] capacity,” but “not using it.” In doing so, the official said, Iran was acquiring “leverage” – obviously referring to future negotiations.

During the round of negotiations in Vienna in June, however, the draft tabled by the P5+1 apparently called for cuts going well beyond what U.S. officials knew would be acceptable to Iran. U.S. officials told the New York Times that the objective was now to lengthen the “breakout period” to more than a year – thus going beyond what Kerry had suggested in April.

The draft may have included an even more extreme demand from the French government. French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius declared in mid-June that the West wants to cut the number of centrifuges to “several hundred”.

After the June round of negotiations, Zarif denounced the draft as containing “excessive demands” which Iran would not accept.

But those demands appear to be a negotiating ploy in which the U.S. would give up the demand for deep short-term reductions centrifuges in the coming years in return for Iranian concessions on the level of enrichment capability to be allowed in the later stage of the agreement.

The November 2013 Joint Plan of Action provided that the future enrichment programme would depend on Iran’s “practical needs”. Iran interprets that term to include the need to be self-reliant in providing reactor fuel for Bushehr, whereas the Obama administration argues that Iran can and should rely on Russia or other foreign suppliers.

Given the past record of political interference in fuel agreements Iran had negotiated with French and German firms in the 1980s and with Russia in 2005, however, Washington knows it faces a tough sell trying to get Iran to accept the U.S. insistence on reliance on foreign suppliers.

The “practical need” criterion suggests that Iran would have to provide concrete evidence of its need and ability to provide the fuel rods for the Bushehr reactor when the current contract with Russia expires in 2021.

Postponing the negotiations over that issue until a date much closer to 2021 would offer a period of a few years to negotiate an agreement on a regional fuel consortium for the Middle East that would be acceptable to both sides, as has been proposed by a group of Princeton University scientists and scholars.

Perhaps even more important, such a postponement would allow for increasing trust through the successful implementation of the agreement covering the next few years.

Explaining the Princeton group’s plan at a briefing in Washington, D.C. last week, nuclear scientist Frank N. von Hippel, who was assistant director for national security in the White House Office of Science and Technology in the Bill Clinton administration, said, “We would have five years to cool down this impasse.”

Gareth Porter is an independent investigative journalist and winner of the 2012 Gellhorn Prize for journalism. He is the author of the newly published Manufactured Crisis: The Untold Story of the Iran Nuclear Scare.

Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif. Credit: CC by 2.0/BEHROUZ MEHRI/European External Action Service - EEAS

By Gareth Porter
TEHRAN, Jun 13 2014 (IPS)

Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif has revealed for the first time that Iran has made a detailed proposal to the P5+1 group of states aimed at ensuring that no stockpile of low-enriched uranium would be available for “breakout” through enrichment to weapons grade levels.

In an exclusive interview with IPS, Zarif described an Iranian plan, presented at the meetings with the P5+1 last month in Vienna, that would exclude weapons grade enrichment. “The parameters of the proposal would be set to continue Iran’s enrichment but to provide the necessary guarantees that it would not enrich to anything over five percent,” said Zarif.The proposal, which was later published by the Iranian government, included a series of “technical guarantees” against nuclear weapons proliferation.

The plan would involve the immediate conversion of each batch of low-enriched uranium to an oxide powder that would then be used to make fuel assemblies for Iran’s Bushehr reactor, according to Zarif.

Russia is currently converting oxide powder to fuel assemblies for Bushehr, but Zarif told IPS that by the time the contract with Russia expires in 2021, “we will certainly have the capability to convert the oxide to fuel rods domestically.”

The previously undisclosed Iranian plan is part of a broader negotiating stance that insists on the need for a large increase in the number of centrifuges it would have in the future – a demand that the United States and its negotiating partners have rejected.

Obama administration officials have made it clear that they are insisting on very steep reductions in the number of centrifuges, based on the argument that Iran cannot be allowed to have the capability to enrich enough uranium to weapons grade for a single nuclear bomb in less than six to 12 months.

Zarif said he could not discuss the details of the Iranian proposal, because it is “still being negotiated”.

But he described it as involving a complete cycle “from conversion to yellowcake, to UF6, to enriched uranium, back to oxide powder, and back to fuel rods,” all of which would be “designed specifically to meet the requirements of the Bushehr reactor.”

Zarif revealed that the Iranian plan for guaranteeing that Iran could not have a nuclear weapons capability is very similar to the proposal that Iran made to a meeting with the European three (U.K., France and Germany) in Paris in March 2005.

The proposal, which was later published by the Iranian government, included a series of “technical guarantees” against nuclear weapons proliferation. It describes one of those guarantees as “immediate conversion of all enriched uranium to fuel rods to preclude even the technical possibility of further enrichment.”

The U.S.-educated Zarif said he had developed that 2005 proposal himself when he was Iranian Ambassador to the United Nations, after he had consulted with a number of American nuclear scientists on ways to reassure the Europeans and the U.S. that Iran could not enrich enough uranium to weapons grade for a nuclear bomb.

“I asked them what would provide the necessary confidence,” said Zarif.  “They gave me a number of elements, which I put in a package and sent it to Tehran, and then took it to Paris.”

Zarif personally presented the proposal to the European foreign ministers and continued the negotiations with them, as he recalled in an Op-Ed in the Washington Post Sunday.

Frank N. Von Hippel, former assistant director for national security in the White House Office of Science and Technology and now a professor at Princeton University, confirmed in an e-mail that he had been part of a small group of American scientists and others who had met with Zarif to discuss the problem of how to provide assurances that Iran’s civil nuclear programme would not be used to support a nuclear weapons programme.

Von Hippel said his recollection was that the group had suggested “not building up a stockpile but rather shipping [the low-enriched uranium] to Russia to make fuel for the Bushehr reactor.”

Peter Jenkins, then the U.K. permanent representative to the International Atomic Energy Agency, participated in the Mar. 23, 2005 meeting at which the Iranian plan was presented.

“All of us were impressed by the proposal,” he recalled in a 2012 interview. The Europeans did not accept it as the basis for negotiation, however, because the George W. Bush administration had insisted that Iran not be allowed to have any enrichment whatsoever, according to European diplomats involved in that earlier phase of negotiations.

Zarif rejected the Obama administration’s position that Iran should obtain whatever reactor fuel it needs for Bushehr or any future reactors from Russia or other foreign sources rather than relying on its own enrichment capabilities. “People should not tell us you have to rely on us,” he said. “It is 30 years too late.”

He was referring to Iran’s experience with its reliance during the early 1980s on a French-based uranium enrichment consortium called Eurodif in which it had a financial stake acquired during the Shah’s regime that entitled Iran to 10 percent of the enriched uranium produced by the consortium.

After the Islamic Republic resumed the nuclear programme begun by the Shah, however, the French government prevented Eurodif from supplying any enriched uranium for nuclear fuel for the nuclear reactor at Bushehr in the early 1980s.

The U.S. State Department acknowledged in 1984 that it had not only ended its own nuclear cooperation with Iran but had “asked other nuclear suppliers not to engage in nuclear cooperation with Iran, especially while the Iran-Iraq war continues.”

The foreign minister ruled out the acceptance of the P5+1 proposal in the last round of negotiations, which reportedly would limit the number of Iranian centrifuges to a fraction of its present total of 19,000.

“We’re not going to redefine our practical needs,” he said, referring to the language in the Joint Plan of Action agreed to last November calling for agreement on an Iranian enrichment programme whose “parameters” would reflect Iran’s “practical needs”.

But the foreign minister indicated that Iran was “prepared within the scope of those practical needs to work on timing, to work on various technical details….”

Zarif criticised statements by former and present U.S. officials to the news media as well in the negotiations referring to demands that the number of Iranian centrifuges must be geared to the need to extend the time required for “breakout” to 6 to 12 months.

Some of the statements made to the press, including those by former State Department proliferation official Robert Einhorn, as well as some of those made in the negotiations “amount to posturing”, Zarif said, adding that they “amount to creating expectations that can never be met.”

“It will be much more productive if everyone involved refrains from shaping the debate in a way that [it] will be out of control,” said Zarif.

Zarif said the U.S. insistence on Iran’s ending of all enrichment at its Fordow facility, which is located in a tunnel under a mountain, is based on “the argument that you can’t have this facility, because otherwise we can’t bomb it.”

The implied assertion of the right to bomb Iranian facilities “strikes the wrong chord in the Iranian psyche and produces exactly the opposite reaction,” he said.

Zarif challenged the view reflected in Western news coverage that the Rouhani government is under strong political pressure to produce results in the talks that would remove the worst sanctions.

The last round of talks in Vienna, which were unsuccessful “has been the easiest time at home,” he said, and “the toughest time” for him as he had to explain “each positive result to a population that is extremely skeptical of the West’s intentions.” If he rejected a deal, Zarif said, he would receive a “hero’s welcome.”

Gareth Porter is an independent investigative journalist and winner of the 2012 Gellhorn Prize for journalism. He is the author of the newly published Manufactured Crisis: The Untold Story of the Iran Nuclear Scare.

* The fourth paragraph in the story moved on Jun. 13, 2014 has been corrected to reflect a further clarification by Zarif in an e-mail to IPS of Iran’s intention regarding the conversion of oxide powder to fuel assemblies. The ninth paragraph corrects one word in the quote from Zarif and adds updated information on Zarif’s role in personally presenting the 2005 proposal in Paris.

In the stalemated talks between the six powers and Iran over the future of the latter’s nuclear programme, the central issue is not so much the technical aspects of the problem but the history of the Middle Eastern country’s relations with foreign suppliers – and especially with the Russians.

The Barack Obama administration has dismissed Iran’s claim that it can’t rely on the Russians or other past suppliers of enriched uranium for its future needs. But the U.S. position ignores a great deal of historical evidence that bolsters the Iranian case that it would be naïve to rely on promises by Russia and others on which it has depended in the past for nuclear fuel.

Both Iran and the P5+1 are citing the phrase “practical needs”, which was used in the Joint Plan of Action agreed to last November, in support of their conflicting positions on the issue of how much enrichment capability Iran should have. Limits on the Iranian programme are supposed to be consistent with such “practical needs”, according to the agreement.

Iran has argued that its “practical needs” include the capability to enrich uranium to make reactor fuel for the Bushehr nuclear power plant as well as future nuclear reactors. Iranian officials have indicated that Iran must be self-sufficient in the future with regard to nuclear fuel for Bushehr, which Russia now provides. It announced in 2008 that another reactor at Darkhovin, which is to be indigenously constructed, had entered the design stage.

Former senior State Department official on proliferation issues Robert Einhorn has transmitted the thinking of the Obama administration about the negotiations in recent months. In a long paper published in late March, he wrote that Iran had “sometimes made the argument that they need to produce enriched uranium indigenously because foreign suppliers could cut off supplies for political or other reasons.”

The Iranians had “even suggested,” Einhorn wrote, “that they could not depend on Russia to be a reliable supplier of enriched fuel.” This Iranian assertion ignores Russia’s defiance of the U.S. and is allies in having built Bushehr and insisting on exempting its completion and fuelling from U.N. Security Council sanctions, according to Einhorn.

Einhorn omits, however, the well-documented history of blatant Russian violations of its contract with Iran on Bushehr – including the provision of nuclear fuel – and its effort to use Iranian dependence on Russian reactor fuel to squeeze Iran on its nuclear policy as well as to obtain political-military concessions from the United States.

Rose Gottemoeller, now Under Secretary of State for Arms Control and International Security, described the dynamics of that Russian policy when she was director of the Carnegie Moscow Center from early 2006 through late 2008. She recounted in a 2008 paper how the Russians began working intensively in 2002 to get Iran to end its uranium enrichment programme.

That brought Russia’s policy aim in regard to Iran’s nuclear programme into line with that of the George W. Bush administration (2001-2009).

Russia negotiated an agreement with Iran in February 2005 to supply enriched uranium fuel for the reactor and to take back all spent fuel. Later in 2005, Moscow offered Iran a joint uranium enrichment venture in Russia under which Iran would send uranium to Russia for enrichment and conversion into fuel elements for future reactors.

But Iran would not gain access to the fuel fabrication technology, which made it unacceptable to Tehran but was strongly supported by the Bush administration.

Bush administration officials then began to dangle the prospect of a bilateral agreement on nuclear cooperation – a “123 Agreement” – before Russia as a means of leveraging a shift in Russian policy toward cutting off nuclear fuel for Bushehr. The Russians agreed to negotiate such a deal, which was understood to be conditional on Russia’s cooperation on the Iran nuclear issue, with particular emphasis on fuel supplies for Bushehr.

The Russians were already using their leverage over Iran’s nuclear programme by slowing down the work as the project approached completion.

A U.S. diplomatic cable dated Jul. 6, 2006 and released by WikiLeaks reported that Russ Clark, an International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) nuclear safety official who had spent time studying the Bushehr project, said in a conversation with a U.S. diplomat, “[H]e almost feels sorry for the Iranians because of the way the Russians are ‘jerking them around’.”

Clark said the Russians were “dragging their feet” about completing work on Bushehr and suggested it was for political reasons.

The IAEA official said it was obvious that the Russians were delaying the fuel shipments to Bushehr because of “political considerations,” calculating that, once they delivered the fuel, Russia would lose much of its leverage over Iran.

In late September 2006, the Russians changed the date on which they pledged to provide the reactor fuel to March 2007, in anticipation of completion of the reactor in September, in an agreement between the head of Russia’s state-run company Atomstroyexport, and the vice-president of Iran’s Atomic Energy Organisation.

But in March 2007, the Russians announced that the fuel delivery would be delayed again, claiming Iran had fallen behind on its payments. Iran, however, heatedly denied that claim and accused Moscow of “politicising” the issue.

In fact, Russia, with U.S. encouragement, was “slow rolling out the supply of enriched uranium fuel,” according to Gottemoeller. Moscow was making clear privately, she wrote, that it was holding back on the fuel to pressure Iran on its enrichment policy.

Moscow finally began delivering reactor fuel to Bushehr in December 2007, apparently in response to the Bush administration’s plan to put anti-missile systems into the Czech Republic and Poland. That decision crossed what Moscow had established as a “red line”.

Obama’s election in November 2008, however, opened a new dynamic in U.S.-Russia cooperation on squeezing Iran’s nuclear programme. Within days of Obama’s cancellation of the Bush administration decision to establish anti-missile sites in Central Europe in September 2009, Russian officials leaked to the Moscow newspaper Kommersant that it was withholding its delivery of S-300 surface-to-air missile systems for which it had already contracted with Iran.

Iran needed the missiles to deter U.S. and Israeli air attacks, so the threat to renege on the deal was again aimed at enhancing Russian leverage on Iran to freeze its uranium enrichment programme, while giving Moscow additional influence on U.S. Russian policy as well.

The Russian attempt to exploit Iran’s dependence on Moscow for its reactor fuel for political purposes was not the first time that Iran had learned the lesson that it could not rely on foreign sources of enriched uranium – even when they had legal commitments to provide the fuel for Iran’s nuclear reactor.

After the Islamic revolution against the Shah in 1979, all of the foreign suppliers on which Iran had expected to rely for nuclear fuel for Bushehr and its Tehran Research Reactor reneged on their commitments.

Iran’s permanent representative to the IAEA, Ali Asghar Soltanieh, sent an official communication to IAEA Director General Yukiya Amano on Mar. 1, 2010, stating that specific contracts with U.S., German, French and multinational companies for supply of nuclear fuel had been abruptly terminated under pressure from the U.S. government and its allies.

Soltanieh said they were “examples [of] the root cause of confidence deficit vis-à-vis some Western countries regarding the assurance of nuclear supply.”
The earlier experiences led Iran to decide around 1985 to seek its own indigenous enrichment capability, according to Iranian officials.

The experience with Russia, especially after 2002, hardened Iran’s determination to be self-reliant in nuclear fuel fabrication. The IAEA’s Clark told the U.S. diplomat in mid-2006 that, if the Russians did cut off their supply of fuel for Bushehr, the Iranians were prepared to make the fuel themselves.

It is not clear whether the Obama administration actually believes the official line that Iran should and must rely on Russia for nuclear fuel. But the history surrounding the issue suggests that Iran will not accept the solution on which the U.S. and its allies are now insisting.

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. His new book “Manufactured Crisis: the Untold Story of the Iran Nuclear Scare”, was published Feb. 14.

As diplomats began drafting a comprehensive agreement on the Iranian nuclear programme and Western sanctions in Vienna Tuesday, U.S. officials were poised to demand a drastic cut in Iran’s enrichment capabilities that is widely expected to deadlock the negotiations.

Iran is almost certain to reject the basic concept that it should reduce the number of its centrifuges to a fraction of its present total, and the resulting collapse of the talks could lead to a much higher level of tensions between the United States and Iran.The Obama administration’s highly risky diplomatic gambit rests on the concept of “breakout time”, defined as the number of months it would take Iran to accumulate enough weapons grade uranium for a single nuclear weapon.

The Barack Obama administration’s highly risky diplomatic gambit rests on the concept of “breakout time”, defined as the number of months it would take Iran to accumulate enough weapons grade uranium for a single nuclear weapon.

Both Secretary of State John Kerry and former U.S. proliferation official Robert Einhorn have explained the demand that Iran give up the vast majority of its centrifuges as necessary to increase Iran’s “breakout time” to at least six months, and perhaps even much longer.

Einhorn, the State Department’s special adviser for nonproliferation and arms control until June 2013, wrote in a report for the Brookings Institution that the number and type of centrifuges “will be limited to ensure that breakout times are…a minimum of 6 to 12 months at all times.”

In a separate article in The National Interest, Einhorn wrote that such a “breakout time” would entail a reduction from Iran’s present total of 19,000 centrifuges to “a few thousand first-generation centrifuges”.

Kerry suggested in testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee Apr. 8 that the administration would try to get a breakout time of more than one year but might settle for six to 12 months. He compared that with the two months he said was the current estimate of Iran’s breakout capabilities.

“Breakout” has been touted by hardline think tanks as a non-political technical measure of the threat to obtain the high-enriched uranium necessary for a bomb, but it is actually arbitrary and highly political.

Even proliferation specialists who support the demand to limit Iranian enrichment capabilities severely, however, including both Einhorn and Gary Samore, Obama’s former special assistant on weapons of mass destruction, believe that “breakout” is more about the politics surrounding the issue than the reality of the Iranian nuclear programme.

In an interview with IPS, Samore said the breakout concept can only measure the capability to obtain the necessary amount of high-enriched uranium from acknowledged facilities – those that are under inspection by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).

It does not deal with a scenario involving secret facilities, he said, because it is only possible to estimate rates of enrichment in facilities with known quantities and types of centrifuges.

The use of the breakout concept is based on the premise that Iran would make a political decision to begin enriching uranium to weapons grade levels in its Natanz and Fordow plants as rapidly as possible. That would mean that Iran would have to expel the IAEA inspectors and announce to the world, in effect, its intention to obtain a nuclear weapon.

Samore, who left the Obama administration in January 2013 and is now the executive director for research at Harvard’s Belfer Center for Science and International Security, told IPS, “It’s extremely unlikely that Iran would actually take the risk for single bomb,” calling it “an implausible scenario.”

Samore is no dove on Iran’s nuclear issue. He is also president of United Against Nuclear Iran, an organisation that puts out hardline propaganda aimed at convincing the world that Iran is a threat trying to get nuclear weapons.

Another problem with the spectre of “breakout” is that, even if it took the risk of enriching the necessary weapons-grade uranium, Iran would still have to go through a series of steps to actually have a bomb that it could threaten to use.

A report released last week by the International Crisis Group (ICG) noted that calculations of breakout capability “are rough and purely theoretical estimates” and that they “omit inevitable technical hitches” and “an unpredictable and time-consuming weaponisation process.”

According to the testimony by director of the Defence Intelligence Agency. Lt. Gen. Ronald Burgess before the Senate Armed Services Committee in April 2010, that process, including integrating the weapon into a ballistic missile, would take three or four years.

The ICG report quoted a senior Iranian official as saying, “Serious people know that, even if Iran sought nuclear weapons, it will take years to manufacture one. What’s more, no state has ever invited opprobrium or a military strike just to produce a few kilograms of highly enriched uranium.”

In an interview, Jim Walsh of MIT’s Security Studies Programme was scathing about the “breakout” scenario the administration is using to justify its diplomatic stance. “The idea of Iran kicking out inspectors to rush to get one bomb is silly,” he told IPS.

Samore believed that Iran would be far more likely to try what he calls a “sneakout” – the use of secret facilities to enrich uranium to weapons grade — than a “breakout”.

But as is generally acknowledged by proliferation specialists, such a covert route to a nuclear weapons capability would take much longer than trying to do so openly. Furthermore, it is almost certain to be detected, as Director of National Intelligence James Clapper testified in April 2013.

Despite his conviction that the breakout concept makes no sense as the basis for negotiations with Iran, Samore believes it will be “the test for any deal”, because it is the only way to measure it. “It’s a political fact of life,” Samore said. “It all gets boiled down to breakout time.”

The dominance that the breakout advocates have achieved in the lopsided Iran political discourse has given opponents of an agreement a new form of pressure on the Obama administration to make unrealistic demands in the negotiations.

Einhorn admitted at a panel at the U.S. Institute of Peace in Washington D.C. Tuesday that the decision on the length of breakout time and the level of centrifuges to be demanded “will come down to a political judgment”.

He clearly suggested, however, that the decision is primarily a response to political pressures from various unnamed parties and not a matter of finding a political compromise with Iran.

“Some say six months or less,” he said. “Others say you need a year. Some say a year and a half or two years.”

The former senior State Department official on proliferation issues insisted, moreover, that there was no possibility of accepting Iran’s explicit demand to be permitted to increase its enrichment capacity to as many as 30,000 centrifuges in order to support a nuclear power programme.

“That amount would bring breakout time down to weeks or days,” he said. “That’s breakout.”

He did not discuss the possibility of agreement on gradually phasing in additional centrifuges as the practical need for them is demonstrated by progress on a new nuclear reactor.

The tough talk by Einhorn, who has clearly been given the green light to describe administration thinking publicly, makes it much less likely that the administration will back away from a breakout demand in the face of firm Iranian resistance.

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. His new book “Manufactured Crisis: the Untold Story of the Iran Nuclear Scare”, was published Feb. 14.

The Iranian team under President Hassan Rouhani, which is headed by Foreign Minister Javad Zarif (right), has also heard domestic criticism of their negotiating strategy ratcheted up in recent weeks. Credit: cc by 2.0

By Jasmin Ramsey
WASHINGTON, May 12 2014 (IPS)

Iran and world powers will resume negotiating a final deal on Tehran’s nuclear programme Tuesday in Vienna while experts warn the hardest work is about to begin.

Representatives from Iran and the U.S. indicated last month that the drafting of a final deal would begin during this round of talks scheduled for five days – the longest session since the extended talks that led to the interim “Joint Plan of Action” (JPOA) reached Nov. 24, 2013 in Geneva.“The U.S. and its partners in the P5+1 need to understand that Iran, too, needs to come out of these negotiations with its principles intact and something positive to show for the concessions it is being asked to make." -- Shaul Bakhash

“So far Iran has adhered to its undertaking, and it does seem that both sides are determined to see the negotiations through to success,” Shaul Bakhash, a leading scholar on Iran, told IPS.

“However, very tough negotiations lie ahead; and the fact remains that Iran will have to limit its nuclear programme in substantial and painful ways to satisfy the P5+1 [the U.S., U.K, France, China and Russia plus Germany] and to get sanctions lifted,” said the George Mason University professor.

While media reports have emphasised the Jul. 20 deadline for reaching a final deal under the terms of the JPOA, the agreement also allows for the negotiations to be extended by “mutual consent.”

“This is not a development that is landing in the laps of the negotiators,” said Mark Hibbs, a nuclear policy expert at the Washington DC-based Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

“These negotiations began in a confidence-building mode by addressing low-hanging fruit and [the negotiators] did that because they know their biggest challenge is a lack of confidence and lack of trust,” he said.

“That means that as time moves along and the negotiations make more progress, the issues they address will become incrementally more difficult, and they’ve been prepared for that,” said Hibbs.

Since the JPOA went into effect on Jan.20, Iran has been scaling back and limiting parts of its nuclear programme in exchange for limited sanctions relief. 

An Apr. 17 report by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) said Iran was complying with the JPOA, but Iran has complained that the lingering effects of the sanctions regime have prevented it from accessing the funds allotted to it under the accord.

Increasing domestic pressure

Attempts by members of the U.S. Congress to impose conditions that some experts likened to “sabotage” and “illusions” for a final deal following the Nov. 24 accord ultimately failed to produce binding legislation.

Those conditions included demands that Iran cease all uranium enrichment and dismantle its entire nuclear programme, two things Iran is allowed to have for purely peaceful purposes according to readings of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) to which Iran is a signatory.

But a successful attempt by the House to attach a “sense of congress” amendment onto the U.S. Annual Defence Bill on May 8 suggests that calls for more conditions for a final deal from Congress could increase as the talks intensify.

“You’ve seen Obama administration officials working very hard behind the scenes to disabuse Congress of any plans to impose additional sanctions that would get in the way of moving forward with Iran,” Hibbs told IPS.

“The real question is whether hardliners in the U.S. who are absolutely determined to prevent President Obama from having a success in this area would throw the baby out with the bathwater and jeopardise a substantial negotiated compromise because they oppose the president for political reasons,” he said.

“So there is pressure, but it’s pressure from the outside, not the inside,” added Hibbs, referring to determination on the part of Iran and the P5+1 to reach a final deal.

The Iranian team under President Hassan Rouhani, which is headed by Foreign Minister Javad Zarif, has also heard domestic criticism of their negotiating strategy ratcheted up in recent weeks.

“There has been criticism of the negotiating team from some members of parliament, commanders of the Revolutionary Guard, prominent members of the clergy and some right-wing newspapers,” noted Bakhash.

“These hard-liners suggest the negotiating team is giving too much away, and is not being tough enough,” he said.

On May 3, several hard-line Iranian politicians, clerics and commentators gathered at the former U.S. embassy in Tehran for a conference focusing on the talks entitled, “We’re concerned”.

The keynote speakers issued a joint statement arguing that a final deal should guarantee Iran’s rights as a NPT member to a peaceful nuclear programme, sanctions should be lifted according to a clear-cut timeline, and a final deal should be shown to the Iranian public and ratified by the Parliament before it’s finalised.

“The hardliners also seek to undermine Rouhani because they oppose much of his broader policy agenda: integration with the international community abroad; political liberalisation at home; greater freedom for the press; a decrease in the role of the state and an increase in the role of the private sector in the economy; and some curbs on the role of the security agencies and the Revolutionary Guards,” said Bakhash.

“However, it is also noteworthy that these criticisms have been kept relatively muted; or, at least, they have not been allowed to derail the negotiations. This is probably due to guarded support the Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has given Iran’s negotiating team,” he added.

“Despite his own publicly expressed reservations and misgivings, he has allowed the negotiations to continue and to make progress,” he said.

“This suggests that he too wants a deal although his final terms may turn out to be unrealistic,” said Bakhash.

The make or break issues

According to Hibbs, the key issues that must be resolved for a final deal include:

• how many centrifuges, which Iran uses to enrich uranium, can be operational;
• the extent to which Iran will be able to do advanced research and development in sensitive technologies including centrifuges and lasers;
• whether or not the powers and the IAEA can be satisfied that Iran’s programme is completely peaceful;
• the terms of sanctions relief to Iran;
• how long Iran must comply with the final agreement.

Hibbs said the length of an final agreement could be a major issue: “Some people in Iran have suggested a couple of years and those close to the administration have said 20 years.”

Another major sticking issue will be sanctions relief.

“The U.S and its partners in the P5+1 need to understand that Iran, too, needs to come out of these negotiations with its principles intact and something positive to show for the concessions it is being asked to make,” said Bakhash.

“Otherwise, the hardliners in Iran will jump on Rouhani and his negotiators for selling out Iran’s interests and gravely undermine the president,” he said.

The Barack Obama administration appears to have rejected a deal-breaking demand by Israel for an Iranian confession to having had a covert nuclear weapons programme as a condition for completing the comprehensive nuclear agreement.

Pro-Israeli commentators have openly criticised the Obama administration for failing to explicitly demand that Iran confess to charges by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) of a covert nuclear weapons programme.All the intelligence in question can be traced back to Israel, and investigation of it has shown that the documents and reports that have been most widely publicised betray multiple indications of having been fabricated.

Demanding such a confession would be an obvious deal-breaker, because Iran has consistently denied those past charges and denounced the documents and intelligence reports on which they were based as fraudulent.  In fact, the failure of the talks appears to be precisely the Israeli intention in pressing Washington to make that demand.

All the intelligence in question can be traced back to Israel, and investigation of it has shown that the documents and reports that have been most widely publicised betray multiple indications of having been fabricated, as reported by IPS.

A “senior administration official” told reporters after the Nov. 24 Joint Plan of Action was announced that the United States had “made clear” in the negotiations that “the Security Council resolutions must still be addressed…and that Iran must come come into compliance with its obligations under the NPT and its obligations to the IAEA.”

The U.N. Security Council Resolution 1929 of Jun. 9, 2010 says Iran “shall cooperate with the IAEA on all outstanding issues, particularly those which give rise to concerns about the possible military dimensions of the Iranian nuclear programme….”

The term “possible military dimensions” had been used by the IAEA in referring to the claims publicised by the agency over the past six years of covert Iranian nuclear weapons development projects, including an alleged facility at Parchin for testing nuclear weapons designs.

The administration thus seemed to suggest that some kind of Iranian admission to past nuclear weapons work is a condition for a final agreement.

But the Obama administration’s rhetoric on resolving IAEA claims of a nuclear weapons programme appears to be less about forcing Iran to confess than responding to pressures from Israel and its supporters in the United States.

The first explicit indication of Israeli pressure on Obama to demand an Iranian confession as part of any diplomatic settlement came in a September 2012 article by Patrick Clawson and David Makovsky, then both senior staff members of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP), whose analysis and recommendations reflect Israeli government policy.

“Given Iran’s past undeclared activities,” Clawson and Makovsky wrote, “a particular concern is that Iran will develop clandestine nuclear facilities.  Tehran’s coming clean about the past will therefore be an important determinant of whether it has any hidden capabilities.”

The demand that Iran “come clean” on its alleged nuclear weapons program entered into the Obama administration’s public posture for the first time after consultations with Israel in advance of the October 2013 round of negotiations with Iran.

The new Iran-IAEA agreement on the EBW issue raises the question of whether IAEA Director General Yukiya Amano is now ready to reach a deal with Iran, despite having staked his own reputation on the November 2011 report on intelligence claims of covert Iranian nuclear weapons research coming from Israel. Credit: International Students’ Committee/cc by 3.0

Secretary of State John Kerry declared in Tokyo Oct. 3 that Iran would “have to prove it’s willing to come clean about the nuclear programme”.

That same day, Ambassador James Jeffrey, a senior fellow at WINEP, in testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said Iran “must come clean on its nuclear-related military research”.

By the time the negotiations on the joint Plan of Action were completed in November, however, the State Department adopted language on the issue that harkened back to Kerry’s testimony at his Senate confirmation hearings in January 2013.  Kerry had said then that “questions surrounding Iran’s nuclear weapons programme” had to be “resolved”.

It quickly became apparent that Israel had wanted the United States to demand not only a pro forma confession by Iran but the details of its alleged work on nuclear weapons.  On the very day the agreement was announced, however, Robert Satloff, the executive director of WINEP, expressed his unhappiness that the deal did not include “getting Iran to come clean on all its past clandestine programmes….”

Also on Nov. 24, Mark Dubowitz and Orde Kittrie of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, which is well known for expressing Israeli policy on Iran, criticised the Joint Plan of Action in the Wall Street Journal for failing to “make clear reference to Iran revealing its past nuclear weapons research.”

The following day WINEP managing director Michael Singh complained in the Wall Street Journal objected again to the same U.S. failure to demand all the details of Iranian work on nuclear weapons. “Without insight into the full extent of Iran’s clandestine nuclear activities,” Singh wrote, “no amount of monitoring and inspection can provide confidence that Iran lacks a parallel programme beyond the inspectors’ view.”

Along with Kerry’s initial adoption of the “come clean” rhetoric, these sharp criticisms of the U.S. refusal to call explicitly for a confession indicate that the Obama administration had initially went along with Israel’s  in calling for Iran to “come clean”, but concluded that such a demand risked a premature breakdown in the talks.

Since the interim agreement, moreover, the State Department has avoided language that would commit it to requiring anything resembling an Iranian confession.  In Israel Feb. 22, Undersecretary of State Wendy Sherman, who is the primary negotiator with Iran, said, “What we have said to Iran is that [the ‘possible military dimensions’ issue] will have to be addressed in some way.”

Sherman suggested for the first time the possibility of a less than complete and clear-cut outcome of the process. The IAEA was “very much focused on working through PMD with Iran,” said Sherman. “And the more Iran can do with the IAEA, which is where this belongs, the more likely we will have successful comprehensive agreement.”

A former U.S. official who had worked on Iran suggested in a recent off-the-record meeting that the “possible military dimensions” issue could not be resolved completely, but that one or more parts could be clarified satisfactorily.  The rest could be left for resolution by the IAEA after the comprehensive agreement is signed, the ex-official said.

That possibility arises because Iran and the IAEA agreed in February to work on the “Exploding Bridgewire” (EBW) issue – the claim published by the IAEA that Iran had carried out experiments on high explosives developed for the purpose of detonating a nuclear weapon.

That claim was based on a document that was part of the large collection originally said by anonymous intelligence sources to have come from the laptop computer of a participant in a purported Iranian nuclear weapons research project.

The documents were actually turned over to German intelligence by the Iranian terrorist organisation Mujahedin-E-Khalq, which had close links to Israel’s intelligence agency, Mossad.

Iran provided the IAEA with an account of its actual EBW development programme in 2008. The Iranian account, cited by the agency in its May 2008 report, indicated the rate of explosions in its experiments, which was just one-eighth the rate mentioned by then IAEA deputy director Olli Heinonen in a briefing for member states in 2008.

But instead of acknowledging that fact in its report, the IAEA suggested repeatedly that Iran had acknowledged carrying out the EBW experiments described in the purported document from the secret weapons programme while claiming it was for non-nuclear applications.

The new Iran-IAEA agreement on the EBW issue raises the question of whether IAEA Director General Yukiya Amano is now ready to reach a deal with Iran, despite having staked his own reputation on the November 2011 report on intelligence claims of covert Iranian nuclear weapons research coming from Israel.

Such an agreement might be based on the IAEA’s stating accurately the Iranian explanation for the EBW – and thus implicitly admitting that the agency had distorted the issue in the past. Other issues might be left to be resolved quietly after the negotiations on a comprehensive agreement are completed.  

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. His new book “Manufactured Crisis: the Untold Story of the Iran Nuclear Scare”, was published Feb. 14.

The Barack Obama administration has demanded that Iran resolve “past and present concerns” about the “possible military dimensions” of its nuclear programme as a condition for signing a comprehensive nuclear agreement with Tehran.

Former IAEA Director General Mohamed ElBaradei referred to a series of documents provided by Israel in his 2012 memoirs. Credit: WEF/cc by 2.0

Administration officials have suggested that Iran must satisfy the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) regarding the allegations in the agency’s report that it has had a covert nuclear weapons programme in the past.

But the record of negotiations between Iran and the IAEA shows Tehran has been ready for the past two years to provide detailed responses to all the charges of an Iranian nuclear weapons work, and that the problem has been the refusal of the IAEA to share with Iran the documentary evidence on which those allegations have been based.

The real obstacle to providing those documents, however, has long been a U.S. policy of refusing to share the documents on the assumption that Iran must confess to having had a weaponisation programme.

The head of Iran’s Atomic Energy Organisation, Ali Akbar Salehi, declared Feb. 12, “The authenticity of each allegation should be proven first, then the person who submitted it to the agency should give us the genuine document. When we are assured of the authenticity, then we can talk to the agency.”

Neither the IAEA nor the Obama administration has responded publicly to Salehi’s statement. In response to a query from IPS, the spokesperson for the National Security Council, Bernadette Meehan, said the NSC officials would have no comment on the Iranian demand for access to the documents.

The spokesperson for IAEA Director Yukiya Amano did not answer a request from IPS Thursday for the agency’s comment.

But a draft text of an agreement being negotiated between the IAEA and Iran dated Feb. 20, 2012, shows that the only difference between the two sides on resolving issues about allegations of Iranian nuclear weapons work was Iran’s demand to have the documents on which the allegations are based.

The draft text, which was later published on the website of the Arms Control Association, reflects Iran’s deletions and additions to the original IAEA proposal. It calls for Iran to provide a “conclusive technical assessment” of a set of six “topics”, which included 12 distinct charges in the report in a particular order that the IAEA desired.

Iran and the IAEA agreed that Iran would provide a “conclusive technical assessment” on a list of 10 issues in a particular order. The only topics that Iran proposed to delete from the list were “management structure” and “Procurement activities”, which did not involve charges of specifically nuclear weapons work.

The two sides had agreed in the draft that the IAEA would provide a “detailed explanation of its concerns”. But they had failed to agree on provision of documents to Iran by the IAEA. The IAEA had proposed language that the agency would provide Iran with the relevant documents only “where appropriate”. Iran was insisting on deletion of that qualifying phrase from the draft.

The first priority on the list of topics to which both sides had agreed in the draft was “Parchin” – referring to the claim of intelligence from an unnamed state that Iran had installed a large cylinder at the Parchin military reservation.

A November 2011 IAEA report suggested the cylinder was intended for testing nuclear weapons designs and had been built with the assistance of a “foreign expert”. Iran also agreed to respond in detail on the issue of the “foreign expert”, who has been identified as Vyacheslav Danilenko, a Ukrainian specialist on nanodiamonds.

The evidence associated with that claim and others published in the 2011 report shows that they were based on intelligence reports and documents given to the IAEA by Israel in 2008-09. Former IAEA Director General Mohamed ElBaradei referred to a series of documents provided by Israel in his 2012 memoirs.

Iran also agreed to respond in detail to allegations that Iran had sought to integrate a nuclear weapon into the reentry vehicle of the Shahab-3 missile, and that it had developed high explosives as a “detonator” for a nuclear weapon.

Both alleged activities had been depicted or described in documents reported in the U.S. news media in 2005-06 as having come from a covert Iranian nuclear weapons programme.

Those documents, about whose authenticity ElBaradei and other senior IAEA officials have publicly expressed serious doubts, have now been revealed as having given to Western intelligence by an anti-regime Iranian terrorist organisation.

Former senior German foreign office official Karsten Voigt revealed in an interview last year for a newly-published book by this writer that senior officials of the German intelligence agency BND had told him in November 2004 that the BND had gotten the entire collection of documents from a member of the Mujahedin-e-Khalq (MEK) who had been one of their sources, and that they did not consider the source to be reliable.

The MEK, considered by the United States and European states as a terrorist organisation, had been used by Saddam Hussein’s regime to support the war against Iran and by Israel to issue intelligence and propaganda that Mossad did not want attributed to it.

ElBaradei, who retired from the IAEA in November 2009, had declared repeatedly that sharing the documents was necessary to ensure “due process” in resolving the issue, but the United States had prevented him from doing so.

In his final statement to the Board of Governors on Sep. 7, 2009 he appealed to “those who provided the information related to the alleged weaponization studies to share with Iran as much information as possible.”

A former IAEA official, who asked not to be identified, told IPS that the United States had allowed only a very limited number of documents to be shown to Iran in the form of Power Point slides projected on a screen.

A May 2008 IAEA report described a number of documents purported to be from the Iranian weapons programme but said that the IAEA “was not in possession of the documents and was therefore unfortunately unable to make them available to Iran.”

Around 100 pages of documents were given by the United States to the agency to share with Iran, the former official said, but none of the documents described in the report were among them.

The U.S. policy of denying Iranian access to the documents continued during the Obama administration, as shown by a U.S. diplomatic cable from Vienna dated Apr. 29, 2009 and released by WikiLeaks. At a P5+1 technical meeting, both U.S. and IAEA officials were quoted as implying that the objective of the policy was to press Iran to confess to the activities portrayed in the papers.

U.S. officials said that a failure by Iran to “disclose any past weaponization-related work” would “suggest Iran wishes to hide and pursue its past work, perhaps to keep a future weapons option”.

IAEA Safeguards Chief Olli Heinonen made it clear that no copies of the relevant documents charging Iran with weaponisation would be provided to Iran and complained that Iran had continued to claim that the documents were fabricated.

In its report of Nov. 14, 2013, the IAEA said it had received more information – presumably from Israel – that “corroborates the analysis” in its 2011 report.

The past unwillingness of the Obama administration to entertain the possibility that the documents provided by the MEK were fabricated or to allow Iran the opportunity to prove that through close analysis of the documents, and the IAEA’s continued commitment to the weaponisation information it has published suggest that the issue of past claims will be just as contentious as the technical issues to be negotiated, if not more so.

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. His new book “Manufactured Crisis: the Untold Story of the Iran Nuclear Scare”, was published Feb. 14.

The Barack Obama administration’s insistence that Iran discuss its ballistic missile programme in the negotiations for a comprehensive nuclear agreement brings its position into line with that of Israel and senators who introduced legislation drafted by the pro-Israel lobby group AIPAC aimed at torpedoing the negotiations.

But the history of the issue suggests that the Obama administration knows that Iran will not accept the demand and that it is not necessary to a final agreement guaranteeing that Iran’s nuclear programme is not used for a weapon.The demand for negotiations on Iran’s missile programme originated with Israel, both directly and through Senate Foreign Relations Committee members committed to AIPAC’s agenda.

White House spokesman Jay Carney highlighted the new U.S. demand in a statement Wednesday that the Iranians “have to deal with matters related to their ballistic missile program.”

Carney cited United Nations Security Council resolution 1929, approved in 2010, which prohibited any activity related to ballistic missiles capable of delivering nuclear weapons, including missile launches. “So that’s completely agreed by Iran in the Joint Plan of Action,” he added.

Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif not only explicitly contradicted Carney’s claim that Iran had agreed to discuss ballistic missiles but warned that a U.S. demand for discussion of its missile programme would violate a red line for Iran.

“Nothing except Iran’s nuclear activities will be discussed in the talks with the [six powers known as the P5+1], and we have agreed on it,” he said, according to Iran’s IRNA.

The pushback by Zarif implies that the U.S. position would seriously risk the breakdown of the negotiations if the Obama administration were to persist in making the demand.

Contrary to Carney’s statement, the topic of ballistic missiles is not part of the interim accord reached last November. The Joint Plan of Action refers only to “addressing the UN Security Council resolutions, with a view toward bringing to a satisfactory conclusion the UN Security Council’s consideration of this matter” and the formation of a “Joint Commission” which would “work with the IAEA to facilitate resolution of past and present issues of concern”.

It is not even clear that the U.S. side took the position in the talks last fall that Iran’s missile programme had to be on the table in order to complete a final agreement. But in any event it was not part of the Joint Plan of Action agreed on Nov. 24.

Past U.S. statements on the problem of the Security Council resolutions indicate that the administration had previously acknowledged that no agreement had been reached to negotiate on ballistic missiles and that it had not originally intended to press for discussions on the issue.

The “senior administration officials” who briefed journalists on the Joint Plan of Action last November made no reference to ballistic missiles at all. They referred only to “possible military dimensions” of the Iranian nuclear programme and to “Iranian activities at Parchin”.

The demand for negotiations on Iran’s missile programme originated with Israel, both directly and through Senate Foreign Relations Committee members committed to AIPAC’s agenda.

Citing an unnamed senior Israeli official, Ha’aretz reported Thursday that Israeli Minister of Strategic Affairs Yuval Steinitz had met with Sherman and senior French and British foreign ministry officials before the start of the February talks and had emphasised that Iran’s missile programme “must be part of the agenda” for negotiation of a final agreement.

By early December, however, Israel was engaged in an even more direct effort to pressure the administration to make that demand, drafting a bill that explicitly included among its provisions one that would have required new sanctions unless the president certified that “Iran has not conducted any tests for ballistic missiles with a range exceeding 500 kilometers.”

Since Iran had obviously tested missiles beyond that limit long ago, it would have made it impossible for Obama to make such a certification.

Although the bill was stopped, at least temporarily, in the Senate when enough Democratic members refused to support it, Republicans continued to attack the administration’s negotiating position, and began singling out the administration’s tolerance of Iranian missiles in particular.

At a Feb. 4 Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing, the ranking Republican on the Committee, Sen. Robert Corker, ranking Republican on the Committee, ripped into Undersecretary of State Wendy Sherman, the chief U.S. negotiator in the nuclear talks with Iran.

After a highly distorted picture of Iran’s readiness to build a nuclear weapon, Corker asked, “Why did you all not in this agreement in any way address the delivery mechanisms, the militarizing of nuclear arms? Why was that left off since they breached a threshold everyone acknowledges?”

But instead of correcting Corker’s highly distorted characterisation of the situation, Sherman immediately reassured him that the administration would do just what he wanted them to do.

Sherman admitted that the November agreement covering the next months had not “shut down all the production of any ballistic missile that could have anything to do with delivery of a nuclear weapon.” Then she added, “But that is indeed something that has to be addressed as part of a comprehensive agreement.”

Sherman also suggested at one point that there would be no real need to prohibit any Iranian missile if the negotiations on the nuclear programme were successful. “Not having a nuclear weapon,” she said, “makes delivery systems almost — not wholly, but almost — irrelevant.”

That admission underlined the wholly political purpose of the administration’s apparent embrace of the Israeli demand that Iran negotiate limits on its ballistic missiles.

The Obama administration may be seeking to take political credit for a hard line on Iranian missiles in the knowledge that it will not be able to get a consensus for that negotiating position among the group of six powers negotiating with Iran.

Russia’s Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Rybakov clearly implied that Moscow would not support such a demand in a statement Thursday that Russia “considers that a comprehensive agreement must concern only and exclusively the restoration of trust in a purely peaceful intention of Iran’s nuclear program.”

Although U.S., European and Israeli officials have asserted consistently over the years that Iran’s medium-range ballistic missiles are designed to carry nuclear weapons, Israel’s foremost expert on the Iranian nuclear programme, Uzi Rubin, who managed Israel’s missile defence programme throughout the 1990s, has argued that the conventional analysis was wrong.

In an interview with the hardline anti-Iran Wisconsin Project on Nuclear Arms Control in September 2009, Rubin said, “The Iranians believe in conventional missiles. Not just for saturation but also to take out specific targets…. Remember, they have practically no air force to do it. Their main striking power is based on missiles.”

Since 2008, the International Atomic Energy Agency has accused Iran of working on integrating a nuclear weapon into the Shahab-3 missile reentry vehicle in 2002-2003, based on a set of drawings in a set of purported Iranian documents. The documents were said by the George W. Bush administration to have come from the purloined laptop of a participant in an alleged Iranian nuclear weapons research programme.

But that account turned to be a falsehood, as were other variants on the origins of the document. The documents actually came from the Mujahedin-e-Khalq, the anti-regime organisation then listed as a terrorist organisation by the U.S. State Department, according to two German sources.

Karsten Voigt, who was the German foreign office coordinator, publicly warned about the MEK provenance of the papers in a November 2004 interview with the Wall Street Journal.

Voigt, who retired from the foreign office in 2010, recounted the story of how an MEK member delivered the papers to German intelligence in 2004 in an interview last year for a newly-published book by this writer.

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. His new book “Manufactured Crisis: the Untold Story of the Iran Nuclear Scare”, was published Feb. 14.

When Western intelligence agencies began in the early 1990s to intercept telexes from an Iranian university to foreign high technology firms, intelligence analysts believed they saw the first signs of military involvement in Iran’s nuclear programme. That suspicion led to U.S. intelligence assessments over the next decade that Iran was secretly pursuing nuclear weapons.

The supposed evidence of military efforts to procure uranium enrichment equipment shown in the telexes was also the main premise of the International Atomic Energy Agency’s investigation of Iran’s nuclear programme from 2003 through 2007.

But the interpretation of the intercepted telexes on which later assessments were based turned out to have been a fundamental error. The analysts, eager to find evidence of an Iranian nuclear weapons programme, had wrongly assumed that the combination of interest in technologies that could be used in a nuclear programme and the apparent role of a military-related institution meant that the military was behind the procurement requests.

The intercepted telexes that set in train the series of U.S. intelligence assessments that Iran was working on nuclear weapons were sent from Sharif University of Technology in Tehran. Credit: public domain

In 2007-08, Iran provided hard evidence that the technologies had actually been sought by university teachers and researchers.

The intercepted telexes that set in train the series of U.S. intelligence assessments that Iran was working on nuclear weapons were sent from Sharif University of Technology in Tehran beginning in late 1990 and continued through 1992. The dates of the telexes, their specific procurement requests and the telex number of PHRC were all revealed in a February 2012 paper by David Albright, the executive director of the Institute for Science and International Security, and two co-authors.

The telexes that interested intelligence agencies following them all pertained to dual-use technologies, meaning that they were consistent with work on uranium conversion and enrichment but could also be used for non-nuclear applications.

But what raised acute suspicions on the part of intelligence analysts was the fact that those procurement requests bore the telex number of the Physics Research Center (PHRC), which was known to have contracts with the Iranian military.

U.S., British, German and Israeli foreign intelligence agencies were sharing raw intelligence on Iranian efforts to procure technology for its nuclear programme, according to published sources.
The telexes included requests for “high-vacuum” equipment, “ring” magnets, a balancing machine and cylinders of fluorine gas, all of which were viewed as useful for a programme of uranium conversion and enrichment.

The Schenck balancing machine ordered in late 1990 or early 1991 provoked interest among proliferation analysts, because it could be used to balance the rotor assembly parts on the P1 centrifuge for uranium enrichment. The “ring” magnets sought by the university were believed to be appropriate for centrifuge production.

The request for 45 cylinders of fluorine gas was considered suspicious, because fluorine is combined with uranium to produce uranium hexafluoride, the form of uranium that used for enrichment.

The first indirect allusion to evidence from the telexes in the news came in late 1992, when an official of the George H. W. Bush administration told The Washington Post that the administration had pushed for a complete cutoff of all nuclear-related technology to Iran, because of what was called “a suspicious procurement pattern”.

Then the Iranian efforts to obtain those specific technologies from major foreign suppliers were reported, without mentioning the intercepted telexes, in a Public Broadcasting System “Frontline” documentary called “Iran and the Bomb” broadcast in April 1993, which portrayed them as clear indications of an Iranian nuclear weapons programme.

The producer of the documentary, Herbert Krosney, described the Iranian procurement efforts in similar terms in his book “Deadly Business” published the same year.

In 1996, President Bill Clinton’s CIA Director John Deutch declared, “A wide variety of data indicate that Tehran has assigned civilian and military organisations to support the production of fissile material for nuclear weapons.”

For the next decade, the CIA’s non-proliferation specialists continued to rely on their analysis of the telexes to buttress their assessment that Iran was developing nuclear weapons. The top-secret 2001 National Intelligence Estimate bore the title “Iran Nuclear Weapons Program: Multifaceted and Poised to Succeed, but When?”

Former IAEA Deputy Director General for Safeguards Olli Heinonen recalled in a May 2012 article that the IAEA had obtained a “set of procurement information about the PHRC” – an obvious reference to the collection of telexes – which led him to launch an investigation in 2004 of what the IAEA later called the “Procurement activities by the former Head of PHRC”.

But after an August 2007 agreement between Iran and IAEA Director-General Mohamed ElBaradei on a timetable for the resolution of “all remaining issues”, Iran provided full information on all the procurement issues the IAEA had raised.

That information revealed that the former PHRC head, Sayyed Abbas Shahmoradi-Zavareh, who had been a professor at Sharif University at the time, had been asked by several faculty departments to help procure equipment or material for teaching and research.

Iran produced voluminous evidence to support its explanation for each of the procurement efforts the IAEA had questioned. It showed that the high vacuum equipment had been requested by the Physics Department for student experiments in evaporation and vacuum techniques for producing thin coatings by providing instruction manuals on the experiments, internal communications and even the shipping documents on the procurement.

The Physics Department had also requested the magnets for students to carry out “Lenz-Faraday experiments”, according to the evidence provided, including the instruction manuals, the original requests for funding and the invoice for cash sales from the supplier. The balancing machine was for the Mechanical Engineering Department, as was supported by similar documentation turned over to the IAEA. IAEA inspectors had also found that the machine was indeed located at the department.

The 45 cylinders of fluorine that Shahmoradi-Zavareh had tried to procure had been requested by the Office of Industrial Relations for research on the chemical stability of polymeric vessels, as shown by the original request letter and communications between the former PHRC head and the president of the university.

The IAEA report on February 2008 recorded the detailed documentation provided by Iran on each of the issues, none of which was challenged by the IAEA. The report declared the issue “no longer outstanding at this stage”, despite U.S. pressure on ElBaradei to avoid closing that or any other issue in the work programme, as reported in diplomatic cables released by WikiLeaks.

The IAEA report showed that the primary intelligence basis for the U.S. charge of an Iranian nuclear weapons programme for more than a decade had been erroneous.

That dramatic development in the Iran nuclear story went unnoticed in news media reporting on the IAEA report, however. By then the U.S. government, the IAEA and the news media had raised other evidence that was more dramatic – a set of documents supposedly purloined from an Iran laptop computer associated with an alleged covert Iranian nuclear weapons programme from 2001 to 2003. And the November 2007 NIE had concluded that Iran had been running such a programme but had halted it in 2003.

Despite the clear acceptance of the Iranian explanation by the IAEA, David Albright of ISIS has continued to argue that the telexes support suspicions that Iran’s Defence Ministry was involved in the nuclear programme.

In his February 2012 paper, Albright discusses the procurement requests documented in the telexes as though the IAEA investigation had been left without any resolution. Albright makes no reference to the detailed documentation provided by Iran in each case or to the IAEA’s determination that the issue was “no longer outstanding”.

Ten days later, the Washington Post published a news article reflecting Albright’s claim that the telexes proved that the PHRC had been guiding Iran’s secret uranium enrichment programme during the 1990s. The writer was evidently unaware that the February 2008 IAEA report had provided convincing evidence that the intelligence analyst’s interpretations had been fundamentally wrong.

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. His new book “Manufactured Crisis: the Untold Story of the Iran Nuclear Scare”, will be published in February 2014.

The subtitle of Gareth Porter’s new book, “The Untold Story of the Iran Nuclear Scare,” is well-chosen. Large parts of “A Manufactured Crisis” are indeed untold till now. They amount to what the author terms an “alternative narrative”.

Courtesy of Gareth Porter.

But don’t be misled by “alternative”. This is not the work of some crank who imagines conspiracies where none exist. One senses, rather, from the author’s meticulous sourcing and the extent of his research that what motivates him is a fierce hunger for truth and aversion to deceit.

Porter has been investigating the Iranian nuclear case for the best part of a decade. The result of his researches is both a fascinating addition to a growing corpus, unlike any previous work on the issue, and a disturbing indictment of U.S. and Israeli policies.

One central theme is that hidden motives have coloured these policies. On the U.S. side, Porter explains, the end of the Cold War led to a federal bureaucratic interest in exaggerating the WMD and missile threat posed by Iran (and other emerging countries) to justify funding bids.

During the presidency of George W. Bush, some senior administration members also sought to exploit nuclear fears to “delegitimise” the Iranian government and engineer a pretext for enforced regime change.

On the Israeli side, every government since 1992 – both Likud and Labour – has seen advantage in dramatising the Iranian threat and in demonising Iran’s leaders.

“Iran and Shi’a fundamentalism are the greatest threats to global peace,” proclaimed one Israeli document. The purpose has been to maintain the value of Israel to the U.S. as a “strategic ally”, to distract global unease from Israel’s nuclear weapons arsenal, and to create excuses for remaining in occupation of Palestinian territory.

Porter concludes: “U.S. and Israeli policies have been driven by political and bureaucratic interests, not by a rational, objective assessment of available indicators of the motives and intentions of Iranian leaders.”

Another central theme, one that complements the hidden motive theme, is that intelligence material and intelligence assessments have played a baleful part in this saga.

Faulty interpretation of intelligence in the early 1990s led U.S. analysts to believe in a full-scale, clandestine nuclear weapons programme, according to Porter, whereas, in his view, the weapons programme never amounted to more than some weapons-related research between the late 1990s and 2003.

Faulty interpretations can be forgiven. More seriously, Porter’s researches suggest that in the first half of the last decade, U.S. analysts ignored or discounted evidence that called into question the assessments made in the 1990s.

A CIA contract officer who transmitted human reporting that Iran did not intend to “weaponise” the product of its enrichment plants was ordered to cease contact with the source. Those within the CIA who pointed out the absence of evidence that Iran’s leaders had decided to make a nuclear weapon were unable to get this reflected in assessments.

Analysts refused to give weight to the outlawing of nuclear weapons on religious grounds, although by then it was clear that Iranians had respected a similar religious ban on chemical weapons. Iranian assurances of peaceful intent, or at least of an intention to go no further than mastering the fuel cycle, “to enable neighbours to draw the necessary inference”, were disregarded.

A still more serious charge is that Israel has engaged in the forgery and fabrication of intelligence.

Since early 2008 the case against Iran has rested mainly on material stored on a laptop. The material came into U.S. hands in 2004, and was passed to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in 2005. For two and a half years, IAEA officials regarded the material as dubious and made no use of it. It was only in 2008 that they started to press Iran to answer for it. Porter implies that their initial scepticism was justified by laying out extensive grounds to believe that Israel fabricated this crucial material.

Porter is also convinced that Israel fabricated two other documents that have kept the Iranian case alive, despite a U.S. National Intelligence (NIE) finding in late 2007 that Iran had abandoned its nuclear weapons programme in 2003, and despite the IAEA reporting in early 2008 that Iran had resolved all the concerns that had arisen out of IAEA investigations in the preceding years.

In 2008, Israel passed to the IAEA intelligence suggesting that, years earlier, Iran had conducted nuclear weapon detonation tests at its Parchin military site. Then in 2009 Israel supplied “evidence” that Iran had resumed weapons-related research post-2003.

If Porter is right, and if all three of these grounds for pursuing the case against Iran were fabricated, that is a very serious matter. The U.S. and its European allies, assuming this intelligence to be reliable, have rejected Iranian protests to the contrary. Indeed, they have interpreted the Iranian response as a refusal to cooperate with the IAEA, and on that basis they have mobilised international support for sanctioning Iran to the hilt. Those sanctions have hurt Iranians and have damaged European and Asian economies.

The supposed refusal to cooperate has also served to justify maintaining U.N. demands that were first made of Iran before the 2007 NIE, when it seemed reasonable to consider Iran’s nuclear programme a threat to peace, but which became inappropriate after the 2007 NIE and once the IAEA had reported the resolution of all its pre-2008 concerns.

No doubt some readers will prefer to continue believing in the authenticity of this Israeli intelligence material. That may or may not turn out to be the right call.

One inference, though, from “Manufactured Crisis” looks inescapable. There has never been conclusive evidence that Iran’s Islamic leaders want to have or to use nuclear weapons. All talk of an “Iranian nuclear threat” is therefore premature. Consequently, the draconian measures implemented by the U.S. and its allies to avert that threat are unreasonable and unwarranted.

*Peter Jenkins was a British career diplomat for 33 years following studies at the universities of Cambridge and Harvard. He served in Vienna (twice), Washington, Paris, Brasilia and Geneva. His last assignment (2001-06) was that of UK Ambassador to the IAEA and UN (Vienna). Since 2006 he has represented the Renewable Energy and Energy Efficiency Partnership.

When the white apartheid regime in South Africa kept the overwhelming majority of blacks under military repression, the country’s security forces were armed with weapons originating mostly from a highly-developed domestic armaments industry.

The wide-ranging locally-made weapons – some of which were categorised as crowd-control equipment – included transport and attack helicopters, armoured personnel carriers, military trucks, internal security vehicles, assault rifles, hand guns and tear gas canisters.

Proving the resilience of its arms industry, South Africa was quick to respond to a United Nations request last October for three attack helicopters and two utility helicopters to strengthen the U.N. peacekeeping force in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC).South Africa has the unique distinction of being the only country to have abandoned its nuclear weapons programme voluntarily - setting an example to other nuclear-armed states.

Nicole Auger, a military analyst covering Middle East/Africa at Forecast International, a leader in defence market intelligence, told IPS “the South African military industry really took shape in the 1980s and got to the point where its technical capability and design and production abilities were among the most advanced in the world.”

After the 1994 election, when Nelson Mandela and the African National Congress (ANC) assumed power, industry developments slowed, notably due to the decrease in defence spending and the lack of immediate security threats, she added.

Still the South African arms industry is considered one of the most advanced in the non-Western world today, and very much in the company of its IBSA partners, India and Brazil.

The industry dates back to the apartheid regime when its rapid development was necessitated by two key factors: battling a domestic insurgency and circumventing a 1977 mandatory arms embargo imposed by the U.N.

Pieter Wezeman, senior researcher, Arms Transfers Programme at the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, told IPS the South African arms industry is advanced in a few niche areas such as certain light armoured vehicles and anti-tank missiles.

“But overall, it has become increasingly a part of the global arms industry acting as subcontractors and supplying military components for complete systems elsewhere.”

He said South Africa currently supplies weapons and other military equipment to many countries throughout the world, from the United States to China, and from Sweden to Zambia.

The U.S. was a one-time major client because it urgently needed mine-protected armoured vehicles for use in Iraq and Afghanistan.

South Africa was the world leader in the production of such vehicles, he added, including the Casspir. This dated back to the apartheid regime when the South African armed forces had to learn how to fight guerrilla forces in Zimbabwe and Namibia, which were then known as Rhodesia and South-West Africa, respectively.

South Africa was also on the threshold of becoming a nuclear power with its well-developed clandestine programme to produce weapons of mass destruction – even while it remained ostracised by the global community.

South Africa’s nuclear weapon programme was successful in producing seven weapons which were eventually destroyed under supervision of the International Atomic Energy Agency.

Jayantha Dhanapala, a former U.N. Under-Secretary-General for Disarmament Affairs, told IPS that South Africa has the unique distinction of being the only country to have abandoned its nuclear weapons programme voluntarily – setting an example for other nuclear-armed states.

In 1991, South Africa joined the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty as a non-nuclear weapon state after destroying the weapons it had developed in a clandestine programme during 1974-1990, allegedly with Israeli collusion, he pointed out.

“President [F.W.] de Klerk, who shared the Nobel Peace Prize with the late Nelson Mandela, told me he was kept in the dark about the nuclear weapons programme until he became president when he decided to halt the programme,” said Dhanapala, one of the world’s best-known authorities on nuclear disarmament.

He said it was fitting the treaty declaring the whole continent of Africa a nuclear weapon free zone should be named the Treaty of Pelindaba, named after the place where the South African nuclear weapon programme was located.

Auger told IPS the U.N. arms embargo was one of the defining drivers for the South African defence-industrial base.

Before the embargo, defence firms would only acquire licence-production agreements from other countries so there was minimal drive to develop its own fully indigenous weapons.

But the 1977 arms embargo provided the incentive for South African firms to research and develop its own weapons so that it could become self-sufficient, she added.

The South African arms industry was led by Denel and the government’s arms procurement organisation, ARMSCOR.

Prior to the embargo, South Africa produced most of its military equipment under licence-production agreements with countries such as France, Germany, Israel and Italy.

Wezeman said arms exports were an issue of debate during the 1990s with some people questioning the morality of selling tools of repression created by the former apartheid regime.

“I am not sure what Mandela’s role was in this, but I think he was critical,” he noted.

“In any case the new ANC government quickly set out to support the industry for the same reason as other arms-producing states: as a source of income, a catalyst for technological development and even hoped it could be used as a foreign policy instrument, in particular in Africa,” said Wezeman.

It never became the latter, he said, because South Africa is a rather minor player as an arms supplier on the continent.

P5+1 foreign ministers after negotiations about Iran's nuclear capabilities concluded on Nov. 24, 2013 in Geneva. Credit: U.S. Dept of State/CC by 2.0

By Jasmin Ramsey
GENEVA, Nov 24 2013 (IPS)

A momentous agreement over Iran’s nuclear programme was officially announced shortly before 3:00 am local time via Twitter by the spokesperson for EU foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton, Michael Mann, on Nov. 24, after more than four days of grueling talks.

The deal occurred after years of negotiations with Iran but only three and a half months after the inauguration of Iran’s moderate president, Hassan Rouhani, who has already overseen several historic foreign policy milestones.

“We just finished many days of hard work,” said Iran’s lead negotiator, Mohammad Javad Zarif, at the night’s first press conference shortly after signing a four-page agreement with his P5+1 (the United States, Britain, France, Russia, China plus Germany) counterparts at the Palais des Nations.

“Now we are in the process of moving forward the resolution based on mutual respect and equal footing,” the veteran diplomat, who has enjoyed consistent support from Iranians and Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei since talks resumed in October, added.

“While today’s announcement is just a first step, it achieves a great deal,” U.S. President Barack Obama said in a late-night statement from the White House.

In Geneva, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry praised Zarif’s role in the talks and Tehran’s decision to “come to the table”, which he credited to the very sanctions Iran has vehemently dismissed as a motivator.

He emphasised to reporters that the first-step agreement aimed at reaching a final, comprehensive solution includes significant limits on Iran’s nuclear programme and addresses the international community’s concerns.

Reciprocal accord

“All sides would gain [from this deal], except those few who believe that it’s feasible to expect that Iran could be sanctioned enough to give up enrichment entirely,” George Perkovich, a nuclear non-proliferation and strategy expert focused on Iran at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, told IPS.

Under the six-month phase of the deal, Iran is expected to halt uranium enrichment above five percent; convert its existing stockpile of 20-percent-enriched uranium to fuel for its Tehran Research Reactor or dilute it to five percent grade; halt “further advances of its activities” at its Natanz and Fordow Fuel Enrichment facilities and at its Arak reactor; and implement further, advanced monitoring by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).

In return Iran will gain approximately 7 billion dollars of sanctions relief; Iran will be given relief from U.S. sanctions on its auto industry as well as spare parts and repairs for its aviation industry; no further U.N., EU or U.S. nuclear sanctions will be issued; and a channel will be established to better facilitate humanitarian trade.

But any gains would be “provisional,” cautioned Perkovich, adding that “the ultimate measure will be in a final agreement.”

U.S., Iran disagree over interpretation

Like many other Iranians, Maryam Askari, a 38-year-old Tehran-based researcher, stayed awake as long as she could to hear news of the negotiation results.

“Many people are doing the same, even housewives – even a servant in my friend’s house asked her about the results of the negotiations,” Askari told IPS shortly before the deal was announced.

Askari added that she wants a deal that eases tensions with Western countries, reduces pressure on Iran’s dilapidated economy and recognises what she considers Iran’s right to peacefully enrich uranium as a signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT).

“I am looking for a fair deal,” said Askari.

But what Iran considers its “inalienable right” to enrich uranium – something it has been emphasising for years – was addressed differently by U.S. and Iranian representatives here.

Zarif not only insisted that Iran would continue enriching uranium but he also referenced “two distinct places” in the agreement that have “a very clear reference to the fact that the Iranian enrichment programme will continue and will be a part of any agreement now and in the future.”

But Kerry reiterated that the United States does not recognise any country’s right to uranium enrichment.

“This first step…does not say that Iran has a right to enrichment, no matter what interpretation the prime minister made, it is not in this document and there is no right to enrich within the four corners of the NPT,” responded Kerry.

He added that as per the signed text, “it can only be by mutual agreement that enrichment might or might not be able to be decided on in the course of negotiations.”

Criticism and relief

“We can expect a strong amount of pushback from critics in the U.S. and Israel, and we’ll have to see how hardliners in Iran react,” Alireza Nader, an international policy analyst at the RAND Corporation, told IPS.

Although Kerry stressed that this agreement will bring security to the region and make U.S. ally Israel “safer”, Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu today called the deal reached in Geneva “a historic mistake”.

Key members of U.S. Congress also criticised the deal shortly after it was announced.

“Unless the agreement requires dismantling of the Iranian centrifuges, we really haven’t gained anything,” tweeted the hawkish Republican Senator Lindsay Graham, who features in media coverage of U.S. foreign policy debates.

“You’re going to see a bipartisan effort that enrichment is not in the final agreement,” predicted Senator Bob Corker, the ranking Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, on Fox News Sunday.

In his speech, Kerry said he looked forward to working with Congress in upcoming discussions over the deal but also acknowledged a presidential “possibility of a veto” in an apparent reference to Congress trying to pass more sanctions on Iran during this phase of the deal.

Iran’s team, at least, has returned to much praise from Iranians, who through interviews with IPS and various illegal social media in Iran have been expressing joy since news of the deal broke.

Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei also expressed his blessing through a tweet and a letter addressed to President Rouhani.

“The content of the agreement will be closely examined, but generally speaking, the mere fact of an agreement has lead to a sigh of relief for most Iranians,” Farideh Farhi, an independent scholar at the University of Hawaii who has been in Iran for the last several months, told IPS.

“It signals a desire for de-escalation from all sides, away from a troubling dynamic that many feared would not only mean more economic hardship but also eventually war,” she said.

Mohammed Javad Zarif, Iranian Minister for Foreign Affairs (centre), gets out of a car at the Geneva talks. Credit: Courtesy of the European Commission

By Jasmin Ramsey
GENEVA, Nov 21 2013 (IPS)

Amidst rising expectations of a breakthrough, Iran and six world powers Wednesday resumed their quest for a deal on Iran’s controversial nuclear programme that seemed just within reach earlier this month.

In the first of at least three days of talks here, diplomats from Iran and the so-called P5+1 (U.S., Britain, France, Russia, China plus Germany) held a series of plenary and bilateral sessions which failed to clarify whether the issues that prevented an accord less than two weeks ago had been resolved.“The primary concern of nonproliferation experts is the threat posed by 20-percent enrichment, and this deal ends that." -- Jim Walsh

While a source close to the Iranian delegation suggested that disagreements among the P5+1, notably between France and the other major powers, persisted, a senior U.S. official told reporters that the group was united. “There is quite a lot of misinformation out there,” according to the official.

“A lot of progress was made, but differences remain,” said EU Spokesperson Michael Mann late Wednesday, repeating the formulation offered by EU Foreign Policy chief Catherine Ashton and Iran’s Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif Nov. 9 when the last round of talks broke up.

While participants involved in the talks have been mostly tight-lipped on the details of their discussions, the deal on the table – an interim agreement pending a comprehensive accord to be completed within six months to a year — involves reciprocal moves by both sides.

Among other steps, Iran would reportedly be required to freeze its production of 20-percent enriched uranium and put its existing stockpile under strict monitoring by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) pending its conversion into oxide; limit all of its enrichment to not more than 3.5 percent; and delay fueling its yet-to-be-completed Arak heavy-water facility, which is designed to produce plutonium for its nuclear industry.

In return, Iran would receive what U.S. officials have called “limited but reversible” relief from sanctions on its trade in petrochemicals and precious metals, and access to as much as 10 billion dollars of its foreign exchange reserves that are currently frozen in Western bank accounts.

“The proposed deal is in America’s national interest and would improve security for the U.S. and its regional allies,” Jim Walsh, an international security expert at MIT, told IPS.

“The primary concern of nonproliferation experts is the threat posed by 20-percent enrichment, and this deal ends that,” said Walsh.

The tone expressed by a senior administration official at the conclusion of Wednesday’s negotiating session was more subdued than that expressed by U.S. diplomats during the last round of talks two weeks ago.

“The atmosphere [of the talks] was positive,” said the official who briefed reporters. “If this were easy to do, it would have been done a long time ago.”

The point of this session is “getting back to work…shutting out the noise, getting into the nitty-gritty of a first-step agreement and the parameters of a comprehensive agreement and seeing if we can narrow the gaps to conclude such an agreement,” the official said.

Earlier in the day, Iran’s Deputy Foreign Minister Abbas Araqchi told the Iranian press corps here: “If we reach good results today, we will discuss the draft tomorrow.”

A meeting of political directors from the P5+1, that included an experts’ discussion Wednesday morning, was followed by a 90-minute bilateral discussion between Ashton and Zarif.

In the evening, a brief plenary session was reportedly followed by separate bilateral meetings between Iran and Russia, China, and the three European countries. The Iranian and U.S. delegations will hold yet another bilateral meeting Thursday, in addition to the plenary sessions.

In a televised speech to members of Iran’s paramilitary Basij force earlier Wednesday, Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei reiterated his support for Tehran’s negotiating team and pledged not to intervene in the talks so long as it does not violate “certain red lines and limits” – an apparent reference to Iran’s insistence that it has the right to enrich uranium for peaceful purposes as a signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT).

“We want to have relations with all people,” Khamenei said. “Even with the American people we do not have enmities, we have a problem with the U.S. government and its arrogance,” he said in an otherwise militant speech in which he strongly denounced Israel as “the rabid dog of the region” and France for allegedly doing Israel’s bidding in the P5+1.

Earlier this month, France broke with its P5+1 counterparts by publicly expressing its opposition to the language of a draft accord reportedly negotiated between Secretary of State John Kerry, Ashton and Zarif. French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius complained in particular about provisions regarding Iran’s continuing uranium enrichment and what he suggested were insufficient constraints on the ongoing construction at Arak.

His last-minute objections to the draft apparently prevented the signing of an agreement here on Nov 9. But U.S. officials have since suggested that those objections have been overcome.’

A senior administration official reiterated here Wednesday that Washington does not recognise any country’s right to enrich uranium but acknowledged that Iran has also insisted on that “right” for “a very long time.”

“Do I believe this issue can be navigated in an agreement? Yes I do, and we will see what can be done,” said the official.

For its part, Iran indicated earlier this week that an explicit recognition by the P5+1 of Iran’s “right to enrich” was not necessary.

“Iran’s enrichment right does not need recognition, because it is an inseparable right based on the NPT,” Zarif said. “What we expect is respecting parts of this right,” he said, according to the Iranian Student News Agency.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has repeatedly denounced the pending interim accord as a “very bad deal,” has insisted that Iran should not be granted any sanctions relief until it halts all enrichment and dismantles other key parts of its nuclear programme. He has also called for more sanctions to achieve that result.

His demands have been backed by Israel lobby groups in Washington and some Republican lawmakers who this week called for more sanctions against Tehran and tried to have Netanyahu’s demands added to a pending defence bill just as the Geneva talks got underway.

Prodded by the White House, however, the Democratic leadership in the Senate appears to have put off debate on the proposed amendment at least until Congress returns from its Thanksgiving recess Dec. 9, thus giving the administration more time to conclude an accord with Tehran.

The administration, whose exasperation with Netanyahu’s lobbying and Republican backing for the Israeli leader has become increasingly apparent over the last few days, was bolstered Wednesday by a Washington Post/ABC poll that found nearly two-thirds of respondents in favour of easing sanctions in order to get a deal with Iran. In addition, former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright signed on to a letter sent Monday by former national security advisers Brent Scowcroft and Zbigniew Brzezinski that offered strong support for Obama’s negotiating strategy.

Still, failure to get a seal an interim accord within the next couple of weeks will almost certainly strengthen hard-line forces in both Tehran and Washington, according to most observers.

“[T]he body language of the two sides suggests that they are ready to secure a meaningful agreement on the basis of realistic and achievable goals,” Ali Vaez, an Iran expert the International Crisis Group, told IPS.

“While more promising than ever, nuclear diplomacy with Iran remains fragile and could well founder,” he added.

“Should that occur, it would be hard to recreate these favourable circumstances; indeed, the more likely path would be continuation of the trajectory witnessed over the past decade: heightened sanctions, accelerated Iranian advances on the nuclear front and greater probability of armed confrontation,” said Vaez.

Jim Lobe contributed to this article from Washington.

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry (far left) sitting next to Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif on the sidelines of the U.N. General Assembly on Sept. 27. Credit: European External Action Service/cc by 2.0

By Jasmin Ramsey
GENEVA, Nov 8 2013 (IPS)

Raising expectations for a deal over its controversial nuclear programme, Iran’s chief negotiator Mohammad Javad Zarif has said that a joint statement on the framework of a nuclear deal could be issued as early as Friday here amid ongoing negotiations with the P5+1 group of world powers.

Those expectations have also been raised by an NBC report that U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry — who President Barack Obama appointed to oversee the U.S. side of nuclear negotiations with Iran in September — is unexpectedly heading to Geneva now.“Neither side should be told at home or by detractors outside that they’ve been taken for a ride; you want a deal that can be presented to sceptical publics." -- Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif

While officials from all sides here have remained tight-lipped about what that deal could include, the Iranian foreign minister exclusively told IPS that Iran’s parliament could consider implementing the Additional Protocol — a voluntary legal agreement that would allow the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) increased inspection access to all of Iran’s nuclear facilities — as part of a deal if it was convinced that sanctions would be reversed.

“The additional protocol is [only] within the prerogative of the Iranian parliament to adopt and to ratify, but we can consider it if the necessary confidence is built,” Zarif told IPS in an interview Thursday evening.

“[The U.S.] should show that they are prepared to reverse the trend; that is, to stop trying to achieve their objections through pressure on Iran,” said the foreign minister.

“Iran demands respect and equal footing [that is] only done when you are prepared to accommodate the other side without trying to impose your views,” continued Zarif.

“We want to see a situation where Iran’s right to the peaceful use of nuclear energy, including enrichment on Iranian territory, is respected and at the same time all sanctions are removed,” he said.

“We are prepared to address the concerns of the international community in the process,” he added.

Asked by IPS to elaborate on any impediments to a deal, Zarif said that Iran was seeking one that was domestically acceptable.

“For this deal to be sustainable and in fact foster confidence, it needs to be balanced,” said Zarif, a Western-educated academic who worked closely with the U.S. in 2001 in drafting the deal that led to the post-Taliban government in Afghanistan.

“Neither side should be told at home or by detractors outside that they’ve been taken for a ride; you want a deal that can be presented to sceptical publics,” he said.

Zarif also rejected the possibility of Iran suspending its controversial uranium enrichment as part of the framework of a possible deal.

On Wednesday, that idea was expressed by the U.S. Senator Robert Menendez, the chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, in an interview with CNN.

Menendez told the journalist Christiane Amanpour that Iran should completely “suspend” its nuclear programme before even a pause in more sanctions.

Zarif rejected that notion this evening in a follow-up CNN interview and with IPS.

“From 2003-05 we did in fact suspend [uranium enrichment]; it didn’t lead anywhere,” Zarif told IPS.

“And from 2005 until now, they’ve been pushing for suspension. The result is that in 2005 we had less than 160 centrifuges spinning, now we have 19,000,” said Zarif.

Asked what measures Iran could take to address the international community’s concerns about Iran’s nuclear programme, Zarif told IPS, “It is in our interest that even the perception that Iran is seeking nuclear weapons would be removed” and Iran “will do anything possible, everything reasonable, to remove those perceptions.”

Iran could address those concerns by operating its nuclear programme in a “transparent, open way with IAEA monitoring,” he said.

Although the Obama administration has recently been lobbying for a temporary pause in the implementation of more sanctions on Iran while talks are in progress, key figures in Congress are voicing resistance against the effort.

A senior administration official told reporters here Wednesday that “Our experts strongly believe that any forward progress on additional sanctions at this time would be harmful to and potentially undermine the negotiating process at a truly crucial moment.”

“In response to a first step agreed to by Iran that halts their programme from advancing further, we are prepared to offer limited, targeted, and reversible sanctions relief,” said the official, who was speaking on the condition of anonymity.

But the Senate Banking Committee is reportedly now poised to move ahead with more sanctions on Iran after the talks conclude here on Nov. 8, according to Reuters.

On Wednesday, a top Republican senator on the Foreign Relations Committee also said he was preparing legislation that would prevent the loosening of sanctions on Iran.

“We’ve crafted an amendment to freeze the administration in and make it so they are unable to reduce the sanctions unless certain things occur,” Sen. Bob Corker told the Daily Beast on Wednesday.

While Iran may currently be far from reaching relief from U.S.-led sanctions targeting its oil revenues and banking sector, it may be getting closer to obtaining relief in other ways as part of a mutual deal.

“A lot of the U.S. restrictions are going to remain, but a good deal that the administration here signs off on could have a big impact on sanctions relief,” Suzanne Maloney, a former State Department policy planning official, told IPS.

“It depends what happens over the course of the next 24 hours…it’s difficult to persuade Congress to back off on any kind of pressure on Iran, but the banking committee’s decision doesn’t mean these provisions automatically become law,” said Maloney, an Iran expert at the Brookings Institution.

“It’s entirely conceivable that if we see something come out of these talks, these sanctions would either not become law or be implemented,” she said.

Iran’s Deputy Foreign Minister Abbas Aragchi. Courtesy of Fars News Agency

By Jasmin Ramsey
GENEVA, Oct 17 2013 (IPS)

Talks between Iran and world powers known as the P5+1 over Iran’s nuclear programme wrapped up here Wednesday with expressions of encouragement and hope, a commitment to reconvene in just three weeks, and several welcomed “firsts”.

Officials remained determinedly mum Wednesday about the much sought-after details of the new PowerPoint proposal that Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif presented to the P5+1 (the United States, Britain, France, Russia and China, plus Germany) Tuesday.“The Additional Protocol is a part of the endgame." -- Deputy Foreign Minister Abbas Aragchi

However, one key element of a potential deal – Iran’s eventual willingness to sign the Additional Protocol of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) — was revealed to IPS earlier in the day.

Elements of Iran’s proposal

Deputy Foreign Minister Abbas Aragchi, who became Iran’s lead representative in the talks following chief negotiator Zarif’s proposal presentation on Oct. 15, told IPS in the first such English-language interview here that Iran is open to implementing the Additional Protocol as part of a mutually agreed final deal.

“The Additional Protocol is a part of the endgame,” Araghchi told IPS this morning in the lobby of his hotel. “It’s on the table, but not for the time being, it’s a part of the final step,” he said.

The voluntary but advanced nuclear safeguards standard, which Iran would formally ratify with the IAEA, has long been considered by analysts a key element of any possible deal between Iran and the P5+1 over its controversial nuclear programme.

“The Additional Protocol is the only way that you can make sure there are no clandestine activities inside the country,” Ali Vaez, an Iran expert at the International Crisis Group, told IPS.

“It gives the IAEA access to all parts of the nuclear fuel cycle. It will be able to conduct snap inspections with two hours’ notice for declared facilities in Iran and within 24 hours of undeclared facilities,” he said.

According to Iran expert Trita Parsi, Iran started implementing the Protocol in 2003 as part of a negotiation with the so-called EU-3 (Britain, France, and Germany) while under the impression that “objective criteria would be put into place for Iran to have a nuclear enrichment programme.”

But the EU-3 failed to follow through, reportedly due in major part to strong objections to such an accord by the administration of President George W. Bush, and Iran stopped adhering to the Protocol in 2006.

“Europe had already achieved what it sought, Iran wasn’t enriching, and the Protocol was implemented,” Parsi told IPS.

“This is part of the reason why the Iranians want the end game to be clarified before,” he said.

Hints of a potential deal

“I have never had such intense, detailed, straightforward, candid conversations with the Iranian delegation before,” a senior U.S. administration official told reporters here, confirming that the next talks would take place again in Geneva from Nov. 7-8.

“I would say we are beginning that kind of negotiation to get to a place where, in fact, one can imagine that you could possibly have an agreement,” the official said.

The U.S. official also noted the persistence of “serious differences,” but added, “If there weren’t serious differences, this would have been resolved a long time ago.”

Zarif, who is suffering from extreme back pain, told reporters early Wednesday evening in an English/Persian press conference that Iran had taken part in “substantive and forward-looking negotiations.”

“We sense that the members of the [P5+1] also exhibited the necessary political will in order to move the process forward, and now we have to get to the details,” a wheelchair-ridden Zarif said in English after the final plenary had ended.

The closed-door bilateral meeting on Oct. 15 between the lead US representative here, Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs Wendy Sherman, with Iran’s Deputy Foreign Minister Abbas Aragchi was the first such meet to take place between the US and Iran during a full-gauged P5+1 negotiation with Iran since 2009, although the US and Iran made history last month when Secretary of State John Kerry and Zarif met privately for 30 minutes on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly.

“Our discussion bilaterally yesterday was a useful one,” said a senior U.S. official Wednesday.

The fact that the talks were conducted in English for the first time was seen as another welcome first.

“The pace of the discussion is much better,” a senior U.S. official told reporters, adding that it “creates the ability to really have the kind of back-and-forth one must have if you want to have a negotiation.”

Possible endgames

Before insisting that he would not comment on any details of his proposal, Zarif told reporters Iran would not implement the Additional Protocol at this stage, adding “these issues are on the table” and “are being discussed and they will be discussed at various stages of the process.”

“We want to guarantee Iran’s right to nuclear technology and assure the other side of the table that our nuclear programme is peaceful,” Araghchi told reporters in Farsi Tuesday.

“The first step includes rebuilding mutual trust and addressing the concerns of both sides,” he said, adding that the “verification tools” of the IAEA could be utilised during the process.

The final step includes using Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei’s fatwa (a religious ruling) against Iran building or possessing nuclear weapons as “the most important point,” stated Araghchi.

“Iran will use its own nuclear facilities, including its nuclear research reactor, for peaceful purposes,” he noted, adding that the last phase of Tehran’s offer includes “the lifting of all sanctions against Iran.”

Sanctions remain a key issue

In another first for the P5+1 talks, a “joint statement” issued in the names of both Zarif and EU High Representative Catherine Ashton noted that sanctions specialists would be included in an “experts” meeting before the Nov. 7-8 talks “to address differences and address practical steps.” In yet another first, top U.S. sanctions officials accompanied Sherman on the delegation this week.

But it remains to be seen what kind – as well as the timing — of sanctions relief the P5+1 is willing to offer Iran as part of a comprehensive agreement that is likely to include interim confidence-building measures (CBMs).

Iran’s insistence that its right to enrich uranium on its own soil as part of its civil nuclear programme must be included in any eventual deal remains a problem for the U.S. Congress where the Israel lobby exerts its greatest influence.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been campaigning for weeks against any agreement that does not require Iran to essentially abandon its nuclear programme, including enrichment on its own soil.

An Oct. 11 bipartisan letter sent to U.S. President Barack Obama by 10 key senators suggested they were “prepared to move forward with new sanctions to increase pressure on the government in Tehran” in the coming weeks, presumably before the next round of talks in Geneva.

The senior U.S. official who briefed reporters after the meeting said there would classified briefings with Congress on the talks in the coming days.

“The prerogative in the end is theirs, but I am hopeful that we will continue to be strong partners with the same objective, which I believe we have,” said the official.

The official said briefings will also be given to key allies, including Israel and Saudi Arabia, which are known to be highly sceptical about – if not strongly opposed – to any deal that would permit Iran to continue any enrichment on its own soil.

Newly published recollections by the former French ambassador to Iran suggest that Iran was not running a covert nuclear weapons programme that it then decided to halt in late 2003, as concluded by U.S. intelligence in 2007.

Ambassador Francois Nicoullaud recounted conversations with high-ranking Iranian officials indicating that Tehran’s then nuclear policy chief – and now president-elect – Hassan Rouhani did not know what research projects relating to nuclear weapons had been carried out over the years.“I guess that most people, [Supreme Leader Ali] Khamenei included, were surprised by the extent of the activities." -- former French ambassador to Iran Francois Nicoullaud

The conversations described by Nicoullaud in a Jul. 26 New York Times op-ed also portray Rouhani as having difficulty getting individual researchers to comply with an order to halt all research related to nuclear weapons.

The picture of Iranian nuclear policy in 2003 drawn by Nicoullaud is different from the one in the 2007 National Intelligence Estimate, which concluded that Iran had halted “its nuclear weapons program”. That conclusion implied that Iranian government leadership had organised a programme of research and development aimed at producing a nuclear weapon.

Nicoullaud recalled that a high-ranking Iranian official confided to him in late October 2003 that Rouhani had just “issued a general circular asking all Iranian departments and agencies, civilian and military, to report in detail about their past and ongoing nuclear activities.”

The conversation came immediately after Rouhani had concluded an agreement with the foreign ministers of the UK, France and Germany on Oct. 21, 2003, Nicoullaud recalled.

The same official explained that “the main difficulty Rouhani and his team were encountering was learning exactly what was happening in a system as secretive as Iran’s,” wrote Nicoullaud.

A few weeks after, the French ambassador learned from a second official, whom he described as “a close friend of Rouhani”, that Rouhani’s nuclear policy team had issued instructions to halt projects relating to nuclear weapons.

The Iranian official said the team was “having a hard time”, because, “[p]eople resist their instructions,” according to Nicoullaud. The official remarked that it was difficult to “convince researchers to abruptly terminate projects they had been conducting for years”.

In an e-mail to IPS, Nicoullaud said he did not believe the Iranian government had ever approved a nuclear weapons programme. “The first challenge for Rouhani when he took hold of the nuclear,” said Nicoullaud, “must have been to get a clear picture of what was going on in Iran in the nuclear field.”

Rouhani had been the secretary of the Supreme National Security Council (SNSC) since 1989 and would not only have known about but would have been involved in any government decision to establish a nuclear weapons programme.

“I guess that most people, [Supreme Leader Ali] Khamenei included, were surprised by the extent of the activities,” Nicoullaud told IPS.

Nicoullaud’s recollections are consistent with published evidence that nuclear weapons-related research projects had begun without any government authorisation.

Despite an Iranian policy that ruled out nuclear weapons, many Iranian officials believed that a nuclear weapons “capability” would confer benefits on Iran without actually having nuclear weapons.

But the meaning of such a capability was the subject of ongoing debate. Nasser Hadian, a well-connected Tehran University political scientist, wrote in late 2003 about two schools of thought on the option of having a “nuclear weapons capability” but not the weapons themselves. One definition of that option was that Iran should have only the capability to produce fuel for nuclear reactors, Hadian explained, while the other called for Iran to have “all the necessary elements and capabilities for producing weapons”.

That debate had evidently not been officially resolved by a government decision before Rouhani’s appointment. And in the absence of a clear statement of policy, figures associated with research centres with military and defence ministry ties began in the latter of the 1990s to create their own nuclear weapons-related research projects without the knowledge of the Supreme National Security Council (SNSC).

Such projects were apparently begun during a period when the Supreme National Security Council was not exercising tight control over the Atomic Energy Organisation of Iran (AEOI), the Ministry of Defence or the military industrial complex controlled by Defence Industries Organisation related to nuclear weapons.

By the mid-1990s, AEOI was already taking advantage of the lax supervision of its operations to take actions that had significant policy implications without authorisation from the SNSC.

Seyed Hossein Mousavian, then the spokesman for Iran’s nuclear negotiating team, recalls in his memoirs that in January 2004, Rouhani revealed to him that AEOI had not informed the SNSC about a policy-relevant matter as important as the purchase of the P2 centrifuge designs from the A. Q. Khan network in 1995. AEOI officials had misled him, Rohani said, by claiming that “they had found some information about P2 centrifuges on the Internet and are studying it!”

When Rouhani was named to take over as nuclear policy coordinator in early October 2003, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) was demanding a full accounting by Iran of all of its nuclear activities. Rouhani’s circular to all civilian and military offices about nuclear work came soon after he had promised the IAEA that Iran would change its policy to one of full cooperation with the IAEA.

At the same time, Rouhani moved to tighten up the policy loophole that had allowed various entities to start weapons-related nuclear research.

Rouhani anticipated resistance from the bureaucratic entities that had nuclear weapons-related research projects from the beginning. He recalled in a later interview that he had told President Mohammad Khatami that he expected that there would be problems in carrying out the new nuclear policy, including “sabotage”.

The sequence of events surrounding Rouhani’s new nuclear policy indicates that he used Khamenei’s public posture that nuclear weapons were forbidden according to Islamic law to ensure compliance with the ban on such research projects.

Around the same time that Rouhani ordered the bureaucracy to report on its nuclear-related activities and to stop any research on military applications of nuclear power in late October, Khamenei gave a speech in which he said, “In contrast to the propaganda of our enemies, fundamentally we are against any production of weapons of mass destruction in any form.”

Three days later, Rouhani told students at Shahrud Industrial University that Khamenei considered nuclear weapons as religiously illegal.

That same week, in an interview with San Francisco Chronicle correspondent Robert Collier, Hossein Shariatmadari, the editor of the conservative newspaper Kayhan and an adviser to Khamenei, alluded to tensions between the Rouhani team and those researchers who were not responding to or resisting the Rouhani circular.

Khamenei was forcing those working on such projects to “admit that it is forbidden under Islam”, Shariatmadari said. He also suggested that the researchers resisting the ban had been working “clandestinely”.

After the U.S. intelligence community concluded in November 2007 estimate that Iran had halted a “nuclear weapons program”, a U.S. intelligence official said key pieces of evidence were intercepted communications from at least one senior military officer and others expressing dismay in 2007 that nuclear weapons-related work had been shut down in 2003.

But U.S. intelligence officials said nothing about what kind of work was being shut down, and revealed no further evidence that it was a “nuclear weapons program” under the control of the government.

Nicoullaud’s recollections suggest that the 2007 estimate glossed over a crucial distinction between an Iranian “nuclear weapons program” and research projects that had not been authorised or coordinated by the Iranian regime.

Nicoullaud told IPS he believes the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), which controls Iran’s ballistic missile programme, was also carrying out a clandestine nuclear weapons programme. The IRGC’s own ministry had been merged, however, with the old Ministry of Defence to form a new ministry in 1989, which implies that any such clandestine programme would have necessarily involved a wider military conspiracy.

*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.

A state-of-the-art nuclear medicine hospital for cancer treatment in the heart of Bangalore goes well with the global image of this tech-savvy city.

Staff at HCG hospital in Bangalore don safety gear before entering the Cyclotron. Credit: Malini Shankar/IPS

The HealthCare Global (HCG) hospital is equipped with facilities to manufacture and trade in nuclear medicine and offers the advantage of easy access for cancer patients.

However, locating such a facility in downtown Bangalore has its risks, particularly as a potential source of radioactivity that could affect residents in the surrounding, densely populated slum, or diners at two nearby restaurants.

Although advances in nuclear medicine and diagnostics – such as mammography, X-rays, cobalt radiation, gamma rays exposure, CT scans, thyroid treatment and radio isotopes – herald an era of advanced medical care, experts say that India’s nuclear medicine industry needs tighter regulation, sharper scrutiny and better planning.

Given that the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) itself plainly states that standards for nuclear medicine differ from state to state, it is not at all an easy task to regulate or standardise radiation or leakage in terms of millisieverts per year.

The problem is made worse by the fact that India’s Atomic Energy Regulatory Board (AERB), tasked with monitoring nuclear applications throughout the country, is funded by the Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) – the very department the AERB is expected to regulate.

Although headed by the Indian Prime Minister, the DAE does not answer to the Indian Parliament.

This compromise in independent regulation has many implications, but Indian scientists and medical professionals are particularly concerned about its impact on the nuclear medical sector.

India’s vast, unplanned cities call for extra caution, since nuclear medicine diagnostic centres are often located in densely populated urban jungles. Often, diagnostic laboratories are located close to residential areas, schools, slums or restaurants.

“Advanced diagnostic laboratories and multi-speciality hospitals that use nuclear applications like radioisotopes in nuclear medicine, X-rays, mammography, etcetera, are all sources of radioactivity,” says Dr. Udaya Kumar Maiya, oncologist at the Bangalore Hospital.

“Adequate safety and security protocols with rigid usage norms are essential for prevention of harm to the general public, patients and the environment,” he told IPS. If the sector is “callously managed” the results could be “catastrophic”, he cautioned: a single radioisotope has the capacity to harm millions of people through contamination or radiation exposure.

As Dr. Guru Shankar, medical superintendent at the Victoria Hospital, the premier government medical college hospital in Bangalore, pointed out, “Even if one technician forgets to give protection to the reproductive organs of patients who are subjected to multiple exposures (for treatment) it can lead to destruction of reproductive organs like ovaries or testes.”

Though Shankar — who also serves on the district disaster management committee of the National Disaster Response Force — has not come across anyone who has crossed the “threshold of high radioactivity in the 34 years that I have served in government hospitals”, he is aware and concerned about possible dangers.

Nuclear medicine and radioactive sources have potentially hazardous effects if they inadvertently escape into the surrounding area, particularly in urban settings. Over-exposure to mammography – particularly for technicians – can also lead to a higher susceptibility to cancer.

“The (spurt) of unplanned growth in urban areas like Bangalore is a recipe for disaster. This is where the role of the AERB is crucial,” Maiya added.

The ability to isolate facilities that manufacture or utilise nuclear medicine is challenged by the rapid growth of India’s metropolises. Urban planners have failed to make provisions for arterial roads for emergency disposal of nuclear medicine or evacuation and assembly points in case of accidents. City planners have also neglected to designate disposal centres for nuclear medicine waste.

However, director of the Pet CT Cyclotron at the HCG hospital in Bangalore, Dr. Kumar Kallur, assured IPS in an exclusive interview that nuclear medicines are perfectly safe and well regulated.

“The radiation is contained within the cyclotron vault and it never escapes. Moreover isotopes produced have a very short life span – anywhere between two minutes to two hours, necessitating easy access in a place like (downtown) Bangalore.

“Cyclotrons (used in the manufacture of nuclear medicines for cancer treatments) cannot be installed without AERB approval, which monitors every single aspect of the cyclotron operations during peak performance.”

He added that cyclotron licences are only issued upon strict inspections of location, disposal mechanisms, manufacturing facilities  and trained staff, and that the hospital itself is expected to produce quarterly safety analysis reports for submission to the Board. “The AERB makes surprise inspections. At the slightest hint of radiation leakage the operations will completely stop,” Kallur stressed.

“Patients who have undergone nuclear medicine therapy are admitted to AERB-approved isolation wards. Even the human waste generated by such patients is subjected to delay and decay in tanks that are tested periodically before the sewage is discharged into the public sewage system,” Kallur assured IPS.

But others are not convinced and some experts have gone so far as to label the regulatory process a “farce”.

In his recently published book “The Power of Promise” physicist M.V. Ramana charged, “The AERB’s effectiveness is constrained by the Atomic Energy Commission’s (AEC) choice of institutional structure. Rather than make the AERB independent of the Department of Atomic Energy (DAE), the AEC made the AERB report to itself.”

He also lamented the fact that the secretary of the DAE is the ex officio chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, which effectively allows the DAE to exercise administrative power over the AERB.

“Until recently, the chairman of the Nuclear Power Corporation was also a member of the AEC,” he wrote.

“The AERB’s budget comes from the DAE. All these factors place structural limits on the AERB’s effectiveness,” Ramana told IPS.

He went on to add, “The AERB does not carry out any monitoring of essential performance metrics such as radiological exposure of workers at DAE facilities or measurement of levels of radio nuclides in the vicinity of nuclear facilities.” Instead, these tasks are “entrusted to the Nuclear Power Corporation of India Limited and the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre in Bombay”.

Scientists here feel the government should undertake disaster prevention measures such as establishing evacuation points, frequent broadcasts of “Dos and Don’ts”, better training for investigative officers, designated arterial routes for mass evacuation and easy access to first aid in the event of an accident, or disaster.

(END)