IAEA Report Finds Iran Has Missed Nuclear Deadline

As expected, the International Atomic Energy Agency formally reported today that Iran has not heeded a U.N. Security Council deadline for Tehran to suspend its sensitive nuclear activities (see GSN, Feb. 21).

The finding, circulated in a six-page report by agency chief Mohamed ElBaradei, clears the way for the council to consider imposing more rigorous sanctions than those it approved in December (see GSN, Jan. 3).

Those measures called on U.N. members to stop any trade of nuclear- or missile-related technologies to Iran and to freeze the assets of nearly two dozen Iranian institutions and individuals.

The council demanded that Iran halt any work on developing uranium enrichment or plutonium production technologies.  Its 60-day deadline lapsed yesterday.

Today’s report, however, is clear that Iran has not met the U.N. demands.

“Iran has not suspended its enrichment related activities,” it says.  Furthermore, construction has continued at Iran’s heavy-water production plant, a facility needed for a planned heavy-water reactor that would produce plutonium.

ElBaradei’s conclusions come as no surprise, as Iran has trumpeted recent advances, such as the installation of hundreds of uranium enrichment centrifuges at its Natanz facility (see GSN, Feb. 5).  Today’s report indicates that Iran has nearly completed the installation of two more 164-centrifuge cascades at Natanz, giving it four such cascades at the underground component of the site and two more in an above-ground building.  Iran has declared a goal of installing 3,000 centrifuges at the underground site by May.

The report repeats earlier agency complaints that Iran has not provided sufficient information for inspectors to conclude that Iran has revealed all of its nuclear activities or fully explained how some particles of highly enriched uranium have been found on equipment (Greg Webb, Global Security Newswire, Feb. 22).

“The Iranians have unfortunately not acceded to the international community’s demands and we will have to consult,” U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said today during a visit to Berlin.  “We will have to decide how to move forward” (Mark Heinrich, Reuters, Feb. 22).

U.S. diplomats would probably try to persuade the Security Council to expand its sanctions by targeting officials and companies affiliated with Iran’s Revolutionary Guards Corps, the Wall Street Journal reported today.  The guard is viewed as the power base behind Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who has seen growing dissent over his nuclear policies from opposition leaders in the country.

That strategy “buttresses domestic criticism of the regime’s cronyism, and it pulls at the purse strings of the specific element of the Iranian bureaucracy responsible for the region’s most egregious behavior,” said Matthew Levitt, until recently the U.S. Treasury Department’s assistant secretary for intelligence and analysis.

Still, council negotiations were unlikely to simply follow U.S. wishes, and Russia and China were likely to resist U.S. goals, according to the Journal.

“Russia will control the pace of things going forward,” said one U.S. official (King/Solomon, Wall Street Journal, Feb. 22).

Meanwhile, Iran has said that a payment dispute over a power reactor Russia is building for Iran at Bushehr can be easily resolved (see GSN, Feb. 20).

Russian officials recently threatened to slow the completion of the reactor and to delay delivery of the first batch of fuel because Iran has missed at least one scheduled payment.

The debt is “less than $100 million dollars, and this issue can be settled quickly,” an Iranian diplomatic source told ITAR-Tass.

“This is purely a technical issue caused by the recent refusal of Iranian financial institutions from using the U.S. dollar and the transfer to transactions in euro from the beginning of this year,” the source said.  “In this connection, Iran offered Russian partners to accept payments in euro.”

“Tehran believes settlements in ‘a strong euro’ more suitable and profitable for both sides, and it is unclear why Moscow refused to accept debt payments in euro,” the source added (ITAR-Tass, Feb. 21).

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