19 November 2012
Iran and the NPT
Editor ABC News
Dear Editor
I've just finished watching an ABC news interview (11.15am, 18/11) with Professor Andrew
O'Neil on Iran's alleged
nuclear weapons program and alleged breaches of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation
Treaty (NPT). It is my opinion that Prof. O'Neill is seriously wrong on matters
of fact, appearing to uncritically rely on contentious IAEA reporting on this
issue. He expressed these views at some length and with a high degree of
certainty.
I am concerned that these views, unsupported by the
evidence, are being uncritically accepted by ABC interviewers.
Prof. O'Neil claims, but does not detail, in what manner Iran is in
breach of the NPT (e.g. diversion of nuclear materials; illegal development of
enrichment centrifuges; denial of IAEA inspections). He does not state what
evidence he has for such claims, does not state what provisions of the NTP
agreement Iran has
alleged to have breached or what reliance he has placed upon questionable IAEA
pronouncements on these issues.
Prof. O'Neil also states (words to the effect) that
"It's pretty well accepted that Iran is in
breach of its obligations under the NPT".
He also argues this as evidence that Iran is
running a nuclear weapons program.
It is not true that Iran is in
breech of its NPT obligations and it is not true that such a claim is “pretty
much accepted”.
The matters of concern here are:
1. There is plenty of expert and informed political
commentary available which disputes that Iran is in breech
of its NTP obligations.
Much of the media and popular misunderstanding arises from
misconceptions about the legal rights and obligations contained within the NPT
agreement as monitored by the IAEA. For example, the legal authority of the
IAEA is largely restricted to monitoring established civilian nuclear energy
sites for the diversion of material.
The NPT does not have provisions allowing for the IAEA or
the UNSC to have unfettered, on demand access to any other sites in the country
that it may seek to inspect. Yet regular pronouncements from the IAEA seek to
create a public impression that Iran is under
these obligations, for example at the military base of Parchin. The public
misreporting on this issue has been quite pronounced.
According to my understanding of the provisions of the NPT, Iran has no
obligations to notify the IAEA of any enrichment sites while they are in the
construction stage, but only when they are due to commence enrichment, and that
Iran has been
in fulfilment of its obligations in this regard. In Sept 2009 Sec.State Hilary
Clinton claimed that Qom nuclear
facility had been built over three years and concealed from IAEA. Similar
charges were made at a site at Fordor on the basis that it was "too
small" to be a civil nuclear facility. No other evidence was ever put
forward. Moreover, Mohammed El Baradei, then director general of the IAEA,
confirmed that Iran notified
the IAEA of the Fordor site three days before the US did, in
complete fulfilment of its NPT obligations.
Yet current IAEA director Yukia Amanao has claimed -- and
with no specific supporting evidence: "Although now declared and currently
under safeguards, a number of facilities dedicated to uranium enrichment were
covertly built by Iran and only declared once the Agency was made aware of
their existence by sources other than Iran. This, taken together with the past
efforts by Iran to
conceal activities involving nuclear material, creates more concern about the
possible existence of undeclared nuclear facilities and material in Iran."
2. There are significant deficiencies in media
reporting on Iran's nuclear
development program as depicted by the IAEA:
There has been a politicisation of the IAEA with a decidedly
US-Israeli slant following the appointment of director Yukiya Amano: Wikileaks
exposes revealed that Amano had promised a US policy line in return for US
backing for his appointment; there has been open revolt within the IAEA by
staff members concerned that the IAEA was losing its independent status and was
uncritically endorsing US and Israeli propaganda claims about the Iranian
program; specific criticisms of IAEA reporting have been made by former IAEA
officials and former head Mohammed El Baradei.
As Flynt Leverett, former Senior Director for Middle East
Affairs at the National Security Council and U.S. Sec.State Condoleezza Rice's
personal envoy to Iran, wrote in
early 2012:
"Ever since Nobel laureate Mohamed El Baradei stepped
down as head of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in late 2009, the
United States and some
of its allies have pushed Baradei’s successor, Yukiya Amano, to ratify Western
arguments that Iran is trying
to acquire nuclear weapons."
"There are many reasons," Leverett continued,
"to question virtually every detail in the IAEA’s accounting of the
'possible military dimensions' to Iran’s nuclear
program. But, more importantly, the stories do not indicate that Tehran is
currently trying to produce nuclear weapons."
http://www.raceforiran.com/pulling-the-iaea-into-the-%E2%80%9Cattack-iran%E2%80%9D-debate-will-backfire
3. Much of the current media commentary on Iran's
nuclear program derives from a Nov 2011 report by the IAEA whose specific
claims have been shown to be either regurgitations of previously debunked false
claims or new evidentiary claims that have been found wanting by experts.
Robert Kelley, a retired IAEA director and nuclear engineer
who previously spent more than 30 years with the US Department of Energy’s
nuclear-weapons program, told the New Yorker that the IAEA report on Iran
released in November 2011 contained very little new information and that
"hundreds of pages of material appears to come from a single source: a
laptop computer, allegedly supplied to the IAEA by a Western intelligence
agency, whose provenance could not be established." All of this was old
news, as several other experts have confirmed. The laptop, obtained around
2003, contains no bureaucracy reference numbers or other supporting details
within its documents that one would expect of a government or military
development program. Rather, it contains generic material that could have been
produced by any competent intelligence agency. The laptop surfaced courtesy of
the MEK, an Iranian dissident and terrorist group with close ties to Mossad.
Yet here it was being brought up again in November 2011. The Iranians claim the
laptop is an intelligence fabrication.
In its November 2011 report, the IAEA said it had been given
"information from Member States" that in 2000, Iran had built
a "large explosive containment vessel in which to conduct hydrodynamic
experiments." That is the term generally understood in the context of the
Iranian nuclear program to mean simulations of the initial phase of a nuclear
explosion using substitutes for fissile material. The agency claimed it had
"confirmed" that the cylinder had the capacity to contain up to 70
kilograms of high explosives, based in part on a publication by a former Soviet
nuclear weapons specialist who had allegedly helped Iran build the
chamber. And it seemed to suggest that there was satellite evidence to support
the story, claiming that a building had been "constructed at that time
around a large cylindrical object" at Parchin.
But those details were rejected by former senior IAEA
inspector Robert Kelley as implausible from a strictly technical point of view.
As previously mentioned, Kelley's credentials for challenging the IAEA were
second to none. He had been project leader for nuclear intelligence at Los
Alamos National Laboratory before becoming the Director of IAEA's Action Team
for Iraq in
1992-93. He then served as director of the US Department of Energy's (DOE)
Remove Sensing Laboratory from 1996 to 1998, rejoining the IAEA to head its
Iraq Action Team again from 2001 to 2005.
Kelley told an interviewer only a few days after the report:
"You have to be crazy to do hydrodynamic explosives in a container.
There's no reason to do it. They're done outdoors on firing tables." Any
test of a nuclear weapon design would have involved "far more
explosives" than the 70 kg capacity claimed for the cylinder at
Parchin", said Kelley. The Bush administration had accused Iran of
carrying out hydrodynamic testing of nuclear weapons at Parchin as early as
2004, but on the assumption that the tests had been done outdoors, on such a
firing table - not inside an explosive chamber.
The 'foreign expert' whose publication was said to have
provided data on the containment chamber's dimensions was identified in leaks
to the news media as Vyacheslav Danilenko, a Ukrainian who had worked in a
Soviet nuclear weapons facility for most of his career, but who is known to
have specialized from the beginning in the nascent field of nanodiamond
technology unrelated to any nuclear weapons activity.
Further Right wing media claims about Danilkow and his work
have emerged throughout 2012, all of them found upon examination to be either
baseless or unlikely.
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/comment/2011/11/iran-and-the-iaea.html
http://truth-out.org/news/item/10112-how-a-nonexistent-bomb-cylinder-distorts-the-iran-nuclear-issue
http://original.antiwar.com/porter/2011/11/09/iaeas-soviet-nuclear-scientist-never-worked-on-weapons/
http://www.iranaffairs.com/.services/blog/6a00d83420523653ef00d834263e1653ef/search?filter.q=parchin
4. Uranium enrichment issues have been seriously
distorted by Western media.
In August 2012 the IAEA reported that Iran had
increased the amounts of 20%-enriched uranium, material that can be later used
as part of a weapons program, a report gleefully taken up by Western
politicians supporting sanctions and UN actions against Iran.
Unfortunately, those reports failed to note that most of the
20%-enrichment was to a metallic form making it unusable in any weapons
program.
http://www.iranaffairs.com/iran_affairs/2008/09/analysis-of-latest-iaea-report-on-iran.html
5. There are significant misunderstandings on Iran’s
obligations under the NPT, and on IAEA and UNSC rights, especially in regard to
site inspections.
The IAEA is not the "enforcer" of the NPT.
As for the demand that Iran sign the IAEA
Additional Protocol (a treaty that allows more intensive IAEA inspections), Iran is not
under obligation to do so and is not in breach of the NPT by refusing to do so.
Many nations flatly refuse to sign the Additional Protocol. Nevertheless Iran not only
voluntarily implemented the Additional Protocol for a period of about 3 years
in the past (with no evidence of any nukes found) but has regularly allowed
inspections that exceed the Additional Protocol and has offered to permanently
ratify the treaty as long as its rights under the NPT are also recognized. Thus
far, the US has
refused to recognize those NPT rights, the only barrier standing in the way of
on-demand IAEA inspections.
http://www.iranaffairs.com/iran_affairs/2008/01/iran-did-not-vi.html
6. There has been an historical amnesia in media
reporting on what have been significant acts of cooperation by Iran on its
nuclear program and in their overtures to the West.
Following 9/11, Iranians were very sympathetic to the US and
expressed their solidarity with them. Iran gave the US extensive
intelligence against al Qaeda; they offered to provide training, uniforms,
equipment, and barracks for as many as 20,000 new recruits for the nascent
Afghan military, all under US
supervision; and they assisted in the Bonn
discussions that established the makeup of the new Afghan government. All of
these were gestures of goodwill to the West. The US State Department
recommended a more formal agreement with Iran in
response but they were refused by Pres.Bush who, in early 2003, described Iran as part
of the "axis of evil". Iran had been
given a US message
in spades: "Don't waste your time because whatever you do we are only ever
interested in defeating you."
Nevertheless, in 2003, shortly after the Iraq invasion,
Iran made a
renewed offer through the Swiss government. They faxed the US with an
offer to recognize Israel, cease
funding for Hamas, and allow the US unfettered access to it's nuclear energy
sites, all this in return for a simple assurance from the US that it
would not attack or destabilize Iran. The US rejected
the offer out of hand and upbraided the Swiss for conveying the message.
In mid 2003, Iran made a
further offer to turn over five al Qaeda operatives in exchange for Washington dropping
its support for the terrorist group MEK operating in Iran. Again,
the offer was rejected. Even defeating Al Qaeda was never a priority for the US;
defeating Iran was.
And it is in this context that the US bullied
and brow beat its European allies at the 2005 NPT conference. Iran invited
the Europeans to propose a system of inspections of Iranian civil nuclear sites
-- of their own devising! -- to guarantee that weapons grade enrichment could
not take place. Under US pressure,
the Europeans refused to even discuss it.
These gestures of cooperation with the West have all been
affirmed by Flynt Leverett, Condoleezza Rice’s personal Middle
East envoy.
And then, of course, there was the 2010 offer from Iran, defeated
by the US when they
discovered that Iran was
actually seeking to cooperate with Western demands on uranium enrichment issues.
In May 2010 Brazil and Turkey
successfully negotiated with Iran to have
material from its nuclear energy program processed outside Iran. It was
great victory for everyone, or so it seemed: this was a goal long sought by the
US, a
feather in the cap for Turkey and Brazil, the
promise of diplomatic peace over Iran's nuclear
program, and, most importantly, a terrific achievement for Pres.Obama who had
written personally to both the Turkish and Brazilian governments encouraging
their initiatives.
But, whoops! The US had
boo-booed. You see, they had not expected Iran to agree
to the proposals, an especially distasteful outcome since the brouhaha was
never really about an Iranian nuclear threat to the West (there is none) but
about bringing down the Iranian leadership and installing a US client
regime.
So the Brazilian-Turkish victory had to be dragged through
the mud. The day after the success announcement Secretary of State Hillary
Clinton, testifying before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, announced
that a new package of sanctions against Iran had been
approved and would be sent to the UN Security Council later in the day. Only
hours before Clinton’s
announcement, Turkey's foreign
minister held his own press conference, unaware of Clinton's planned
bucketing:
"According to Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu, he had
been in 'constant contact' with Clinton herself and with national security
adviser James Jones, while his prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, had
face-to-face encouragement from President Obama in December and April."
Yet our media allows these positive exercises in Iranian cooperation
and US duplicity
and politicking to vanish from the public memory, as if they never existed.
7. There are significant contradictions between the
public comments by US and Israeli officials and their policy positions via the
U.N. and the IAEA against Iran. There is
a lack of recognition by our media of these contradictions and the underlying
hostility and unreasonableness of US, UN and IAEA policy positions that have
followed.
US Intelligence agencies and senior US and Israeli officials
have admitted that they see no evidence of a current Iran nuclear
weapons program but that they are concerned about Iran
developing a nuclear weapons "capability". Even former heads of
Mossad and Israel's nuclear energy program have come out and said that any
alleged Iranian nuclear weapon is years away.
President Obama (4/3/12) said: "Our assessment, which is shared by the
Israelis, is that Iran does not
yet have a nuclear weapon and is not yet in a position to obtain a nuclear
weapon without us having a pretty long lead time in which we will know if they
are making that attempt."
In April 2012 the head of the Israel Defense Forces, Lt.
Gen. Benny Gantz, told Israeli newspaper Haaretz that he doubts Iran is
currently seeking a nuclear weapon or that they will eventually decide to
pursue one.
Crippling economic sanctions have been imposed upon Iran
specifically in order to deny them the rights to develop a civil nuclear energy
program which appears to be in complete fulfilment of its NPT obligations,
sanctions imposed under the lie that Iran is in
breach of its NPT or IAEA obligations. As far as I can see, they are not.
I note also that US and Israeli foreign policy documents for
many years have repeatedly called for actions to remove the current Iranian
leadership and install one they approve of, outside any concerns about any
alleged nuclear issues, a factor that is not only relevant but central to
assessing IAEA and US-lead media reports in regard to Iran’s nuclear
program.
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article32132.htm
8. Professor O’Neil has been criticized previously
for his public claims on uranium issues and shows evidence of both a
conservative bias and a willingness to argue from an ideological position
rather than from the available facts.
For instance: “Every nuclear weapons program since and
including the US Manhattan Project has been the product of dedicated military
reactors rather than an offshoot of civilian programs” and “There is simply no
historical evidence to support the proposition that civilian nuclear reactor
programs fuel weapons proliferation.”
Which is a remarkable statement given that the thrust of US,
Israeli and IAEA statements have been that the Iranian civil nuclear energy
program is being used as a springboard to a military program.
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/opinion/nuclear-power-plants-are-not-bomb-factories/story-e6frg6zo-1225925594625
One can also assume that O’Neil’s claims (18/11) on the ABC
of an Iranian weapons program are derived almost entirely from inferences about
the refusal of Iran to allow IAEA access to its primary military site at
Parchin -- and with no affirmative evidence whatsoever to back up his claims.
It has already been pointed out that Iran is under
no legal obligation to permit such inspections as they have not signed the
additional UN protocol allowing such inspections and are they are not obliged
to do so.
Professor O’Neil cites no positive evidence for the
existence of a military nuclear weapons program.
Marko Beljac, with a PhD from Monash University, is
writing a book on nuclear terrorism and has taken Professor O’Neil to task for
his article in The Australian (18/9/10) over
some of these claims as ideologically driven rather than factually based.
http://scisec.net/?p=455
Summary remarks:
I have cited a number of credible people who have disputed
claims that Iran is in
breech of provisions of the NPT or that there is evidence of a nuclear weapons
program. These include former senior IAEA officials and US Middle East
diplomats with expertise in the field of nuclear weapons and NPT requirements.
There are also a considerable number of alternative media and political
commentators expressing the same objections.
Given the divergence of expert opinions on these contentious
issues – issues that can easily be used to justify a horrendous Middle East war
– it seems essential to me that ABC interviewees alleging NPT or IAEA
non-compliance by Iran be put on the spot and asked for actual evidence. Simply
repeating questionable media released from the IAEA or the US State Department
is hardly adequate in my view.
In future news items on alleged Iranian nuclear
irregularities or NPT failures I would respectfully request that interviewees
be questioned more closely on any sweeping claims, especially assertions for
evidence of the existence of an Iranian nuclear weapons program:
In what way has Iran been
breaching the NTP?
What specific provisions have they breeched, if any?
To what extent are you relying on IAEA announcements or
other sources of information?
What evidence do you have of an Iranian nuclear weapons
program?
Yours Sincerely
[personal details omitted]
# posted by kenj @ 19:42 
