Mark Hibbs Thinks Developing Countries Can’t be Trusted with Nuclear Power (Apparently)

Am I the only one who thinks that this article by Mark Hibbs comes across quite condescending and paternalistic? 

“Look at ’em – they can’t even control a fire! How can we trust them with nuclear power plants!?”

I think the lessons of Fukushima can be understood quite diferently to how Mark sees them. Along with the Fukushima accident in Japan, where have the other major nuclear accidents occured? That would be Three Mile Island in the U.S., and Chernobyl in the Soviet Union.  All three powerful, advanced technological countries, with strong governments.  And in each case, the responsible government has been criticized for the way in which it handled the aftermath of the accidents – the worst case of course being Chernobyl, followed by Fukushima. So it seems to me that the technologically advanced countries that have had nuclear power plants for years, have to be a bit careful in quite how high they sit on their proverbial high horses, looking down in disdain upon developing countries, and explaining to them how they’re just not ready to be trusted with nuclear technologies.

This is not to mention how very non – “Atoms for Peace” this view is, and how disharmonious it is with Article IV(2) of the NPT, which obligates supplier states to:

co-operate in contributing alone or together with other States or international organizations to the further development of the applications of nuclear energy for peaceful purposes, especially in the territories of non-nuclear-weapon States Party to the Treaty, with due consideration for the needs of the developing areas of the world.

While I’m writing, I might as well also quickly address Mark’s other recent piece over at Arms Control Wonk. This one is entitled Closing the Iran File, and contains Mark’s prescription for how Iran can normalize its relationship with the IAEA. I honestly don’t see much that is novel in this piece. It seems to just be saying that Iran should do everything the IAEA and UNSC says it should do, and that if they do, in time the IAEA may back off on its scrutiny of Iran’s nuclear program and normalize its safeguards relationship with Iran. The piece doesn’t seriously engage with any of Iran’s objections to the substance or process of IAEA/UNSC actions regarding it, or with Iran’s proposals for normalizing relations with the IAEA. It appears to offer no new insights into how the dispute between Iran and the West can practically be resolved.

It is of course all wrong in its fundamental assumption, upon which the entire piece is based, that the IAEA should be investigating “potential military dimensions” in Iran, or anywhere else for that matter. But I’ve made this point so many times before that I didn’t really see it as worth the time or effort to do so again in comments to this new piece.

Report from FACO Conference on Embargoes and International Sanctions

FACO Conference Report Embargoes Sanctions

This (click on the link above) is the report of a conference I participated in back in February in Paris. It was organized by the Faculté Libre de Droit, d’Economie et de Gestion de Paris, which is one of the relatively few private universities in France. I thought the conference was excellent. It considered the issue of sanctions from both legal and political perspectives, and included some really top notch speakers. It was also very well attended by FACO students, which is a high mark of quality for the university.

Speakers included H.E. Boutros Boutros-Ghali, H.E. Roland Dumas, Pierre-Emmanuel Dupont, Elie Hatem, Antonios Tzanakopoulos, Matthew Happold, Alexander Oakelashvili, Rouzbeh Parsi, and myself among others.

The report is useful in giving summaries of each of the presentations. I recommend taking a look at it.

“Diamonds for Peanuts” and the Double Standard

This is a great piece by Marsha Cohen over on LobeLog. I highly recommend it. It’s very direct about a subject – Israel’s nuclear weapons stockpile – that far too few people in the nonproliferation community, especially in the US, are willing to write about directly.  But its so clearly an important set of observations, and so clearly analytically relevant to considerations of the Iran issue, for such obvious reasons. And yet the US nonproliferation community tends to bury its collective head in the sand about Israel’s nuclear weapons stockpile, for fear of upsetting the USG and their funders (when those are different things). I’ll paste the text here:

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“Diamonds for Peanuts” and the Double Standard

By Marsha B. Cohen

The New York Times’ op-ed page headlined “Hopes for Iran”, which offers half a dozen cautious-to-negative views on Iran’s president-elect Hassan Rouhani, unexpectedly links to a “Related Story” published last year: Should Israel Accept a Nuclear Ban? Linking the online discussion — intentionally or not — to a debate over Israel’s own nuclear program and policies may be more remarkable than any of the op-ed’s arguments.

One of the most overlooked and under-discussed aspects of the Iranian nuclear program, at least from an Iranian point of view, is the double standard that’s applied to it: while Israel has an estimated 100-200 nuclear weapons that it has concealed for decades, Iran is treated like the nuclear threat — and Iran doesn’t possess a single nuclear weapon. Adding insult to injury, Israel is usually the first, loudest and shrillest voice condemning Iran and demanding “crippling sanctions” while deflecting attention away from its own record.

“Iran has consistently used the West’s willingness to engage as a delaying tactic, a smoke screen behind which Iran’s nuclear program has continued undeterred and, in many cases, undetected,” complained former Israeli Ambassador to the UN, Dore Gold (also president of the hawkish Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs) in a 2009 LA Times op-ed entitled “Iran’s Nuclear Aspirations Threaten the World“:

Back in 2005, Hassan Rowhani, the former chief nuclear negotiator of Iran during the reformist presidency of Mohammad Khatami, made a stunning confession in an internal briefing in Tehran, just as he was leaving his post. He explained that in the period during which he sat across from European negotiators discussing Iran’s uranium enrichment ambitions, Tehran quietly managed to complete the critical second stage of uranium fuel production: its uranium conversion plant in Isfahan. He boasted that the day Iran started its negotiations in 2003 “there was no such thing as the Isfahan project.” Now, he said, it was complete.

Yet half a century ago, Israel’s Deputy Minister of Defense, Shimon Peres — the political architect of Israel’s nuclear weapons program — looked President John F. Kennedy in the eye and solemnly intoned what would become Israel’s “catechism”, according to Avner Cohen: “I can tell you most clearly that we will not introduce nuclear weapons to the region, and certainly we will not be the first.” Fifty years and at least 100 nuclear weapons later, Peres is awarded the U.S. Medal of Freedom, with no mention of his misrepresentation of Israel’s nuclear progress.

According to declassified documents, Yitzhak Rabin, another future Israeli prime minister (who would be awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace in 1994) also invoked the nuclear catechism to nuclear negotiator Paul Warnke in 1968, arguing that no product could be considered a deployable nuclear weapons-system unless it had been tested (Israel, of course, had not tested a nuclear weapon). Warnke was unswayed by Rabin’s talmudic logic but came away convinced that pressuring Israel would be futile since it was already a nuclear weapons state.

In a BBC Radio June 14 debate between Gold and former British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw about the prospects for improving relations with Iran after Rouhani’s election, Straw pointed out that Israel has a “very extensive nuclear weapons program, and along with India and Pakistan are the three countries in the world, plus North Korea more recently, which have refused any kind of international supervision…”:

JOHN HUMPHRYS (Host): Well let me put that to Dr Gold; you can’t argue with that, Dr Gold?

DORE GOLD: Well, we can have a whole debate on Israel in a separate program.

JOHN HUMPHRYS: Well, it’s entirely relevant isn’t it? The fact is you’re saying they want nuclear weapons; the fact is you have nuclear weapons.

DORE GOLD: Look, Israel has made statements in the past. Israeli ambassadors to the UN like myself have said that Israel won’t be the first country to introduce nuclear weapons into the Middle East.

JACK STRAW: You’ve got nuclear weapons.

JOHN HUMPHRYS: You’ve got them.

JACK STRAW: You’ve got them. Everyone knows that.

DORE GOLD: We have a very clear stand, but we’re not the issue.

JACK STRAW: No, no, come on, you have nuclear weapons, let’s be clear about this.

National security expert Bruce Riedel is among those who have observed Washington’s “double standard when it comes to Israel’s bomb: the NPT applies to all but Israel. Indeed, every Israeli prime minister since David Ben-Gurion has deliberately taken an evasive posture on the issue because they do not want to admit what everyone knows.” Three years ago, Riedel suggested that the era of Israeli ambiguity about its nuclear program “may be coming to an end, raising fundamental questions about Israel’s strategic situation in the region.” Thus far that hasn’t happened. Instead, Israeli leaders and the pro-Israel lobby use every opportunity (including Peres’ Medal of Freedom acceptance speech) to deflect attention from Israel’s defiant prevarication about its own nuclear status and directing it toward Iran.

This past April, Anthony Cordesman authored a paper for the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) arguing that Israel posed more of an existential threat to Iran than the other way around. “It seems likely that Israel can already deliver an ‘existential’ nuclear strike on Iran, and will have far more capability to damage Iran than Iran is likely to have against Israel for the next decade,” Cordesman wrote. (The paper has since been removed from the CSIS website, but references to it persist in numerous articles.)

This double standard, and refusal to recognize Iranian security concerns, is not news to Iranians. Ali Larijani, Speaker of the Iranian Majlis (Parliament), assured the Financial Times last September that talks between the U.S. and Iran “can be successful and help create more security in the region. But if they try to dissuade Iran from its rights to have peaceful nuclear technology, then they will not go anywhere — before or after the US elections.” Larijani, who was Iran’s nuclear negotiator between 2005-2007, proposed that declarations by U.S. political leaders that Iran has a right to “peaceful nuclear technology” be committed to in writing.

“Many times the US president or secretary of state have said they recognise Iran’s right to nuclear energy,” Larjani said. “So, if [they] accept this, write it down and then we use it as a basis to push forward the talks…What they say during the talks is different from what they say outside the talks. This is a problem.” Larijani also denied that Iranian leaders were discussing withdrawal from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) even though the benefits of Iran remaining a signatory — in the face of mounting international pressure campaigned for by Israel while Israel itself faced little to no criticism — seemed unclear. “The Israelis did not join the NPT and they do not recognize the IAEA,” he said. “They are doing what they want — producing nuclear bombs, and no one questions it.”

This past weekend, CNN’s Christiane Amanpour bluntly suggested that up until now, the U.S. has offered Iran few incentives to comply with the international community’s demands regarding Iran’s nuclear program: “Let’s just call a spade a spade. I’ve spoken to Iranian officials, former negotiators, actually people who worked for Dr. Rouhani earlier, and they said that so far the American incentives to Iran in these nuclear negotiations amounts to demanding diamonds for peanuts.”

Ben Caspit, writing in al-Monitor last week week, notes that as soon as the Russians hinted Iran would be willing to suspend uranium enrichment and keep it at the 20% level, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu blew off the suggestion as merely cosmetic. The Israeli demand will continue to be  uncompromising, Caspit says, insistent that “…nothing short of complete cessation of uranium enrichment, removal of all enriched uranium out of Iran; termination of nuclear facility activities and welcoming the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) would provide sufficient guarantee of Iran’s willingness to abandon the nuclear program. Needless to say this will never happen.”

As Jim Lobe pointed out the other day, Rouhani outlined an 8-point blueprint for resolving the nuclear standoff between the U.S. and Iran in a letter to TIME in 2006. Rouhani stated:

In my personal judgment, a negotiated solution can be found in the context of the following steps, if and when creatively intertwined and negotiated in good faith by concerned officials…Iran is prepared to work with the IAEA and all states concerned about promoting confidence in its fuel cycle program. But Iran cannot be expected to give in to United States’ bullying and non-proliferation double standards.

New Article on Nuclear Power Plant Financing and International Investment Law

I’ve recently had accepted for publication a new paper in the Journal of World Energy Law & Business, which is a peer-reviewed journal published by Oxford University Press. The article is entitled Nuclear Power Plant Financing Post-Fukushima, and International Investment Law. The complete paper can be downloaded from SSRN here.

This paper project took me about a year to complete, and represented a significant new direction in my research, that required a steep learning curve in order to get up to speed.

The paper grew out of my experience in consulting and advising states and private companies on international investment law in the context of nuclear power plant finance. It struck me along the way that there were some current trends in financing of nuclear power plants that were likely to make the triggering of host-state obligations under international investment law sources more likely in the future. And that this was a phenomenon that both host states and foreign investors should be aware of, as it could be quite significant in a number of calculi (risk, liability, pricing, etc.) concerning a potential nuclear power plant investment project.

Here’s the abstract. I would appreciate forwarding of the link to any listserves readers think appropriate.

The essential thesis of this article is that, as corporate and project finance trends continue in nuclear power plant financing, resulting in diversified and much broader and more complex structures of foreign investment, international investment law will become increasingly relevant to and influential upon these transactions. This in turn will spawn a new wave of disputes based in international investment law claims, before international arbitral tribunals including the ICSID. After discussing the 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster, and the first international investment law case directly related to an investment in a nuclear power plant, the article begins in Part I by describing recent trends in the financing of nuclear power plants. These trends include a shift from almost exclusively sovereign-assumed financing cost and risk, to other financing models which increasingly access global capital markets, and spread risk among a larger and more diverse set of investors. It then proceeds in Part II to review and consider the international legal sources addressing nuclear energy development and related international trade and investment transactions, focusing on the sources of international investment law. It considers both the primary ways in which the current trends in nuclear power plant financing are making international investment law increasingly relevant to nuclear power plant related investments, as well as the secondary effect this increasing relevance will likely have upon future structuring of financing arrangements for new nuclear power plants. In Part III it provides detailed consideration of the application of international investment law to foreign investments in nuclear power plants, including areas in which host states of such investments are most likely to experience increased exposure to liability due to current financing trends. It concludes with a further consideration of the secondary effects caused by this increased host state exposure to liability, including effects on future structuring of financing arrangements for new nuclear power plants, and effects on (re)negotiations of international investment law instruments between actual or potential host states, and states that are actual or potential home states of nuclear vendors and investors.

Former Israeli Ambassador Calls for NK to be “Wiped Off the Map”

I think this goes under the “you could cut the irony with a knife” category. Did he really not see it? Wow.

Rouhani’s Nuclear Thoughts in 2006

Now that Rouhani is the President of Iran, we’re all trying to figure out exactly who he is and what his views are on the nuclear issue, and that makes his prior writing and speeches on the subject quite important. Here is a very insightful piece he wrote for Time magazine in 2006. I really encourage you to read the whole thing. I find it very thoughtful and well expressed. I think you can see his legal training coming through in his thought process – which of course I like. Here’s an excerpt:

Iran is not accused of having the bomb. There are no indications that Iran has a nuclear weapon program. If Iran were to have a weapons program, the alarmists in the U.S. and Israel have reportedly said that it would take at least another seven to ten years for Iran to make the bomb. What is often cited by American officials as 20 years of Iranian secret nuclear military program turned out to be, as declared by the IAEA, nothing more than the failure to declare, in a timely manner, some experiments and receiving some material and equipment. Such failures to declare are not uncommon among the NPT members. Remedial steps are envisioned in the Safeguards Agreement to address them, and Iran has done so. Moreover, it was no secret that we were in the European, Russian and Asian markets to purchase enrichment technology in the late ’80s and ’90s. Therefore, an Iranian secret weapon program is only hype, and the sense of urgency about Iran’s nuclear program is rather tendentious. The world should not allow itself to be dragged into another conflict on false pretenses in this region again.

Iran is intent on producing nuclear fuel domestically for reasons both historic and long-term economic. The U.S. and some Europeans argue that they cannot trust Iran’s intentions. They argue that they cannot accept Iran’s promise to remain committed to its treaty obligation once it gains the capability to enrich uranium for fuel production. They ask Iran to give up its right under the NPT, and instead accept their promise to supply it with nuclear fuel. This is illogical and crudely self-serving: I do not trust you, even though what you are doing is legal and can be verified to remain legal, but you must trust me when I promise to do that which I have no obligation to do and cannot be enforced. It is this simple and this unfair. There must be a better way out of this than to top this travesty with threatening Iran in the Security Council with possible sanctions and perhaps even use of force. This path can potentially cause harm and suffering at differing degrees to all parties to the conflict.

Rouhani Discusses Potential Nuclear Deal with the West

In his first press conference to address the nuclear issue, newly elected Iranian President Hassan Rouhani made some important statements about how he intends to approach nuclear diplomacy with the West, and he intriguingly mentioned the specifics of a deal he says he worked out with French President Chirac in 2005 when Rouhani was Iran’s chief nuclear negotiator:

Rouhani proposed that a deal he discussed in 2005 with then French President Jacques Chirac, which he said was rejected by the UK and the US, could be the model going forward.

Hossein Mousavian, who served as a member of the Rouhani negotiating team, said the Chirac idea that Rouhani referenced involved the highest level of transparency of Iran’s nuclear program in exchange for Iran having its rights under the nuclear Non Proliferation Treaty (NPT) recognized.

We agreed with Chirac that: first, the EU-3 would respect the legitimate rights of Iran for peaceful nuclear technology under the NPT, including enrichment,” Mousavian told Al-Monitor Monday. “Second, Iran would accept the [International Atomic Energy Agency] IAEA’s definition for objective guarantees that the Iranian nuclear program would remain peaceful and would not divert toward weaponization in the future.

It means that Iran would respect the maximum level of transparency that internationally exists,” Mousavian, a contributing writer to Al-Monitor, further explained. “In return, the P5+1 would not discriminate against Iran as a member of the NPT. It would respect Iran’s rights under the NPT like other members.

I think that the basic contours of this deal as he describes it, are what everyone is basically coming around to accepting as the inevitable essentials of a potential diplomatic accord between the West and Iran. Its alot like the Israeli-Palestinian dispute in that sense – i.e. everyone basically knows what has to happen here for both sides to agree and for the issue to finally be settled. Now its just down to having leaders on both sides who are willing to do what has to be done to solve the dipute peacefully. Rouhani seems to be going out of his way to try and tell the world that he wants to be that leader on the Iranian side. Now if he can only find a good faith partner in President Obama.

ATT Commentary

I ran across this today. It appears to be a thorough commentary on the ATT published by the Geneva Academy of International Humanitarian Law and Human Rights. I just thought I’d pass it along for reference.

Mark Fitzpatrick on the Influence of Western Sanctions on the Iranian Election

As the news of the Iranian election’s results came in on Saturday, Mark Fitzpatrick of IISS sent out a Tweet saying:

My conclusion: Iranians are fed up with Sanctions and with the leaders who couldn’t stop them.

This was my first exposure to an argument that has since been making the rounds on the web, championed by nonproliferation types with close ties to Washington DC, like Fitzpatrick. The basic idea of this argument is that the election of Hassan Rouhani, a relative moderate, in Iran is confirmation of the effectiveness of Western economic sanctions in influencing Iran’s nuclear policy.

I find this argument particularly analytically odious for several reasons. First, it attempts to simplify what I think is a very complex and nuanced dynamic between the Western sanctions and both the Iranian public and Iranian officials’ reactions to them.  Second, I think at an essential level it is incorrect.  I would cite as evidence for this conclusion a Gallup poll that was conducted only four months ago in Iran.  This poll found that, while the Western-imposed sanctions have indeed had a very serious effect upon the living conditions and overall financial well being of ordinary Iranians, they overwhelmingly blame the U.S., and not their own leaders, for the sanctions.  Furthermore, according to the poll, the Iranian public still overall supports their country’s nuclear program and aspirations.  Here’s an excerpt from the summary of results:

Despite Effects of Sanctions, Many Iranians Support Nuclear Program

The majority of Iranians are so far seemingly willing to pay the high price of sanctions. Sixty-three percent say that Iran should continue to develop its nuclear program, even given the scale of sanctions imposed on their country because of it. In December, one in two Iranians supported their country developing its own nuclear power capabilities for nonmilitary uses.

Iranians Hold U.S. Most Responsible for Sanctions

Iranians are most likely to hold the U.S. (47%) responsible for the sanctions against Iran. One in 10 Iranians says their own government is most to blame for sanctions.

Implications

Iranians report feeling the effect of sanctions, but still support their country’s efforts to increase its nuclear capabilities. This may indicate that sanctions alone are not having the intended effect of persuading Iranian residents and country leaders to change their stance on the level of international oversight of their nuclear program. Iran, as one of the most populous nations in a region undergoing monumental shifts, will remain a key country in the balance of power for the Middle East. Thus, the United States’, Russia’s, and Europe’s relationship with the Iranian people remains a matter of strategic interest. The effect of sanctions on Iranians’ livelihoods and the blame they place on the U.S. will continue to be a major challenge for the U.S. in Iran and in neighboring countries such as Iraq. Recent reports that Tehran and Washington might enter into direct talks were short-lived when Iran’s supreme leader made a statement strongly rejecting them. With Iran preparing for elections later this year, a turning point is needed to get leaders on both sides out of the current stalemate on the country’s nuclear program.

The results of this poll would seem to directly contradict Fitzpatrick’s conclusions regarding both the nature of the influence of Western sanctions on the Iranian election, and the locus of blame which ordinary Iranians perceive for their suffering under the sanctions.

I would instead recommend Seyed Hossain Mousavian’s analysis of the effect of Western sanctions on Iran and its nuclear policy here.

And with regard to the implications of the election, I would recommend Barbara Slavin’s analysis here, and Paul Pillar’s analysis and excellent policy recommendations here.

Putin on Iran’s Nuclear Program

One doesn’t always think of Russian President Vladimir Putin as being the epitome of good judgment, but I have to say I think he hits just about exactly the right chord in his comments here on Iran’s nuclear program and the surrounding law and diplomacy: