China owed the world one on Iran, for reasons explored in a previous post, and today it delivered, joining the United States, Russia, France and the UK in agreeing to draft sanctions. If adopted by the full UN Security Council, the sanctions will authorize members to board ships entering or leaving Iran, to search for suspected nuclear weapons technology, and impose penalties on Iranian financial institutions that support the Revolutionary Corps, which manages the country’s nuclear program.
But while announcement of the draft sanctions is to be applauded in principle, questions may be raised about its timing, coming as it did hard on the heels of Iran’s agreeing with Turkey and Brazil to a uranium fuel swap. That agreement resuscitates an October 2009 agreement, in which Iran was to send 1200 kg of low-enriched uranium abroad, in exchange for getting higher-enriched uranium to fuel a research reactor that produces medical isotopes. Iran subsequently backed away from that deal, over disagreement as to whether the fuel exchange would be simultaneous or sequential, and in February this year Iran announced it would start enriching uranium to 20 percent–the level needed for the research reactor, but which also would cut the time in half it would need to get fuel to weapons-grade 90-percent enrichment.
The U.S. government had said in recent weeks that the fuel exchange deal was still on the table, observe Ivan Oelrich and Ivanka Barzashka of the Federation of American Scientists. And so now, given that Iran agreed with Brazil and Turkey to a sequential swap, meeting the U.S. demand, those sympathetic to Iran’s position are bound to ask whether the big powers were negotiating in good faith. Earlier this year, the so-called nonaligned nations agreed to a resolution supporting Iran’s right to pursue peaceful development of nuclear energy, as an NPT party.
Inasmuch as China, France and Russia had hailed Iran’s agreement with Brazil and Turkey as a positive development, one wonders whether big-power agreement on the sanctions draft is as solid as Hillary Clinton indicated today in congressional testimony. But if that agreement holds, and if the Security Council adopts the sanctions, Iran will find it a lot harder to pursue its nuclear ambitions, Oelrich observes. Iran won’t be getting what it needs most for nuclear weapons from developing countries; and the advanced industrial countries of Europe, as well as the United States, will be in a position to adopt even tougher unilateral sanctions, under the UN flag.
Earlier this spring Barzashka and Oelrich argued in an FAS issue brief that the United States should accept Iran’s simultaneous transfer offer, to slow its accumulation of 20-percent enriched uranium, and to force it to show its hand. If Iran continued to enrich to 20 percent even after being assured of continued fuel supplies for its research reactor, then its military intentions would stand exposed. Barzashka and Oelrich characterized Iran’s push toward 20-percent enrichment as “brinkmanship,” which might be reversed “if it is meant to serve an alternate purpose.”
As it happens, a major flaw in this week’s agreement between Iran, Brazil and Turkey is that it does not address the issue of continued 20-percent enrichment, as the Arms Control Association noted in an e-mailed issue brief on Monday. And it’s questionable whether Iran’s push to 20 percent was mere brinkmanship intended to serve some diplomatic purpose. On the face of it, Iran wished simply to establish 20 percent as a fait accompli, bringing the country that much closer to breakout capacity–halfway closer, as Barzashka and Oelrich themselves repeatedly emphasize.
Why do we have to act on the assumption that Iran’s ultimate intention is to develop nuclear weapons? As stated previously, the main reason is that Iran tripped the IAEA’s wires like no country ever before; since being exposed in 2002-03, the burden of proof has been on Iran to prove its peaceful intentions, and repeatedly it has failed to provide convincing proof. The country’s big power sense of nuclear entitlement, and the absence of strong anti-nuclear sentiment in the opposition, suggest that Iran ultimately will not change its mind.
But perhaps it’s best to recall the basics. In August 2002, the radically oppositional National Council of Resistance of Iran held a press conference in Washington and claimed that Iran was building a secret uranium enrichment plant in Natanz and a heavy water production plant in Arak. The heavy water plant could provide the key ingredient needed for a plutonium production reactor, while the enrichment facility eventually could produce weapons-grade uranium. (Reactors moderated with heavy water run on natural uranium and therefore can produce plutonium–the most direct route to a bomb–without costly and difficult enrichment.) In the following year, already on the case, the IAEA confirmed the council’s charges and found an unprecedented pattern of illegal non-disclosure on the part of Iran stretching back twenty years.
Since then, it’s been clear that Iran is pursuing both technological routes to an atomic bomb, on the model of the Manhattan Project. Having got to 20 percent enrichment, it’s halfway from low-enriched uranium to bomb-grade, as Barzashka and Oelrich put it. As for plutonium, they say Iran has built the heavy-water production plant and begun construction of a reactor, though that is now stalled because of IAEA and UN action.
Ultimately Iran may not be stoppable, but the harder the world makes it for Iran along the way, the less likely it is that another country will follow in its footsteps, as Oelrich notes.
