Tag: Nuclear weapons
Iran: still hope for an enrichment agreement
As I’ve been keen on the idea of an enrichment agreement with Iran, one that would allow Iran to exercise its “right” to enrich but limit the extent and quantity, the question arises: how might the appointment of Ali Akbar Salehi, the head of Iran’s Atomic Energy Organization, as Acting Foreign Minister affect the prospects for such an agreement?
The most detailed recent interview with the MIT doctorate Salehi I have been able to find in English was done by CBS in April. He says there:
we have been consistent. That we are against nuclear weapons. That we are not looking for nuclear weapons. That we are a member of the NPT. That we should stay in the NPT. That we allow the inspectors to visit our sites. And we don’t want nuclear weapons. We want peaceful nuclear technology and this is our right in accordance with Article 4 of the NPT.
The interview with CBS’ Elizabeth Palmer ends this way:
the mere fact that we’ve offered not to enrich uranium to 20% …this was a big message sent to the West. But unfortunately they did not receive the message. I remember in many interviews I said ‘Please. Please Listen. This is a big offer…that Iran is offering. OK? We keep our promise of [only enriching up to] 5%… although it is our right to enrich to whatever level we want. But we keep our promise to 5%. And please enrich for us the 20%. But they didn’t. They started putting conditions after conditions after conditions. And then we had to start 20% enrichment. And now I am saying we are ready if they – today – say ‘OK we will supply you the fuel’, we will stop the 20% enrichment process. What else do they want?
Palmer: And you will give up the LEU equivalent to what you’d get back [in the plates for the Tehran Research Reactor].
Salehi: Yes, in fact [in a proposal for…] partial shipment. We said ‘No. We will give it in one go….the 1,000 kilos of 3.5% enriched uranium, in return for the 100 kilos of 20% enriched uranium. You can put that 100 kilos of uranium under the custody of the Agency in Iran.
Palmer: So that deal is on the table?
Salehi: Yes. That deal is on the table.
It is not clear to me whether it is still on the table, but on the face it seems pretty close to what Hillary Clinton has been hinting for some time. You can also watch Salehi in an Al Jazeera interview from February, where he seems to be saying the same things he said to CBS in April.
It would be a mistake to conclude that an agreement at the late January meeting in Turkey of the P5+1 with Iran is therefore likely, or even possible. Iran and the U.S. are both countries with multiple power centers that will be difficult to satisfy. Salehi’s relationship to the emerging praetorian Iran is not clear to me: is he close to the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps? What does his appointment by President Ahmedinejad signify? Is he just window dressing, or can he deliver a serious agreement with verification measures sufficient to satisfy not only the Obama Administration but also the Congress? These are critical questions I am not seeing answered–they would of course be key questions for a U.S. embassy in Tehran, if we had one.
For those who are interested, Salehi’s MIT Ph.D. thesis, “Resonance region neutronics of unit cells in fast and thermal reactors,” is available on line. Whatever his political connections and clout, I hope the Americans have negotiators at the same technical level.
PS: In my original post three days ago, I omitted this link, which is an excellent 360 of the issues Salehi faces. It is as good as I’ve seen on the subject.
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The Iranian enrichment gambit gets more explicit
This is from a BBC interview, as reported by Foreign Policy: Hillary Clinton says
We’ve told them that they are entitled to the peaceful use of civil nuclear energy, but they haven’t yet restored the confidence of the international community to the extent where the international community would feel comfortable allowing them to enrich. They can enrich uranium at some future date once they have demonstrated that they can do so in a responsible manner in accordance with international obligations.
In diplospeak, she is clearly floating the idea that there might be a deal if Iran will agree not to enrich too much. This is published under a headline that reads Clinton on Iran: The regime is on the ropes. Nice cover for a soft message to Tehran.
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Can the Lady deliver?
Simon Henderson at the Washington Institute has a sharper eye than I do, as he detected this from SecState Clinton this week: “Iran is entitled to the use of civil nuclear power for peaceful purposes.” In his well-crafted scenesetter, Simon bemoans that “this formulation could allow Iran to continue enriching uranium.”
I doubt we are going to be able to stop that. The best we can hope for is to limit the degree of enrichment and amount of material.
Monday’s P5+1 meeting in Geneva is a big test for the EU. If Lady Ashton can deliver, Brussels will gain serious credibility.
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Pakistan: what me worry?
Islamabad is busy pooh-poohing U.S. concerns and treating them as signs of bias against Pakistan, but anyone sensible would worry about that country’s highly enriched uranium (HEU) as well as about the security of its nuclear weapons.
As a science counselor at the American Embassy in Rome in the late 1970s, I visited one of Italy’s research reactors, which like Pakistan’s ran on HEU. It contained, as my guide pointed out, more than enough HEU to make a nuclear weapon. The U.S. has been busy collecting this material, and replacing it with less dangerous stuff, for some years now. No one responsible would pooh-pooh the concerns–and lots of proud countries have collaborated in getting the HEU into more secure places, including well-known U.S. toady Belarus.
We won’t I imagine find much about Pakistan’s nuclear weapons in the diploleaks, since those cables will likely be more restricted in distribution. But if Pakistan can’t respond more responsibly on HEU, it makes me worry even more about their nukes.
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Scientist sees centrifuges, others see international catastrophe
The press has underlined the risks North Korea’s recently revealed centrifuges entail,and others have been quick to draw broad international conclusions (see Simon Henderson, http://www.washingtoninstitute.org/templateC05.php?CID=3274). But it is well worth reading Siegfried Hecker’s original report, which is cautiously judicious, while raising many important questions.
Certainly Henderson goes a bit far in speculating about hydrogen bombs. He is on more solid ground in his discussion of possible nuclear and missile trade, once considered unlikely to happen by nonproliferation experts.
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An Iranian enrichment gambit
If New START has fallen into the abyss of partisan politics within the U.S., the issue of Iran’s effort to achieve nuclear weapons capability has fallen into the abyss of U.S.-Iranian relations, which seem capable of oscillating only between bad and worse, with an occasional move towards catastrophic. The Stimson Center and USIP have attempted to fish it out with a study group report advocating “strategic engagement.”
The approach is sagacious: while discounting the likelihood of any regime change stemming from the Green Movement in the near future, the expert group focuses on what can be done to strengthen those conservatives with reason to regret international sanctions and to want them ended, at the expense of hardliners who want nuclear weapons at any cost and have no interest in normalizing relations with the U.S. and the rest of the world. It rightly sees the tightening of sanctions as part of strategic engagement.
The group wants the U.S. (and the rest of the world) to acknowledge Iranian rights to enrichment, in the hope that doing so will enable an agreement that limits the degree and/or quantity of enrichment, hoping even for a phase-out. Here is the key sentence from the report: “Washington should signal its clear—if also clearly conditional—acceptance of Iran’s enrichment rights, providing that Tehran negotiates verifiable limits on the degree of enrichment and on the volume of enriched fuel stored in Iran.”
This is not a new idea, as a quick search reveals Matthew Bunn of Harvard put it out a year ago. Making a virtue of necessity is a tried and true approach in diplomacy. Iran is already enriching, why imagine you can stop it altogether?
It is easy to imagine how this idea will go over in some quarters, where even a substantial cut in Russian nuclear weapons is having a hard time getting a hearing. There are three rational criticisms likely: 1) Iran has lost its “right” to enrichment by violating its obligations under the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT), 2) what reason is there to believe Iran will agree to anything on enrichment once its right is acknowledged, however conditionally? 3) what would prevent Iran from reneging on the agreement and enriching beyond the specified limits, either overtly or covertly?
Iran appears to have agreed to restart nuclear talks December 5. Will the enrichment gambit be tested then?
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