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Excerpts from previous status reports, by subject

Removed on November 1, 2004

 

Negotiating with Iran
Following the first disclosures by the International Atomic Energy Agency that Iran had concealed nuclear work, U.S. President George W. Bush announced, in June 2003, that “the international community must come together to make it very clear to Iran that we will not tolerate the construction of a nuclear weapon in Iran.” And the international community did come together in October 2003, when foreign ministers from Britain, France and Germany traveled to Tehran and successfully extracted a series of concessions. Under this deal, Iran agreed to sign the IAEA’s Additional Protocol and to suspend uranium enrichment and reprocessing activities in exchange for future access to technology. Despite some skepticism, the Bush administration endorsed the agreement.

One year later, on October 15, 2004, the Bush administration sat down with senior officials from all G-8 countries in Washington to discuss how to get Iran to renounce its nuclear ambitions. The discussions focused on convincing Iran to suspend its effort to enrich uranium. Britain, France and Germany had reportedly fashioned a new set of inducements, including the promise to resume talks on trade, to allow Iran to import nuclear fuel, and to lift certain economic penalties on Iran that would allow it to import much-needed civilian airline parts. The willingness of the Bush administration to even consider incentives for Iran appeared to mark a shift in policy, as U.S. officials had previously demanded that Iran first renounce its nuclear ambitions before being rewarded. To avoid giving the impression that policy had changed, U.S. State Department spokesman Richard Boucher was careful to label all incentives as part of a package proposed by the Europeans, and he reiterated the U.S. position that Iran should still be referred to the U.N. Security Council based on past violations of its international obligations.

September 2004 meeting at the IAEA
After contentious back-room negotiation, the governing board of the International Atomic Energy Agency passed a resolution on September 18 that called on Iran to suspend all enrichment related activities, to renounce its plans to build a heavy water research reactor, and to provide the IAEA with access to and information on nuclear equipment and sites. Given Iran’s incomplete adherence to past pledges to freeze uranium enrichment activities, the resolution has specifically defined such activities as including “the manufacture or import of centrifuge components, the assembly and testing of centrifuges, and the production of feed material, including through tests or production at the UCF.” The UCF is Iran’s commercial-scale uranium conversion facility at Isfahan, where Iran produced some 35 kg of UF6 earlier this year. UF6 can be enriched in centrifuges to a form suitable for either reactor fuel or nuclear weapons. Should Iran fail to fulfill the requirements of the resolution by the governing board’s next meeting on November 25, the IAEA “will decide whether further steps are appropriate,” which could mean sending Iran’s nuclear file to the U.N. Security Council.
The United States, Europe and the non-aligned movement agreed on the wording of the resolution after struggling to find common ground on how best to contain Iran’s nuclear program. Still hoping for a negotiated solution, Britain, France and Germany supported censuring Iran but hoped to avoid involving the U.N. Security Council. The United States pushed for more immediate action, calling for the inclusion of a clear “trigger mechanism” that would automatically send Iran’s file to the U.N. Security Council should Iran fail to suspend work on nuclear technology that would enable it to produce fuel for nuclear weapons. Members of the non-aligned movement insisted on including language that supported Iran’s right to develop nuclear energy for peaceful use.

Iran’s enrichment and uranium conversion programs
In its September 2004 report, the International Atomic Energy Agency concluded that Iran’s account of its past laser enrichment and uranium conversion efforts had largely checked out. However, until then, the IAEA had been investigating a number of questions about the scope and success of these efforts.

The IAEA has had a difficult time understanding Iran’s past laser and centrifuge enrichment activities. In its November 2003 report, the most comprehensive and damning exposition of Iran’s secret nuclear work, the IAEA revealed that Iran had run a centrifuge enrichment program for 18 years and a laser enrichment program for 12 years—all without telling the agency. The November report also revealed that Iran received 50kg of uranium metal from a foreign supplier, along with relevant equipment, and had enriched some 30kg of the material in secret laser experiments. Though Iran initially claimed not to have enriched uranium using lasers at all, and then not to have done so much beyond 3%, inspectors eventually discovered that, in fact, the average level of enrichment achieved in these laser experiments was between 8-9% and as high as 15%.

The IAEA has also been unraveling the history of Iran’s uranium conversion experiments and the nuclear material it secretly imported in order to conduct them. In 1991, Iran illicitly imported from China nearly 2,000kg of uranium compounds, including 1,000kg of UF6. The agency’s November 2003 report catalogued the history of Iran’s extensive conversion experiments, in which Iran used uranium that had been either exempted from IAEA safeguards, illicitly imported, or previously declared as process loss. Beginning in 1981, Iran successfully produced a variety of uranium compounds in these laboratory-scale experiments, including UF6, uranium tetrafluoride (UF4), uranium dioxide (UO2) and uranium metal. These experiments allowed Iran to refine its expertise, and to apply what it learned towards work in larger facilities, especially the uranium conversion plant it has begun operating at Isfahan.

Cooperation with the IAEA
Every International Atomic Energy Agency report has also criticized Iran’s cooperation with the Agency. The August 2003 report concluded that while Iran had shown “an increased degree of cooperation…information and access were at times slow in coming and incremental.” And in its November 2003 report, the IAEA said that Iran had “failed in a number of instances over an extended period of time to meet its obligations under its Safeguards Agreement.” Despite the critical conclusions of every report, the IAEA’s resolutions have merely criticized Iran’s bad behavior. Each of the resolutions passed on Iran have been the subject of much diplomatic wrangling, which has resulted in watered down language and a clear reluctance to censure Iran for violating its international obligations.

The Parchin site
According to an analysis of satellite imagery by the Institute for Science and International Security (ISIS), Iran may be using the Parchin military complex, about 30 km southeast of Tehran, for nuclear weapon testing. The site is officially dedicated to research, development and production of ammunition, rockets and high explosives. Iraq too had used high explosive testing sites, at both Al Atheer and Al Qaqaa, to work on nuclear weaponization.