Nuclear Inspectors Have Snazzy New Tools to Catch Iran Cheating

The catch: Iran gets to approve which ones the IAEA can use.

BY ELIAS GROLL-FEBRUARY 4, 2016

On the heels of Iraq’s defeat in the 1991 Gulf War, inspectors with the International Atomic Energy Agency returned to Baghdad with a mandate from the U.N. Security Council to find and destroy the country’s illicit nuclear weapons program. What they found astonished them: Left unchecked, Iraq had hoped to have a bomb by the end of the year.

IAEA inspectors had frequently visited Iraq throughout the 1980s, touring the country’s nuclear facilities and checking to see whether Baghdad’s declarations to the Vienna-based agency were complete. While some within the agency harbored suspicions about Iraq’s intentions, the IAEA failed to grasp the true extent of Saddam Hussein’s nuclear program. Iraq used a campaign of deceit and deception to clandestinely acquire the tools, materials, and knowledge necessary to construct a nuclear weapon. At the same time, IAEA officials were invited for carefully choreographed visits to sites such as the Tuwaitha research facility, a center for the weapons program. The officials left thinking that Iraq was far from attaining a bomb — a serious miscalculation that wasn’t corrected until after the first Gulf War.

Today, the Iraq experience weighs heavily on the minds of the IAEA officials charged with a new, even higher-stakes test: verifying that neighboring Iran is living up to its commitments under a historic nuclear deal inked last year. It’s a task that grants the IAEA a central role in determining the outcome of President Barack Obama’s foreign policy legacy. Moreover, the IAEA’s ability to detect a clandestine Iranian nuclear program — if Tehran decides to restart one — represents a crucial variable in whether the Middle East will see yet another major war.

Hanging over the entire effort will be the agency’s little-known failures in Iraq. In the 1990s, agency inspectors found that Iraq had secretly built industrial-scale uranium enrichment facilities and had made significant progress on nuclear weapons designs. Iraqi nuclear engineers, the IAEAfound, had hoped to have a first weapon built by 1991. While Israel had bombed the Osirak reactor in 1981, it did little to set back the broader nuclear program.

To eliminate Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, the IAEA overhauled its policies and aggressively sought out clandestine facilities. The agency used explosives to destroy more than 500,000 square feet of Iraqi facilities, shipped nuclear material out of the country, and carted equipment back to its Vienna headquarters.

By 2003, when the United States invaded Iraq to eliminate its purported WMD stocks, the agency could claim a bitter victory: It had fulfilled its mission to eliminate them, but Saddam’s ability to persuade the West that he still possessed an active nuclear program prompted war all the same.

The soul-searching triggered by the terrifying discovery of Iraq’s quest for the bomb remains a touchstone for those charged with overseeing Iran’s nuclear program today. “The tools that we had were not sufficient to expose undeclared nuclear activities,” said Tero Varjoranta, the deputy director general and head of the Department of Safeguards at the IAEA. Since then, according to Varjoranta, the agency has embraced new technologies like environmental sampling — capable of detecting minute traces of nuclear material — and satellite imagery analysis to better detect clandestine nuclear programs. It also has more power to do so, courtesy of the 1997 Additional Protocols — which Iran has agreed to abide by — allowing far more intrusive inspections.

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