McClatchy reports: Experts: No evidence of Iranian nuclear weapons program:
Despite President Bush's claims that Iran is pursuing nuclear weapons that could trigger "World War III," experts in and out of government say there's no conclusive evidence that Tehran has an active nuclear-weapons program.
Unfortunately, the article still manages to repeat some BS propaganda talking points (which I will take apart below)
It claims, for example,
Nevertheless, there are many reasons to be skeptical of Iran's claims that its nuclear program is intended exclusively for peaceful purposes, including the country's vast petroleum reserves, its dealings with a Pakistani dealer in black-market nuclear technology and the fact that it concealed its uranium-enrichment program from a U.N. watchdog agency for 18 years.
Well, lets look at that in some more detail, shall we?
First - since Iran has "vast petroleum reserves" then it can't possibly need nuclear technology for anything other than bombs - right? Well, no. This claim is made by some of the same Bush officials who made the opposite argument in favor of Iran's nuclear program a few years before. But actually, even US-based analysts agree that Iran is short of oil. But though this innuendo about Iran having "vast petroleum resources" that has been debunked over and and over over and over again . . . and yet some reporters still repeat it.
For example, David Isenberg a senior analyst with the Washington-based British American Security Information Council (BASIC), has dealt with this before:
Much of the argument over the intentions of Iran's nuclear program revolves around a single proposition that goes like this. Given that Iran has huge oil and gas reserves, it has no need for nuclear power for domestic energy needs and thus its nuclear program will be used for nuclear weapons. . .The Foreign Affairs Select Committee of England's parliament said in March 2004 that based on a study it commissioned, "It is clear ... that the arguments as to whether Iran has a genuine requirement for domestically produced nuclear electricity are not all, or even predominantly, on one side."
Some US arguments against Iran "were not supported by an analysis of the facts", the committee added, noting that much of the natural gas flared off by Iran - which US officials say could be harnessed instead of nuclear power - was not recoverable for energy use.
Second, did Iran really "conceal" its uranium enrichment program? No, not true either:
Under the terms of Iran's then-existing safeguards agreement with the IAEA, was never legally required to announce the existence of the enrichment facility while it was under construction. According to the terms of the safeguards agreement (which were standard), Iran was only required to disclose the facilities 6 month prior to the introduction of fissile material into the facilities, and not while the site was still under construction.
As Siddharth Varadarajan has written:
Though there has been a surfeit of motivated and ill-informed commentary about how Iran "concealed" its uranium enrichment programme from the IAEA "in violation of the NPT" until it was "caught cheating" in 2002, the fact is that Iran was not obliged to inform the Agency about those facilities at the time. David Albright and Corey Hinderstein — who first provided the international media with satellite imagery and analysis of the unfinished fuel fabrication facility at Natanz and heavy water research reactor at Arak on December 12, 2002 — themselves noted that under the safeguards agreement in force at the time, "Iran is not required to allow IAEA inspections of a new nuclear facility until six months before nuclear material is introduced into it." In fact, it was not even required to inform the IAEA of their existence until then, a point conceded by Britain and the European Union at the March 2003 Board of Governors meeting... This `six months' clause was a standard part of all IAEA safeguards agreements signed in the 1970s and 1980s.
And while it is true that the IAEA did say that Iran failed to inform the IAEA of some matters, the IAEA has certified repeatedly that the undeclared activities were not related to a nuclear weapons program, and there was no diversion of nuclear material for military purposes. This is a significant point, whose importance has been missed by people not familiar with the legalities of the Non-Proliferation Treaty. As Michael Spies of the Lawyer's Committee on Nuclear Policy has explained:
The conclusion that no diversion has occurred certifies that the state in question is in compliance with its undertaking, under its safeguards agreement and Article III of the NPT, to not divert material to non-peaceful purposes. In the case of Iran, the IAEA was able to conclude in its November 2004 report that that all declared nuclear materials had been accounted for and therefore none had been diverted to military purposes. The IAEA reached this same conclusion in September 2005.
In fact, Iran's enrichment program was quite well-known all along - it was openly announced on national radio, and IAEA inspectors even visited Iran's uranium mines. As I noted in my Le Monde diplomatique article:
A review of nuclear industry literature shows that if Iran’s uranium enrichment programme was ever clandestine, it was a poorly guarded secret. Tehran’s intentions to obtain the full nuclear cycle date from the 1970s, when its nuclear energy programme was set up in cooperation with the US and some European governments. In 1974 the Ford administration offered to contribute directly, and Iran continued to work on the fuel cycle until the 1979 revolution. In 1981 the new government decided to continue Iran’s nuclear energy projects, and in 1982 Iranian officials announced that they planned to build a reactor powered by their own uranium at the Isfahan nuclear technology centre. The IAEA inspected that and other facilities in Iran in 1983, and planned to assist Iran in converting yellowcake into reactor fuel. The IAEA report stated clearly that its aim was to “contribute to the formation of local expertise and manpower needed to sustain an ambitious programme in the field of nuclear power reactor technology and fuel cycle technology”. But the agency’s assistance programme was terminated under US pressure.In 1984 Iranian radio announced that negotiations with Niger on the purchase of uranium were nearing conclusion, and in 1985 another broadcast openly discussed the discovery of uranium deposits in Iran with the director of Iran’s atomic energy organisation. An IAEA spokesman, Melissa Flemming, confirmed [that] in 1992 its inspectors had visited the mines and Iran had announced plans to develop the full nuclear fuel cycle.
Tehran had openly entered into negotiations with several nations, including Brazil, Russia, India, Argentina, Germany, Ukraine and Spain, for the purchase of nuclear energy facilities and components. Almost all of these deals ultimately fell through after pressure from Washington. The Chinese informed the IAEA of plans to build a uranium enrichment facility in Iran in 1996, and when they too pulled out under US pressure, the Iranians informed the IAEA that they would continue the project none the less. Iran’s nuclear efforts were not entirely clandestine
But what about those undisclosed nuclear activities and importation of nuclear centrifuge technology from Pakistan? Iran states that it went to Pakistan after repeated attempts to acquire the technology to which it was entitled under the NPT were frustrated by US pressure on supplying nations. In fact, Iran is hardly the only country to have had undisclosed nuclear activities.
For example, take Egypt: While the IAEA noted the "possibility of nuclear material, activities and facilities in Egypt relating to uranium extraction and conversion, irradiation of uranium targets and reprocessing that had not been reported to the Agency", there was no further innuendo promoted about Egypt's "intentions" and "capabilities" to build nukes as is promoted in the case of Iran. In fact, in 2004, IAEA head ElBaradei specifically stated that many states had failed to declare all their nuclear activities:
"… cases are surfacing, and will likely continue to surface, in which the Agency finds that States have not in the past fulfilled all of their reporting obligations." (Note further than Egypt refuses to sign the Additional Protocol, which allows more stringent inspections, while Iran signed it and voluntarily implemented it for 2 years during the course of the Paris Agreement negotiations - and no nukes were found then either.)
What about the "Uranium Sphere" baloney? If I remember right (and I'm too tired to check) I think the McClatchy article is plain wrong when it claims that Iran has refused to allow IAEA inspectors to copy the document which supposedly shows how to make the spherical uranium casing for a bomb. Iran allowed them to have a copy - but not the original. But in any case, the portion of the document that shows that information reportedly consists of only 2 pages and lacks the necessary measurements and other details to be practically useful, and furthermore the technological know-how to make nuclear bombs is hardly a secret anyway and is widely available (as the Nth Country experiment proved.)
What about the P2 centrifuge and the Laptop containing "secret" nuclear plans? Dr Jeffrey Lewis dealt with the claim that Iran has "failed" to disclose work with the P2 centrifuge:
"Iran notified the IAEA that it planned eventual resumption of research on the P2 centrifuge design in its so-called Additional Protocol Declaration. The declaration is not available to the public, but IAEA Director-General Mohamed ElBaradei noted in one of his reports to the IAEA Board of Governors that 'in its Additional Protocol declarations, Iran has foreseen P-2 R&D activities for the future.' ... Iranian officials have mentioned that Iran has an ongoing R&D effort on the P2. Former top nuclear negotiator Hassan Rohani, in a speech published by an Iranian journal, told the audience "As for the P2, we are doing some research; we are doing things at the research level" -- a speech that was reported on by ... the New York Times."
And Armscontrolwonk.com has an entertaining post about the "Laptop of Death" - the laptop which, miraculously! - contains all that "secret" nuclear information on Iran, and which was "obtained it in mid-2004 from a source in Iran who they said had received it from a second person, now believed to be dead." which conveniently means that it can't be verified. McClatchy claims that US and European experts find the laptop to be "credible" - but these experts are unnamed, and the basis for their conclusions are unexamined since the laptop has never been turned over to the IAEA for their analysis. So, if you see a similarity between this laptop and the forged "yellowcake from Niger" documents, you'd be right.
And what about the claim that Iran doesn't have enough uranium to be self-sufficient? Well, the amount of uranium depends on what is economically recoverable. And since the price of uranium has increased 10 fold in the last decade and is expected to go even higher, what is "economically recoverable" will change. But in any case, Iran never claimed that it will exclusively use nuclear power for self-sufficiency - note many countries that use enriched uranium import the stuff, and Iran was willing to do so too especially since its neighbors in Central Asia are rich in uranium ore.
Oh, and while I am at it - note all the issues that the McClatchy article doesn't address: that for example, the IAEA has complained that the US has repeatedly failed to provide any actual useful evidence of any actual Iranian nuclear weapons program, or that the traces of the highly enriched uranium found in Iran were in fact attributable to contamination, as Iran had claimed all along. McClatchy also fails to mention all the Iranian nuclear compromise proposals that the US has ignored, which would address even the theoretical case that Iran could use civilian nuclear power technology to make bombs.
So there you have it - a pretty thorough debunking. if I say so myself. My fingers are tired from the typing!
(But there are more BS propaganda points out there about Iran's nuclear program which I have addressed in a previous posts.)
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