Iranian Nuclear Activities Are Safe From U.N. Security Council Review, Diplomat Says

By Joe Fiorill
Global Security Newswire

WASHINGTON — The United States now considers that its bid to refer Iran’s recently acknowledged illicit nuclear programs to the U.N. Security Council is “probably … dead,” a Western diplomat in Vienna said yesterday.

The acknowledgement reflects Washington’s lack of success, including during two recent meetings of the International Atomic Energy Agency’s 35-member Board of Governors, to convince other Western countries that Iran’s nuclear activity merited a referral to the council. It follows reported improvements in Iranian cooperation with the IAEA, which along with other factors led U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell last week to say Washington “should keep open the possibility of dialogue” with diplomatically estranged Iran “at an appropriate point in the future.”

In a Nov. 10 report, IAEA Director General Mohamed ElBaradei told the board that Iran had for 18 years systematically concealed activities including the production of small amounts of plutonium and low-enriched uranium (see GSN, Nov. 11, 2003). The board responded two weeks later by adopting a British-French-German resolution that turned back the U.S. drive for a Security Council referral but indicated the board would “meet immediately” if any new “serious Iranian failures [came] to light” and would “consider … all options at its disposal” (see GSN, Nov. 26, 2003).

U.S. envoy in Vienna Kenneth Brill said at the time that the board’s action showed that “Iran should make no mistake about our resolve that under such circumstances, an immediate report to the UNSC [U.N. Security Council] would be necessary.” According to the diplomat in Vienna, however, Washington now believes that only a spectacular revelation could revive efforts to send the Iran case to the Security Council.

“Probably, the issue of the Security Council is dead,” said the diplomat.

“The trigger is left purposefully vague” in the board’s Nov. 26 resolution, the diplomat said, “but I would definitely say something like a new site … something super big like a new site or some obvious nondeclared site” would be needed to send the case to New York.

Nuclear Control Institute founder Paul Leventhal, who favors the creation of a Security Council-associated agency to take over safeguards activities from the IAEA, said the Board of Governors has become an inadequate forum for dealing with the Iranian case but that a referral to the council is “not going to happen.”

“When a nation cheats for 18 years and fails to declare enrichment facilities to the agency, this is not a matter any more for the Board of Governors,” said Leventhal.

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