Global Security Newswire

The International Atomic Energy Agency should demand a rarely invoked "special inspection" of Syria to investigate allegations that the nation sought to build a secret nuclear reactor, a former head of the agency's safeguards division said yesterday (see GSN, Feb. 26).

The issue promises to be a major discussion point at next week's meeting of the agency's Board of Governors in Vienna. Syria has denied building such a nuclear facility, but U.S. intelligence officials offered significant evidence to the contrary last year, including photographs purported to be taken from inside the site. The structure was destroyed by an Israeli air strike in 2007; Syria quickly razed the remains and replaced them with a new structure, possibly a missile pad.

Agency inspectors were granted a single inspection last June that turned up traces of uranium and graphite, perhaps bolstering the U.S. charge, but Damascus has refused agency requests to revisit the site and to inspect three additional locations that might be related.

"It is time for the atomic energy agency to invoke its most powerful inspection provision, the 'special inspection,' to make its requests for access legally binding," wrote Pierre Goldschmidt, former IAEA inspections chief, in a commentary in yesterday's International Herald Tribune. The commentary was co-authored by James Acton of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and Mark Fitzpatrick of the International Institute for Strategic Studies.

The special inspection, a power granted to the agency through its safeguards agreements with individual nations, gives officials the right to demand to visit undeclared sites. The tool has been rarely used, but many nations urged the agency to use it more frequently after the 1991 Gulf War revealed that Iraq had successfully hidden a massive nuclear enterprise.

The agency did request a special inspection of North Korea in 1993, a demand that contributed to pressure that ultimately led to the 1994 Agreed Framework under which Pyongyang pledged to freeze its nuclear activities.

Goldschmidt said he hoped that a similar request for Syria could also build international consensus in this case.

"If the IAEA asks for a special inspection, Syria may refuse access. In this case, the Board of Governors would have sufficient grounds to find Syria in noncompliance with its safeguards agreement," he wrote. Such a finding could lead to political and economic pressure from the U.N. Security Council.

Invoking a special inspection would also make it easier to use the measure again in the future and would strengthen the agency's influence, Goldschmidt wrote.

"It would help the IAEA to reassert its right to conduct all necessary inspections and to stop the gradual erosion of its legal and political authority," he said (Greg Webb, Global Security Newswire, Feb. 27).