Joshua Pollack at Arms Control Wonk predicts that the IAEA is preparing to refer the Syria situation to the UN Security Council.
The situation has been strange since it began in September 2007, when Israel bombed a suspected nuclear facility in Syria. The initial Syrian response was to denounce the Israeli violation of Syria’s sovereignty and to claim that the bombing caused no property damage and left no casualties (see Seymour Hersh’s New Yorker article on the subject). However, in a BBC interview in October 2007, Syrian president Bashar al-Assad claimed that the strike had hit an abandoned military building, which was the intended target.
Meanwhile, both Israel and the U.S. refused to comment publicly on the incident until April 2008, when the U.S. presented evidence to the IAEA that purportedly showed that the site was a nuclear reactor weeks away from activation at the time of the bombing. ElBaradei, then the IAEA head, was sharply critical of both the U.S., for taking so long to hand over the evidence, and Israel, for circumventing “the due process of verification that is at the heart of the non-proliferation regime” by undertaking the strike.
In June 2008, the IAEA inspected the site and found traces of uranium. Syria claims it came from the bombs dropped but the IAEA finds this unlikely. There has since been friction between Syria and the IAEA over the scope of what is allowed under Syria’s safeguards agreement. Earlier this year, Assad, in an interview with the Wall Street Journal, laid out the case for skepticism of the U.S.-Israeli claims. And the IAEA’s 35-nation governing board will surely discuss the issue at their meeting next month.
But if the IAEA does refer the matter to the UN Security Council, the situation won’t very much resemble that of Iran. The difference is that Iran already has a publicly declared civilian nuclear program. A big part of the Security Council’s resolutions against Iran (which you can peruse here) target Iran’s nuclear program – they impose sanctions on materials that benefit Iran’s uranium enrichment activities and demand that Iran cease uranium enrichment. But Syria does not have a civilian nuclear program. So unless it decides it wants to develop one, this situation won’t involve the same legal controversies as the Iran issue. There won’t be this collision of the UN Security Council and the NPT. (The Security Council demands that Iran halt uranium enrichment, even for civilian purposes, but the NPT’s Article IV acknowledges the “inalienable right” of countries to develop civilian nuclear energy.) Syria has already stated that it would like to develop a civilian nuclear program, but it has yet to do so. So the situation won’t quite play out in the same way.
