Here's the latest IAEA report on Iran, specifically about the implementation of the Aug 2007 timetable agreement on modalities to resolve all outstanding issues with respect to Iran's nuclear program. If you remember, the US was quite critical of this agreement with Iran, and has declared that even Iran's full compliance with this agreement will not suffice. That's probably why we've seen so much bashing of ElBaradei recently too.
The report generally says that Iran is cooperating with the IAEA as requested, and that the information Iran has provided is consistent with the IAEA's findings. It is pretty much a positive report, which says that some issues are left to be resolved later in accordance with the agreed-upon timetable, but there's no mention of any nuclear weapons programs or anything like that.
There are four important points to keep in mind with respect to this report:
1- IRAN IS IN COMPLIANCE WITH THE NPT: The IAEA again states that there's no evidence of any diversion of nuclear material for non-peaceful uses. The importance of this statement may not be clear to those who are not familiar with NPT law: it means that Iran is still in compliance with its NPT obligations, and so there's still no legal basis for any referral to the UN Security Council for "breaking the NPT" as is widely alleged.
2- "UNDECLARED ACTITIVIES" AND THE ADDITIONAL PROTOCOL: The IAEA report states that though it has found no evidence of a nuclear weapons program, the IAEA cannot say that Iran's nuclear activites are exclusively peaceful since the IAEA cannot verify the absence of undeclared nuclear acvitities in Iran. The report then proceeds to request that Iran once again implement the Additional Protocol.
I suspect that the Iran bashers will seize on this language and spin it in order to make it sound as if the latest IAEA report had somehow condemned Iran, but keep in mind the following two points:
First point, that the IAEA does not verify the absence of undeclared nuclear activities for any country unless they have signed and ratified the Additional Protocol (which permits more stringent inspections of nuclear facilities.) According to the IAEA itself, there are currently something like 40 other countries for which the IAEA similarly cannot verify the absence of undeclared nuclear activities. Some other countries - like Egypt (recently held up by Rice as a model nuclear program) have refused to even sign the Additional Protocol, unlike Iran.
Second point: you should know that Iran did in fact voluntarily implement the Additional Protocol by allowing the more stringent inspections for the course of 2 years during the course of the Paris Agreement negotiations with the EU3 - even though it was not legally obligated to do so - and still no evidence of nuclear weapons was found in Iran (in fact the IAEA complained publicly that the evidence that the US had given them of "secret" Iranian nuclear facilities had been bogus.) Iran stopped providing that additional level of cooperation and stopped voluntarily implementing the Additional Protocol when the EU tried to cheat Iran in the course of the Paris Agreement negotiations, but Iran has repeatedly stated that it is willing to ratify and implement the Additional Protocol once its nuclear rights are recognized.
3- ISSUES RESOLVED: According to this report, several issues seem to have been resolved. These were issues which, until now, were treated by the media as proof positive of an Iranian nuclear weapons program. Also, while there's no mention of it in this report of Nov 2007, but the Modalities Agreement of Aug 2007 stated that the issue of Iran's experiments with plutonium had been resolved too.
4- OUSTANDING ISSUES: THE "LAPTOP OF DEATH" There's some outstanding concern about the traces of highly-enriched uranium which were found in Iran, but to date Iran's statements about those traces have been verified by the IAEA to be accurate: the traces were attributable to contamination from imported centrifuge parts I would only add that Iran does not have the capacity to make highly-enriched uranium anyway - it barely managed to make low-enriched uranium just recently.
The only major oustanding issue is the reported "Green Salt Project" and other nonesense about a secret Iranian nuclear project. And the only evidence of that comes from a highly questionable laptop computer that supposedly was smuggled out of Iran. You can read more about this "Laptop of Death" at the Next Hurrah and ArmsControlWonk.
UPDATE: In response to several queries, I'll add this paragraph:
5- NO SUSPENSION OF ENRICHMENT: As expected, the report also says that Iran has still refused to comply with the demand by the UNSC to "suspend" (aka abandon) its nuclear fuel enrichment program, which is fully IAEA-monitored and perfectly legal. That should not come as a surprise since Iran has made it plain that it will not do so, but will instead insist on its right to have nuclear fuel enrichment technology - the same technology that Brazil and Argentina and several other countries already possess and use to make reactor fuel. The UNSC demand on Iran is, at least in my opinion, nonbinding. In any case, as a confidence-building measure, Iran already tried suspending enrichment for 2 years during the course of the Paris Agreement negotiations with the EU states, but were cheated when the EU violated the explicit terms of the Paris Agreement by demanding that the temporary, non-obligatory suspension of enrichment become permanent and obligatory. The EU made an "offer" of civilian nuclear technology to Iran that as essentially a joke. However, Iran has long offered to put additional restrictions on its enrichment program beyond its legal obligations - such as operating the program as a multinational facility on Iranian soil - to ensure that it cannot even theoretically be used to make bombs secretly. Thus far, the US has refused to even acknowledge these perfectly reasonable compromise offers from Iran, and instead the US has imposed greater and greater demands and designed-to-fail preconditions on any negotiations with Iran.
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