PMD Thoughts

With the latest round of talks between the P5+1 and Iran in Vienna, there has been another resurgence of writing on the PMD issue. Some good. Most uninformed and/or agenda-driven.

One theme that I’ve noticed running throughout a lot of the commentary on the PMD issue is speculation about the intentions behind whatever nuclear weapons related R&D work went on in Iran up until 2003. And this speculation is often presented more as a statement of fact than as speculation.

For example, Jeffrey Lewis in a piece in Foreign Policy a while ago said:

Left to its own devices, the 2007 NIE suggests, Iran would likely have acquired a nuclear weapon.

Similarly, in his piece just posted yesterday over at Arms Control Wonk, Aaron Stein said:

According to my research, Iran made the decision to proliferate sometime after March 1984, but before the end of 1985.

Here and elsewhere, observers are speculating about Iran’s intention in doing whatever weapons related R&D they were doing. They’re speculating that Iran’s intention was linear – i.e. to progress linearly from R&D straight onward to building and fielding a nuclear weapon.

I think it’s fallacious, and possibly specious to assume that this was or is Iran’s intention. And more to the point, it is pure, unevidenced speculation.

Don’t the facts of Iran’s R&D work with nuclear weapons – even accepting as facts those allegations that are controversial and that Iran has denied – equally or more persuasively support the hypothesis that Iran’s intent or purpose in carrying out that R&D work was to reach a level of technical and industrial capacity and knowledge at which Iran would be capable of producing a nuclear weapon, without necessarily taking the decision to build a nuclear weapon?

This is the concept of “nuclear hedging,” as introduced by Ariel Levite in his groundbreaking article in International Security in 2002. As Levite explained:

Nuclear hedging refers to a national strategy of maintaining, or at least appearing to maintain, a viable option for the relatively rapid acquisition of nuclear weapons, based on an indigenous technical capacity to produce them within a relatively short time frame ranging from several weeks to a few years.

In its most advanced form, nuclear hedging involves nuclear fuel–cycle facilities capable of producing fissionable materials (by way of uranium enrichment and/or plutonium separation), as well as the scientific and engineering expertise both to support them and to package their final product into a nuclear explosive charge.

Nuclear hedging is a strategy that may be adopted either during the process of developing a bomb or as part of the rollback process, as a way of retaining the option of restarting a weapons program that has been halted or reversed.

So again, don’t the facts of Iran’s R&D work on nuclear weapons pre-2003 better fit a nuclear hedging policy, than a policy of a linear march to a bomb? I mean it’s fairly clear that Iran’s impetus for doing the nuclear weapons R&D that it did during this period was its traumatic war with Iraq, which had included the use of chemical weapons against Iran, and the continued threat that Saddam Hussein posed to Iran. Doesn’t it make sense that, faced with this very real threat and history, Iran would want to develop the capacity to produce nuclear weapons to defend itself in the case of another war with Iraq? But again, just because it makes sense that they might want the capability to do this, does not mean that they would have ever exercised the option to build a nuclear weapon.

It’s also fairly clear that Iran stopped its nuclear weapons R&D work around 2003, due to the invasion of Iraq by the West – effectively removing the Iraqi threat – and to concerns that if its own weaponization R&D work were discovered, it might be next on the US hit list. To me, this is a persuasive narrative with bookends, and again fits perfectly with the idea that Iran achieved capability in some aspects of weaponization, and overall is keeping its options open with regard to the future, but has not made a decision to build a nuclear weapon. In short, that Iran’s case is perfectly described by the concept of nuclear hedging.

It is well known that there are a number of states in the world today who are nuclear weapons threshold states – who have all the necessary knowledge and the technical and industrial capabilities to build a nuclear weapon in short order. And the fact that they have not yet exercised that option, is proof of the prudence that a number of states see in achieving and maintain the capability to build a nuclear weapon, but choosing not to exercise that option.

So again, whatever nuclear weapons R&D work Iran did in the past, we do not know and should not speculate about their intent in doing that work and obtaining that knowledge and capability. Nor should we speculate, as so many do, what Iran’s intent is regarding the future. There is absolutely no evidence, and this conclusion is borne out by the conclusions of the US intelligence community, that Iran is currently seeking to build a nuclear bomb, or that they will seek to do so in the future.

Another thing that you always hear when particularly US government officials, but also IAEA officials, talk about the PMD issue, is that it’s necessary to include the resolution of the PMD issue in the negotiations between Iran and the P5+1/IAEA, because only through Iran’s transparency about this work, and admission of its having been done, can the international community begin to build trust with Iran, and confidence that Iran is not currently engaged in nuclear weapons related work.

But have you ever stopped to really think about that rationale, and whether it makes sense?  How, in practical terms, will knowing the details about what Iran did in the past regarding weaponization R&D, give other states or the IAEA any meaningful confidence about what Iran is or is not doing now regarding weaponization R&D?

How will knowing the details of what Iran did in the past, and having Iran admit to them, actually increase other states’ ability to trust Iran now?

I confess I don’t see a real, practical connection between the propositions in either of these questions.

Don’t we already have the conclusions of the US intelligence community that, whatever weaponization R&D work was going on in Iran pre-2003, it has been halted since then, and that there is no evidence that Iran has made or will make a decision to re-start it or to build a nuclear weapon?

Isn’t that exactly what this rationale says we need to know about Iran’s current program?

So how does knowing more about the details of what happened 15-20 years ago increase our confidence about what is going on now, or our trust in Iran about the future? To me it doesn’t make sense logically.

To me it appears that IAEA/Western insistence on having the PMD issue as part of the P5+1/IAEA negotiations with Iran, is more persuasively explained as a witch hunt for past truth and a concession of embarrassment for Iran which, while perhaps cathartic and a moral victory for the West, really serves no practical purpose for the present or future. It strikes me as more of a truth and reconciliation mission, which I think Iran understandably has no interest in. As Mark Hibbs has explained:

On February 3, Iran’s Foreign Minister, Javad Zarif, visited the German Council of Foreign Relations in Berlin. Zarif explained to us that Iran has no aim or interest in having nuclear weapons. In fact, he said that the credibility of Iran’s regime was founded upon Iran not having such an ambition or interest. That’s the crux. If the credibility of Iran’s regime rests on its disavowal of nuclear arms, then any admission by Iran to the IAEA that the Islamic Republic of Iran has been engaged in nuclear weapons-related research or experiments–which prima facie would have to be reported to the Board of Governors– would severely damage the regime’s reputation. Shia theology might imply that nuclear weapons are sinful, but the IAEA’s dossier poses a potential major credibility problem. For Iran at any point to admit that it worked on nuclear weapons would be orders or magnitude more significant than Iran admitting, as it did in 2003, to having failed to declare to the IAEA a flurry of nuclear activities which could be justified by Iran’s peaceful nuclear program.

So there is zero likelihood that Iran will ever sign a confession detailing nuclear weapons related R&D that may have gone on pre-2003, and for the West and the IAEA to insist on such a confession is a sure way to guarantee the failure of the current diplomatic effort with Iran.

I was having a conversation earlier today with a colleague, and he raised an insightful question about the purpose of international law, and how it might shed some light on how this issue should be dealt with in the context of the current negotiations between Iran and the West.

Most of the corpus of international law, including the sources of nuclear nonproliferation law such as the NPT and IAEA safeguards agreements, is most analogous to domestic tort and contract law, which focus on identifying breaches of law as between parties, and ensuring that the party responsible for the breach makes the damaged party whole. As long as an extra-judicial settlement of the issue can be reached among the parties, in these areas the law is generally happy to approve of that settlement, and allow the parties to move forward on the basis of that settlement. If that settlement can be reached – and it is often necessary or at least useful in order for such a settlement to be reached – without dragging into public view all of the sins of the parties against each other, and requiring a confession of guilt by the party responsible for the breach, the law will recognize the settlement in the interest of moving forward.

The exception to this paradigm occurs in criminal law, which is purposed in a clear explication of the facts of the breach of law, in order to establish the guilt of the responsible party, and to mete out an appropriate punishment for that party. Revelation of the facts of the case is also considered necessary both for the sake of the victim, as well as for the sake of broader society. In criminal law there typically is no such thing as a non-judicial settlement between the perpetrator and the victim that the law will recognize. A judicial finding of guilt or innocence is necessary for the disposition of the case.

In the context of negotiations between Iran and the West/IAEA over Iran’s nuclear program, I think it is clear that we are and should remain within the first, contract/tort law paradigm, and that we should not allow considerations more fitting for a criminal law paradigm to interfere – and they will interfere – in the peaceful resolution of this dispute, which can then allow the parties to move forward.

US Shared Liability for Iraq’s Use of Chemical Weapons Against Iran

Jennifer Kiss US Iraq Chemical Weapons Responsibility

As I mentioned a few posts back, I spent about three weeks this past January teaching a short course at the University of Ottawa School of Law.  I taught my signature “WMD Law & Policy” course to about ten students.  I was genuinely impressed by the quality of the students in the course, particularly when they turned in their end-of-the-course papers to be assessed.

Each student chose a subject relevant to the course on which to write their paper. The results were on the whole truly excellent.

I thought that two papers in particular were so exceptional in their quality, and in the timeliness of their subject matter, that they deserved a broader audience. One of those papers is by Juris Doctor candidate Jennifer Kiss, who wrote her paper on the topic of: The United States’ Decision to Ignore the Use of Chemical Weapons in the Iran-Iraq War: An Involvement that Remains Unpunished.  This is a tremendously important, and timely subject given the recent confirmation of US knowledge of Iraq’s use of chemical weapons during the Iran-Iraq war, and its continued material support for Iraq notwithstanding this knowledge.

I asked Jennifer for her permission to post her paper on ACL, and she kindly agreed.

On the topic of her paper, I think that, just from a moral standpoint, the revelations about US support for Iraq, in full knowledge that Iraq was using chemical weapons, seriously weaken the credibility of US protestations about the use of chemical weapons by any other state, including Syria.

But Jennifer goes further and uses some of the most cutting-edge legal scholarship on shared responsibility in international law, to argue that the US should additionally be seen to share in Iraq’s legal liability for this grave violation of the laws of armed conflict.  As Jennifer writes:

The revealed declassified CIA documents provide substantial amounts of concrete evidence proving that the United States not only knew about the Iraqi use of chemical weapons in the war, but that the Pentagon and the U.S. government determined that using those weapons against soldiers was acceptable because it was “just another way of killing people.” From these CIA documents and through it’s decision to play an active role in the planning of the Fao Peninsula battle strategy of Iraq in 1988, it is acceptable to believe that the U.S. knew that Iraqi military strategy involved the use of chemical weapons, therefore any plans devised by the U.S. must have included the use of chemical weapons.

As a result, it can be argued that the United States agreed to being involved in the internationally wrongfully committed acts by Iraq. Under the Article 47 of the ASR, since both states can be viewed as being involved in the wrongful acts, both the U.S. and Iraq should incur responsibility and both should be obligated to provide reparation to the Iran. The United States can be seen as having a cooperative responsibility as it aided in Iraq in committing the wrongful act against Iran, which parallels the ICJ’s decision in the Nicaragua Case when it found that both the U.S. and Honduras shared liability for the damage incurred by Nicaragua.

I think this is an excellent and persuasive analysis of an important, and too long underpublicized topic. I highly recommend it to readers.

No Iran Deal, No Problem

While I’m writing about Yousaf, I wanted to recommend highly to readers Yousaf’s most recent article in The National Interest, entitled “No Iran Deal, No Problem” (that title has kind of a Bob Marley ring to it, doesn’t it?).  In this new piece, Yousaf tackles and clarifies a number of common misconceptions about the Iran nuclear issue, including that the US is currently faced with a choice of either negotiated settlement or war. He also provides what I think is a very evenhanded prescription for moving diplomacy forward towards a meaningful resolution. Quoting from the piece:

To reach a comprehensive deal both sides should now own up to past mistakes and make amends. For instance, Iran should consider ratifying the Additional Protocol, which would provide more confidence that it would continue to abide by its safeguards agreement and minimize chances of future safeguards violations. Iran should also consider converting the Arak heavy-water reactor to a more—but still not perfectly—proliferation-resistant light-water reactor, or removing the spent fuel for disposition by a third country to prevent it from becoming a plutonium source. And Iran should be open to a frank discussion about whether it undertook weaponization research during the times of tension with Iraq in the 1980s and 1990s. Other countries, like Sweden and Switzerland, that had clandestine nuclear weapons programs—which continued to some extent even after their signing the NPT—are now in good standing with the world powers, so a resolution should not prove impossible.

In the spirit of reconciliation, the P5+1 states and the IAEA could admit to having used unorthodox procedures, partly motivated by political considerations, in handling Iran’s case. They should now support passage of a new Security Council resolution that annuls the past UN nuclear sanctions, and better captures the current reality of what a realistic end-state of Iran’s nuclear program would look like. Reforming the IAEA’s management structure and funding streams should also be seriously considered to improve the professionalism of the Agency. Bringing in a new IAEA chief who is seen as more apolitical than the current one could also be very helpful. Given its historical misuse, the IAEA should also revisit whether it will continue to accept intelligence from third parties, especially non-NPT member states.

I also want to highlight his prescription of the passage of a new UN Security Council resolution, which would effectively supersede and satisfy previous UNSC resolutions demanding that Iran cease uranium enrichment, and send Iran’s case back to the IAEA exclusively. As he says:

Fortunately, there is a simple way out of this byzantine and dangerous bureaucratic mess. The UN Security Council should now adopt a new resolution verifying that Iran is now technically in compliance with its safeguards agreement. Such a resolution would annul the previous UN resolutions calling for sanctions, and return Iran’s file to the IAEA. Individual countries that wanted to maintain unilateral sanctions would, of course, still be free to do so.

Another reason that the current set of UN nuclear sanctions on Iran should be annulled is because their prescription of zero enrichment will not be met. The negotiations between the P5+1 and Iran center on limits to enrichment—not on outright suspension. The 2006-era UN Security Council demand that “Iran shall suspend all enrichment-related and reprocessing activities” is outdated. As written, the old UN sanctions resolutions are essentially irremovable because their demands will not be met. A new UN resolution superseding the older ones would better capture the current reality while returning Iran’s file to the IAEA, the proper technical agency responsible for nuclear safeguards verification.

This article is really a first rate piece of analysis and writing, in my view. I agree with its analysis and prescriptions 100% and would urge readers to spread it far and wide through listserves, etc. Hopefully it will get in front of the right eyes.

Easy to Explain PMD Issue on the Table in IAEA Talks with Iran

The following is a quick explanation by Dr. Yousaf Butt of some important developments this weekend in negotiations between the IAEA and Iran. I really appreciate our good friend Yousaf using his considerable technical expertise to explain things like this to us simple country lawyers.

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Easy to Explain PMD Issue on the Table in IAEA Talks with Iran

By Dr. Yousaf Butt

The IAEA and Iran just released a joint statement on the talks that took place this weekend.

The agreement is a welcome development. The agreed measures are:

1. Providing mutually agreed relevant information and managed access to the Saghand mine in Yazd;

2. Providing mutually agreed relevant information and managed access to the Ardakan concentration plant;

3. Submission of an updated Design Information Questionnaire (DIQ) for the IR-40 Reactor;

4. Taking steps to agree with the Agency on the conclusion of a Safeguards Approach for the IR-40 Reactor;

5. Providing mutually agreed relevant information and arranging for a technical visit to Lashkar Ab’ad Laser Centre;

6. Providing information on source material, which has not reached the composition and purity suitable for fuel fabrication or for being isotopically enriched, including imports of such material and on Iran’s extraction of uranium from phosphates; and

7. Providing information and explanations for the Agency to assess Iran’s stated need or application for the development of Exploding Bridge Wire detonators.

This last element is part of the “Possible Military Dimensions” file that has hung up Iran’s case at the UN Security Council.

It is refreshing to see that this issue (7) will finally gain a likely resolution.

Frankly, it is surprising that it has taken this long for the Agency to get to the point of resolving the still-outstanding issue of the use of “Exploding Bridge Wire” (EBW) detonators. The Agency felt that these EBWs were for nuclear weapons (per the November 2011 IAEA report).

But there are many non-nuclear weapons uses for EBWs, especially for an oil-rich nation like Iran. One manufacturer of EBWs explains that these have “…applications in explosive welding of piping and tubing, seismic studies, oil well perforating & hard rock mining”

The manufacturer is explicit that EBWs “…have found a wide range of applications within the mining, explosive metal welding and energy exploration field. Many of these uses could not be accomplished using conventional blasting equipment without a compromise of safety.”

Furthermore, Iran was not secretive about its work on EBWs. As the November 2011 IAEA report states: Iran “provided the Agency with a copy of a paper relating to EBW development work presented by two Iranian researchers at a conference held in Iran in 2005. A similar paper was published by the two researchers at an international conference later in 2005.”

Would Iran be so open in pursuing a secretive nuclear weapon technology?

The Agency, however, noted, “Iran’s development of such detonators and equipment is a matter of concern…” It really is not given its other civilian (and conventional military) uses, and Iran’s relative openness in pursuing the technology.

As long ago as 2011 Robert Kelley, a former IAEA inspector, stated: “The Agency is wrong. There are lots of applications for EBWs….To be wrong on this point, and then to try to misdirect opinion shows a bias towards their desired outcome…. That is unprofessional.”

News reports have cast the agreement today as Iran finally providing openness on the issue — but Iran has told the IAEA before that the EBWs were for non-nuclear weapons uses.

Clearly, this issue could have been resolved long ago. But it is a positive development that the IAEA seems willing now to listen to reasonable explanations and hopefully the issue will likely – finally – soon be off the table.

Excellent New Article on the Polonium Issue

This is an outstanding new article by Jonathan Tirone, posted at Bloomberg. And very courageous – the IAEA under Amano does not take criticism well. But this is an important piece, setting the record straight about how bringing up the polonium issue now is both technically ridiculous, and threatening of the small signs of trust and cooperation that have started to emerge between Iran and the West. It includes some very good quotes by Bob Kelley and Tariq Rauf. It also cites to fascinating evidence of US and French officials intentionally trying to revive the polonium issue, after it had been resolved by the IAEA – which could be seen as an attempt to artificially gin up controversy where technically there was none, and thereby unnecessarily prolong the dispute between the West and Iran. As described in the article:

The IAEA’s March 2008 decision to suspend the investigation into Iran’s polonium experiments, made during Nobel laureate Mohamed ElBaradei’s tenure, prompted French and U.S. diplomats to seek new ways to reintroduce the issue. At the time, some diplomats didn’t want ElBaradei’s initiative to resolve allegations against Iran to derail sanctions.

France “suggested intensifying our involvement in verification of formerly outstanding issues, such as polonium, by feeding the secretariat additional information,” former U.S. IAEA envoy Greg Schulte wrote in March 2008 after the polonium file had been cleared.

Congratulations to Jonathan for this very valuable article, and for his and Bloomberg’s courage in publishing it.

*Breaking News Update on the Polonium Issue*

We’ve all been tricked.

Basically, the piece by Fredrik Dahl that I referred to in my last post, made a mountain out of a molehill. Amano didn’t in fact bring the polonium issue up at all. He only responded to it very briefly, when a reporter, Joseph Joffe, raised it as a question which he posed to Iranian Foreign Minister Zarif.  Frankly, it was a dumb question to ask, but Zarif humored the reporter and answered the question. Only then did Amano make his very brief remarks on the matter, which I think really amounted only to a boilerplate answer that this was among the various issues about which that the IAEA would like more information from Iran. This was not, as the sensationalism of the Dahl article would lead us to believe, something that Amano raised himself out of the ether, during a speech or other pre-planned presentation. This was just Amano responding briefly, and probably fairly disinterestedly with regard to the specific matter in question, to a query from a reporter.

You can see the exchange yourself in this video from the Munich conference. The exchange happens at the 1hr 2 min mark of the video. Here is a rough transcript of the exchange (I don’t guarantee its 100% accurate, but it’s close):

Joseph Joffe: Mr. Minister. I wish we had a few more like you in our Western diplomatic services who can handle words and arguments so nicely as you do. this whole argument has revolved around trust, verification and facts. I think there’s a nice little case study, which you mentioned yourself, which is the Tehran Research Reactor which went online, I don’t know, 1967. What you forgot to say is that it was fueled with highly enriched uranium under the Shah’s reign. So by 1991, the United States, which delivered this stuff, thought maybe it wasn’t such a good idea to give weapons grade uranium to the Iranians. And then the Iranians went around and begged a little bit and scaled down the reactor to the use of 20 percent so that it can be ostensibly for the use of medical purposes. That’s under safeguards and that’s good. However, there’s a little thing that’s called polonium, which this reactor produces. It’s a tiny, tiny quantity which is extremely important for creating neutron, neutron eruptions, which trigger nuclear explosions. And that our friends from the IAEA say that they cannot control. So why not start with that old clunker, which is worthless to begin with, and really open it up and say `you know, you think we’re making plutonium here, why don’t we go and check it out.’ That builds trust! Not [your] appeals to trust. I think if we can start with these things, as we have, I think we’ll be doing fine.

Javad Zarif: I don’t know whether I should take that as a compliment, but I will. We didn’t build that reactor. It was a part of Atoms for Peace. The United States built it. We didn’t ask for highly-enriched uranium to fuel that reactor. It was the United States that did it at that time. Then it decided to convert it to medium-enriched uranium, or low-enriched uranium because 20 percent is just the border line between medium and low. Sorry Dr. Solana, I’m not a physicist, you know this more than I do. And we did, we brought it down. We did, we had to. But then the United States had to give us the fuel. Why didn’t it? Because they don’t have to. That’s the problem. Now that reactor is under full IAEA safeguards. The IAEA controls it. The polonium issue — it’s not plutonium, it’s polonium. We didn’t design that to come out of that reactor. And the reactor is under IAEA safeguards. As I said very clearly to you: nuclear technology for peaceful purposes and nuclear technology for weapons are twin sisters, or twin brothers. It’s the role of the IAEA to make sure that the more benign parts of nuclear technology are implemented and the other side is not and we are open to that. The IAEA has full access to Tehran nuclear reactor and it’s under inspection, has always been, and we’ll continue to work with the IAEA to answer any questions they may have about it.

Yukiya Amano: Just a brief intervention. As Minister Zarif mentioned, the Tehran Research Reactor is under IAEA safeguards and we can tell that stays in peaceful purpose. You have raised issues of polonium. Polonium can be used for civil purpose like a nuclear battery but it can also be used for a neutron source for nuclear weapons. We would like to clarify this issue, too.

Not cool, Fredrik Dahl.  Not cool.

Polonium?

Sort of a weird development that has many observers scratching their heads – yesterday Reuters published this report in which IAEA Director General Yukiya Amano’s remarks are reported as follows:

The head of the United Nations’ nuclear watchdog, Yukiya Amano, said possible military dimensions of Iran’s nuclear programme needed to be clarified and he said his agency also wanted to clarify the issue of small amounts of polonium-210 that had been produced by the Tehran research reactor.

“Polonium can be used for civil purposes like nuclear batteries but can also be used for a neutron source for nuclear weapons,” Amano told the Munich Security Conference.

Fredrik Dahl then wrote up this report about the incident today.

What’s weird about this is that the issue of polonium-210 related experiments in Iran was dealt with in 2008, and this Director General’s report issued in February 2008 contained the following passage concerning the agency’s findings:

 A.3. Polonium-210

20. Polonium-210 is of interest to the Agency because it can be used not only for civilian applications (such as radioisotope batteries), but also — in conjunction with beryllium — for military purposes, such as neutron initiators in some designs of nuclear weapons. On 20–21 January 2008, a meeting took place in Tehran between the Agency and Iranian officials during which Iran provided answers to the questions raised by the Agency in its letter dated 15 September 2007 regarding polonium-210 research (GOV/2007/58, para. 26). The Agency’s questions included a request to see the original project documentation.

21. According to Iran, in the 1980s, scientists from the Tehran Nuclear Research Centre (TNRC) were asked to propose new research activities. A project called “Production of 210Po by the irradiation of 209Bi in the TNRC reactor” was proposed and eventually approved by the Scientific Advisory Committee of TNRC in 1988. The project consisted of fundamental research aimed at enhancing knowledge about this process. According to Iran, it was not aimed at a specific immediate application. However, a potential use in radioisotope batteries, if the chemical extraction of polonium- 210 proved successful, was mentioned in the initial proposal.

22. Iran reiterated that the project was not part of any larger R&D project, but had been a personal initiative of the project leader. According to Iran, the chemist working on the project left the country before full chemical processing had been performed, the project was aborted and the decayed samples were discarded as waste (GOV/2004/11, para. 30).

23. To support its statements, Iran presented additional copies of papers and literature searches that had formed the basis for the request for approval of the project. Iran also provided copies of the project proposal, the meeting minutes and the approval document from the Scientific Advisory Committee of TNRC, as well as a complete copy of the reactor logbook for the entire period that the samples were present in the reactor.

24. Based on an examination of all information provided by Iran, the Agency concluded that the explanations concerning the content and magnitude of the polonium-210 experiments were consistent with the Agency’s findings and with other information available to it. The Agency considers this question no longer outstanding at this stage. However, the Agency continues, in accordance with its procedures and practices, to seek corroboration of its findings and to verify this issue as part of its verification of the completeness of Iran’s declarations. (emphasis added)

So the question people are asking is, if the issue was resolved in 2008, why bring it up again now six years later? It is possible that some new information has been brought to light on the issue. That’s what Mark Hibbs suggests in the Dahl piece. But it still seems strange to bring up an issue involving past experiments with a material that my technical friends tell me is really not at all useful in modern nuclear weapons programs.

What should one read into this decision by Amano to bring this issue up now, in light of the very sensitive stage at which we are currently in diplomacy between Iran and the P5+1, and in parallel between Iran and the IAEA? One possible interpretation is that Amano is bringing up this issue now in order to keep pressure on Iran, to force concessions in the respective negotiating fora. The more cynical interpretation would be that this is a strategy aimed at making a diplomatic settlement in both fora more difficult. It’s difficult for me to see whose interests that would serve, other than of course Israel’s. It’s hard for me to see this as an instance of one of the P5 pulling Amano’s strings. Is he going rogue and interjecting this rather lame and tangential PMD issue into the mix for some reason only he knows/understands? Hard to say. This is a weird one.   

Julian Borger on Israel’s Nuclear Arsenal

This new piece by Julian Borger, detailing the history of clandestine and illicit means by which Israel developed its nuclear weapons stockpile is an absolute must read.  Borger subtitled the piece:

Israel has been stealing nuclear secrets and covertly making bombs since the 1950s. And western governments, including Britain and the US, turn a blind eye. But how can we expect Iran to curb its nuclear ambitions if the Israelis won’t come clean?

Good question. There’s some very damning stuff in here – a lot of information I’d never read before. Here are just a few excerpts, but you really need to read the whole thing:

Israel, unlike Iran, never signed up to the 1968 NPT so could not violate it. But it almost certainly broke a treaty banning nuclear tests, as well as countless national and international laws restricting the traffic in nuclear materials and technology.

The list of nations that secretly sold Israel the material and expertise to make nuclear warheads, or who turned a blind eye to its theft, include today’s staunchest campaigners against proliferation: the US, France, Germany, Britain and even Norway.

………..

As more and more evidence of Israel’s weapons programme emerged, the US role progressed from unwitting dupe to reluctant accomplice. In 1968 the CIA director Richard Helms told President Johnson that Israel had indeed managed to build nuclear weapons and that its air force had conducted sorties to practise dropping them.

The timing could not have been worse. The NPT, intended to prevent too many nuclear genies from escaping from their bottles, had just been drawn up and if news broke that one of the supposedly non-nuclear-weapons states had secretly made its own bomb, it would have become a dead letter that many countries, especially Arab states, would refuse to sign.

The Johnson White House decided to say nothing, and the decision was formalised at a 1969 meeting between Richard Nixon and Golda Meir, at which the US president agreed to not to pressure Israel into signing the NPT, while the Israeli prime minister agreed her country would not be the first to “introduce” nuclear weapons into the Middle East and not do anything to make their existence public.

In fact, US involvement went deeper than mere silence. At a meeting in 1976 that has only recently become public knowledge, the CIA deputy director Carl Duckett informed a dozen officials from the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission that the agency suspected some of the fissile fuel in Israel’s bombs was weapons-grade uranium stolen under America’s nose from a processing plant in Pennsylvania.

Not only was an alarming amount of fissile material going missing at the company, Nuclear Materials and Equipment Corporation (Numec), but it had been visited by a veritable who’s-who of Israeli intelligence, including Rafael Eitan, described by the firm as an Israeli defence ministry “chemist”, but, in fact, a top Mossad operative who went on to head Lakam.

“It was a shock. Everyody was open-mouthed,” recalls Victor Gilinsky, who was one of the American nuclear officials briefed by Duckett. “It was one of the most glaring cases of diverted nuclear material but the consequences appeared so awful for the people involved and for the US than nobody really wanted to find out what was going on.”

The investigation was shelved and no charges were made.

A few years later, on 22 September 1979, a US satellite, Vela 6911, detected the double-flash typical of a nuclear weapon test off the coast of South Africa. Leonard Weiss, a mathematician and an expert on nuclear proliferation, was working as a Senate advisor at the time and after being briefed on the incident by US intelligence agencies and the country’s nuclear weapons laboratories, he became convinced a nuclear test, in contravention to the Limited Test Ban Treaty, had taken place.

It was only after both the Carter and then the Reagan administrations attempted to gag him on the incident and tried to whitewash it with an unconvincing panel of enquiry, that it dawned on Weiss that it was the Israelis, rather than the South Africans, who had carried out the detonation.

“I was told it would create a very serious foreign policy issue for the US, if I said it was a test. Someone had let something off that US didn’t want anyone to know about,” says Weiss.

Israeli sources told Hersh the flash picked up by the Vela satellite was actually the third of a series of Indian Ocean nuclear tests that Israel conducted in cooperation with South Africa.

Wow.  How many times have you heard Israeli officials blast Iran’s nuclear program for being clandestine and illicit? How do you translate “the pot calling the kettle black” into Hebrew?

Peter Jenkins on Gareth Porter’s New Book

Peter Jenkins, former UK Ambassador to the IAEA and friend of ACL, has written a fascinating review of Gareth Porter’s newly released book Manufactured Crisis: The Untold Story of the Iran Nuclear Scare over at LobeLog.  Basically, this book is Porter’s narrative of the history of Iran’s nuclear program and the dispute over it between Iran and the West.  Porter, who by all accounts is a well respected, independent journalist of long and productive career, has been working on the subject of this book since 2006.  I have not yet read the book myself, but will be ordering my copy straightaway.  Peter’s review and description make me eager to read what promises to be a very useful independent analysis of the causes of the crisis.

Along with a truly excellent research assistant, I am currently working myself on a narrative history of Iran’s nuclear program and the dispute surrounding it, that will eventually comprise the first chapter of my forthcoming book Iran’s Nuclear Program and International Law.