Iran Digs in Nuclear Heels, But Vows Transparency; NPT Conference Unfolds

By Greg Webb and Jim Wurst
Global Security Newswire

UNITED NATIONS — Iran would allow international inspectors to monitor its nuclear facilities in person on a daily basis, but it would never agree to permanently end its planned uranium enrichment activities, a top Iranian nuclear negotiator said yesterday (GSN, May 3).

In an interview with Global Security Newswire, Iran’s senior nuclear negotiator Hossein Mousavian railed against U.S. and European calls for Tehran to abandon its nuclear fuel-cycle plans. To offer reassurance that it was not building nuclear weapons, however, he repeatedly offered to cooperate with virtually any International Atomic Energy Agency oversight measures.

“We are completely open. We have no limitation to any kind of control, supervision, whatever it is, they can have carte blanche because we are not after [the] atomic bomb,” he said. “We are ready to negotiate and to agree [to] more measures for confidence building as objective guarantees, like permanent presence of IAEA inspectors in the sites.” 

Mousavian spoke outside the U.N. General Assembly, where several dozen nations have gathered to review the status of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty.

He left no doubt that Iran would not offer to make permanent its current suspension of activities to develop a uranium enrichment capability. Iran agreed only to a temporary suspension in a November 2004 deal reached with three European nations in Paris, Mousavian said.

“In the Paris Agreement, it was reiterated that the issue between Iran and [the] EU is suspension, not cessation,” he said. “We agreed together on suspension with four conditions: [the suspension would be] 1. Voluntary, 2. Not a legal obligation, 3. just for confidence building, and 4. just for the period of negotiation. It meant the period of suspension would not be indefinite.”

In follow-up talks to the Paris Agreement, Mousavian said, EU negotiators have failed to offer Iran significant incentives in the areas Tehran sought: political, security, technological, economic and nuclear cooperation. The most recent meetings were held last week in London.

“Deadlock was clear,” he said. “There was no progress, therefore suspension cannot be kept.”

In Tehran yesterday, Foreign Ministry spokesman Hamid Reza Asefi was more explicit.

“We will definitely restart some activities,” he told reporters, according to several media accounts. He did not define what steps Iran would take, but said uranium enrichment “will remain the last option.” Reports last week indicated that Iran would probably first resume its uranium conversion efforts, a process to create uranium gas that can be enriched in centrifuges.

Mousavian’s comments strengthened official statements made earlier yesterday about Iran’s overall intentions.

“Iran, for its part, is determined to pursue all legal areas of nuclear technology, including enrichment, exclusively for peaceful purposes,” said Foreign Minister Kamal Kharazi in his address to the NPT conference.

With Iran’s determination well-stated, the only question is to agree on measures to assure other nations that any uranium enriched in Iran was used for its budding nuclear power program, Mousavian said. He asserted that IAEA investigations had ended all questions of whether Iran’s nuclear program had conducted any nonpeaceful work.

“The questions, suspicions and ambiguities about 25 years activities of Iran now [are] removed. … They know that there is no atomic bomb, there was no diversion,” he said.

“This is now the matter of future,” he added.

That position directly contradicts the U.S. position as presented Monday to the conference, where Assistant Secretary of State Stephen Rademaker accused Iran of continuing a “clandestine nuclear weapons program.”

The only solution would be a “permanent cessation of Iran’s enrichment and reprocessing efforts, as well as dismantlement of equipment and facilities related to such activity,” he said.

Suggesting a good-cop, bad-cop strategy, Mousavian cautioned that domestic support in Iran for nuclear negotiations with the West was tenuous.

Iran’s “negotiating groups in the last 18 months have been [under] extreme internal pressure,” he said. “You have a lot of groups which are really suspicious, pessimistic of the process. They have been from the beginning.”

“It would be really unfortunate if after two years of such a comprehensive cooperation and negotiations we reach a situation that they have been right,” he added.

Two other nuclear-weapon states — China and Russia — addressed the assembly yesterday. Like the United States, both said they were fulfilling their nuclear disarmament obligations and neither referred to the 13 practical steps on nuclear disarmament agreed to at the 2000 NPT review conference.

Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Kislyak said Moscow “is committed to its obligations under the treaty, including to the nuclear disarmament measures.” 

He cited the agreements with the United States on reducing both countries’ strategic warhead arsenals, unilateral reductions in nonstrategic arms, reprocessing nuclear materials from warheads into fuel and ratification of the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty. 

“The NPT laid down conditions for consistent and irreversible progress towards nuclear disarmament. The treaty helps to fulfill the task of minimizing the risks of nuclear conflict,” Kislyak said.

The standard Chinese position on disarmament is that the primary responsibility lies with the two largest nuclear powers.

“The two countries with the largest nuclear arsenals should earnestly implement the treaty they have concluded to reduce their nuclear weapons and further reduce their nuclear arsenals in a verifiable and irreversible manner, thus creating a favorable condition for ultimate, complete and thorough nuclear disarmament,” said Zhang Yan, director general for arms control of the Chinese Foreign Ministry.

In clear references to U.S. policies, Zhang criticized “negative developments,” including the abrogation of the Antiballistic Missile Treaty; “advocating pre-emptive strategy,” an apparent reference to the invasion of Iraq; “lowering the threshold of using nuclear weapons” by threatening to use nuclear weapons against non-nuclear states; and “researching and developing new types of nuclear weapons.” 

Zhang said states should deal with proliferation concerns “through political and diplomatic means within the current international legal framework. Unilateralism and double standard practices on nonproliferation issues should be discarded.” In addition, he said, efforts “should not undermine the legitimate rights of countries, while on the other hand diversion from peaceful use to non-peaceful purposes should be prevented.”

Neither official treated the Iranian issue as a crisis (see related GSN story, today). 

“We call for current negotiations and consultations to provide such decisions with regards to Iran’s nuclear program that would meet the country’s legitimate energy needs on the one hand and dispel doubts as to the peaceful nature of its nuclear activities,” Kislyak said. 

“China favors resolving the Iranian nuclear issue within the framework of the IAEA and supports the efforts by Iran and the three EU countries to negotiate a long-term solution,” Zhang said.

On North Korea, Zhang called the six-party talks the appropriate forum for resolving the nuclear standoff. “We hope that parties concerned could refrain from provocative action and demonstrate more flexibility to create favorable conditions for the resumption of the talks,” he added.

South Korean Deputy Foreign Minister Chun Yung-woo called North Korea’s withdrawal from the nonproliferation pact “an irreparable blow” to the “integrity and credibility of the treaty,”

“While the NPT regime has enhanced security elsewhere in the world, the Korean Peninsula suffers from diminished security because of the miserable failure of the NPT to contain the nuclear specter,” Chun said in his speech yesterday before the conference assembly.

He said Seoul remains “committed” to the multilateral talks, but that “nothing short of Pyongyang’s strategic decision to abandon and dismantle once and for all its entire nuclear weapons programs will bring about a breakthrough in the six-party talks” (see related GSN story, today).

Chun said the treaty “must be supplemented and strengthened” by “enhanc[ing] the verification authority and capabilities of the IAEA through the universalization of the Additional Protocol.” The protocol “should be a condition of nuclear supply to non-nuclear weapon states,” he added. South Korea also “attaches great importance to export control over technologies and items of proliferation potential as a practical means of closing the existing loopholes in the NPT,” Chun said.  

Echoing a proposal from the U.N. nuclear watchdog, Chun said, “We believe that ironclad guarantees for the security of fuel supply at a reasonable price should be provided to those countries that voluntarily forgo the possession of sensitive fuel cycle facilities. We see no inconsistency between tightened export controls on the sensitive fuel cycle and the inalienable right to peaceful uses of nuclear energy.”

Several of the addresses made it clear that coming to a consensus on restricting nuclear technology will be difficult. Some delegates worried that restrictions would impede all civilian nuclear development and that new restrictions on non-nuclear states without complementary disarmament steps by the nuclear powers would increase the discriminatory character of the treaty.

“At the review conference, we should guard against the adoption of new measures that would restrict the inalienable right of states parties to verifiably utilize nuclear energy for peaceful purposes,” said Abdul Minty, South Africa’s deputy director general for disarmament. “There is a growing concern that while demands are being made for non-nuclear weapon states to agree to new measures in the name of nonproliferation, concrete actions towards nuclear disarmament are neglected.”

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