Iran Wins Reprieve, West Concedes Uranium Conversion

By Greg Webb
Global Security Newswire

VIENNA — Iran received a diplomatic reprieve late last week as the European Union and the United States agreed to defer their push to report the Iranian nuclear issue to the U.N. Security Council (see GSN, Nov. 23).

Officials gathering here at a meeting of the International Atomic Energy Agency’s governing board elected to allow more time for reinvigorated negotiations between Iran and France, Germany and the United Kingdom, the three largest EU nations, which have been spearheading an effort to resolve the nuclear crisis.

Still, while leaving open a “window of opportunity” for continued talks, British Ambassador Peter Jenkins cautioned that the opening would not “stay open forever or under all circumstances.”

While the agency board meetings have often served as the main forum for the international community to discuss Iran’s nuclear ambitions, last week’s meeting was overshadowed by an agreement for renewed EU-Iran talks, which are scheduled for early next week.

Diplomats here told Global Security Newswire that the precise schedule remains to be set but that the meetings would take place Dec. 6 or Dec. 7, most likely in Vienna or possibly Moscow.

The Moscow option has indicated the growing involvement of Russia in a possible resolution to the crisis, which began two years ago, when Iran acknowledged concealing an extensive nuclear program for nearly 20 years. Tehran has steadfastly declared its programs to be peaceful, but the long-time clandestine nature of the program, combined with a still-unsatisfied nuclear agency, has fueled continued Western suspicion of Iran’s nuclear aims.

Moscow has proposed a compromise solution in which it would host a Russian-Iranian facility to enrich uranium to low levels for use in Iranian nuclear power plants.

The success of this proposal remains uncertain. While Iranian diplomats here said they were considering the Russian offer, other officials in Tehran said Iran would insist on having the uranium-enrichment facility on its territory.

“Any proposal that contains producing nuclear fuel inside Iran will be supported by Iran,” said Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Hamid Reza Asefi yesterday, the Associated Press reported.

While the Russian proposal focuses on the location of enrichment sites, it tacitly accepts Iran’s intention to convert mined uranium into a gaseous form to make it ready for enrichment.

In a significant concession, the EU nations and the United States have retreated from opposing Iran’s uranium conversion program. Earlier this year, the EU halted talks with Iran after Tehran restarted its conversion facility, but that opposition has faded with the prospect of enrichment taking place outside Iran.

For its part, the United States has made an evolutionary leap in policy. During the Clinton administration and the beginning of the Bush administration, the United States leaned heavily on Russia to end Moscow’s nuclear cooperation with Iran. Russia has nearly completed building a nuclear power plant in Iran at Bushehr and has agreed to supply the fuel for that reactor. Today, Washington appears to have no problem with that relationship and sees such an arrangement as an acceptable path to preventing Iran from acquiring the means to make nuclear weapons, according to officials here.

U.S. Ambassador Gregory Schulte sidestepped the policy change Thursday.

“I’m a very bad historian on that,” he told reporters.

Although the forum for Iran has switched to the next week’s talks, Western nations still seized the opportunity here to continue accusing Iran of having nuclear-weapon ambitions.

In particular, many nations drew attention to a single sentence in a recent report by agency Director General Mohamed ElBaradei that said Iran had admitted receiving documents “on the casting and machining of enriched, natural and depleted uranium metal into hemispherical forms.” The documents came from the international nuclear-smuggling network led by former Pakistani nuclear scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan, who provided Iran with much of its uranium enrichment technology.

While ElBaradei is politically prevented from drawing conclusions from the data the agency gathers, agency member states are not.

As for uranium shaping, “such a process has no application other than the production of nuclear warheads,” said British Ambassador Jenkins on behalf on the European Union.

He criticized Iran for revealing the documents only this year, long after Tehran pledged full cooperation with the agency.

“It is disturbing that a state which practiced a policy of concealment for 18 years should be so reluctant to demonstrate that it no longer has anything to hide. This reluctance makes Iran’s claim that its nuclear program is exclusively peaceful in nature ring hollow,” Jenkins said.

Iran sought to soften the disclosure’s blow by arguing that it had never requested the documents and that Khan had simply included them in a package of other material.

Furthermore, “the information contained in one-and-a-half pages is simple and nonsophisticated information which could be found in open literature and [the] Internet,” said Iranian Ambassador Mohammad Akhondzadeh in his statement to the board Thursday.

He complained also that “it has become the usual practice by the U.S. and terrorist groups supported by this state to fabricate false allegations against Iran.”

U.S. Ambassador Schulte disagreed with Akhondzadeh’s assessment of the documents.

“This is not information that Iran downloaded from the Internet. This is information that they obtained, according to the IAEA, from a nuclear-trafficking network that has provided a nuclear-weapon design to at least one other country,” he told reporters, referring to Khan’s supply of design information to Libya.

Agency officials also privately expressed concern about the documents to GSN, saying they had no purpose but to manufacture nuclear weapons.

British Ambassador Jenkins initiated a minor disturbance on the board when he asked ElBaradei to deliver copies of the documents to the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council for examination.

“It would be helpful if the director general could arrange for the document to be seen by experts from the five nuclear-weapon states,” he said in the British statement to the board on Thursday.

A number of non-nuclear nations quickly objected, however, complaining that providing access to only a portion of the board would be discriminatory. Led by South Africa, the non-nuclear states also argued that such a move “would undermine the director general’s independence and authority,” said one diplomat in the boardroom.

Eventually, Jenkins stepped back and said the United Kingdom was simply offering its services to the agency.

At its meeting in September, the board found Iran to be in noncompliance with its nuclear safeguards obligations, a finding that U.S. officials have argued must lead eventually to the board reporting Iran to the U.N. Security Council. By giving the EU-Iran talks more time, Washington and the EU agreed not to push for such a report at last week’s meeting.

The report was still inevitable, said Schulte.

“The report to the Security Council will come, and it will come at a time of our choosing,” he said. “And that time will be soon if Iran continues to defy the board’s calls to cooperate fully with the IAEA.”

In other business, the board agreed to spend the agency’s share of this year’s Nobel Peace Prize on a fund to train cancer treatment professionals in developing nations. ElBaradei and the agency were awarded 5 million Swedish kronor each last month in recognition of their work toward world peace.

ElBaradei’s portion would go toward funding orphanages in Egypt, according to an agency spokeswoman.

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