Iran’s game of nuclear hide-and-seek

Published on November 29, 2005

Mohammad ElBaradei, the director-general of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), is pressing the agency’s board of governors to make one last effort to find a diplomatic solution to Iran’s nuclear ambitions before sending the case to the United Nations Security Council for possible sanctions. The board met last Thursday to discuss “new information” discovered by inspectors on the ground.

Thanks to IAEA inspectors, we now have a fairly detailed picture of Iran’s nuclear archipelago – at least those facilities that the Iranian government has been forced to open. We know that Iran has discovered, mined and milled natural uranium, the basic building block of any enrichment programme, without telling the IAEA. We know that Iran built a uranium-conversion facility in Isfahan to convert uranium yellowcake into uranium hexafluoride gas, the feedstock for uranium enrichment, without required prior notification to the IAEA.

We also know that Iran built an underground uranium-enrichment plant at Natanz, hardened it against missile attack and erected dummy buildings on the surface to conceal it from overhead surveillance. The authorities agreed to open this facility to the IAEA only after its existence was confirmed by commercial satellite imagery, and they appear to have swept the underground halls of whatever equipment was installed before the inspectors arrived. Once fully operational, these facilities will give Iran mastery of the entire nuclear-fuel cycle.

For 18 years, Iran’s government concealed its nuclear activities from the IAEA, in clear violation of its safeguards agreement. For this reason alone, the IAEA board must refer Iran to the Security Council for further action, as required by the agency’s charter.

Non-nuclear nations that sign the IAEA charter, as Iran has, pledge to abandon all efforts to develop nuclear weapons. In exchange, they are given access to nuclear technology. But that pledge requires complete, transparent cooperation with the IAEA. Instead, Iran has been playing cheat and retreat.

“With Iran, we realised that mastery of the fuel cycle makes you a virtual nuclear-weapons state,” a top aide to ElBaradei told me. “That was a wake-up call for all of us.”

But a wake-up call that allows the IAEA board to go back to sleep is useless. For two and a half years, the European Union has made every effort to get Iran to cooperate fully with the IAEA and come clean about its nuclear activities, to no avail.

When the IAEA announced it wanted to inspect a suspected enrichment cascade within the Revolutionary Guard complex at Lavizan-Shian, Iran’s government stalled for months until it could raze the site. When it asked to visit a suspect lab within the Parchin defence-production plant, the Iranians stalled. When they finally allowed a small team in, they limited their movements, in violation of Iran’s commitments.

ElBaradei has stated that the IAEA has found “no evidence” of a weapons programme in Iran – a statement that Iranian leaders have since cited as proof of their peaceful intentions. But the IAEA has no authority to determine whether or not a country has a nuclear-weapons programme. That is up to the UN Security Council. The IAEA’s job is to determine whether a nation has violated its safeguards agreement, and ElBaradei has made it abundantly clear that Iran has.

Understanding the intentions of Iran’s leaders is not as difficult or as ambiguous as some believe. Eighteen years of concealment constitutes a powerful track record. So do Iranian leaders’ own statements.

For example, in 1986, then-president Ayatollah Ali Khamenei gave a pep talk at the headquarters of the Atomic Energy Organisation of Iran. “Our nation has always been threatened from outside,” he said. “The least we can do to face this danger is let our enemies know we can defend ourselves.”

In 1988, Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani – the supposed “moderate” candidate in Iran’s recent presidential election – spelled out what that meant in an address to the Revolutionary Guard Corps. “We should fully equip ourselves, both in the offensive and defensive use of chemical, bacteriological and radiological weapons,” urging the audience to “make use of the opportunity and perform this task”. At a Jerusalem Day rally at Tehran University in December 2001, he uttered one of the regime’s most sinister threats: “The use of an atomic bomb against Israel would destroy Israel completely, while [the same] against the world of Islam would only cause damage.”

Iran’s regime has only grown bolder since then. Foreign Minister Kamal Kharrazi declared in June of last year that Iran “won’t accept any new obligations” and must “be recognised by the international community as a member of the nuclear club”. Similarly this past March, Rafsanjani reiterated Iran’s refusal to dismantle its nuclear-fuel cycle facilities, as the EU and the IAEA had demanded, insisting: “We can’t stop our nuclear programme and won’t stop it.”

In these circumstances, the risk entailed by doing nothing far outweighs the costs of referring Iran to the Security Council. Indeed, Iran may already be enriching uranium secretly. If it used the centrifuges that it purchased from Pakistan’s nuclear impresario, AQ Khan, it could have enough fissile material to produce 20 bombs. With Iran continuing to shelter top al-Qaeda leaders, this raises an even graver threat: terrorists getting hold of nuclear weapons.

The dangers of allowing Iran to go nuclear ought to be obvious. Even to ElBaradei.

Kenneth Timmerman

Kenneth Timmerman, author of “Countdown to Crisis: The Coming Nuclear Showdown with Iran”, is president of the Middle East Data Project.

Post your comment to this story here