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?????????????????????????????????????????????????Wednesday, May 9, 2018
How killing the nuclear deal could make it easier for Iran to pursue the bomb in secret
Scientists at the International Atomic Energy Agency in Seiberdorf, Austria, review results from tests of nuclear material collected abroad. The agency is helping ensure Iran’s compliance with the 2015 nuclear accord that put restrictions on Iran’s nuclear program. (Joby Warrick/The Washington Post)
by Joby Warrick May 8 at 6:00 AM
VIENNA — In the three years since the start of the Iran nuclear agreement, a cluster of buildings near the Austrian capital has served as an unblinking eye over Tehran’s most sensitive factories and research labs. But perhaps not for much longer.
VIENNA — In the three years since the start of the Iran nuclear agreement, a cluster of buildings near the Austrian capital has served as an unblinking eye over Tehran’s most sensitive factories and research labs. But perhaps not for much longer.
Every day, workers arrive at the United Nations nuclear agency here to
monitor live video from inside Iran’s once-secret uranium enrichment
plants, part of an unbroken stream of data delivered by cameras and
other remote sensors installed as part of the 2015 accord.
Each week, scientists in lab coats analyze dust samples collected from
across Iran, looking for minute particles that could reveal possible
cheating.
Dispatchers track the movements of U.N. inspection teams that now work
inside Iran every day of the year, checking and rechecking known nuclear
facilities and occasionally venturing out to investigate tips about
suspicious sites elsewhere.
The scrutiny carried out by officials of the International Atomic Energy Agency is a key component of the agreement, and it is unprecedented — not just for Iran but for any country, anywhere in the world.
The Post’s Alan Sipress and Karen DeYoung explain how President Trump’s decision might affect an already tense Middle East. (Sarah Parnass, Joyce Lee/The Washington Post)
As the Trump administration considers withdrawing from the pact, the
U.N. watchdog agency is preparing for the possibility that its window
into Iran’s nuclear affairs will abruptly slam shut.
President Trump has said he will announce Tuesday
whether the United States will withdraw from the historic agreement,
which was signed by the Obama administration as well as the leaders of
Britain, France, Germany, Russia and China. While citing no evidence of
major violations by Iran, Trump has repeatedly blasted the deal as a
“disaster” while accusing Tehran of failing to live up to the spirit of
the accord.
Trump’s animus toward the pact appeared to deepen last week after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu made a dramatic television appearance
to showcase evidence about nuclear weapons research conducted by Iran a
decade before the agreement was signed. Trump asserted that the pact
was useless because Tehran cannot be trusted to keep its word. “What
we’ve learned has really shown that I’ve been 100 percent right,” Trump
said.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu describes how Iran has
continued with its nuclear capabilities during a presentation at the
Israeli Defense Ministry in Tel Aviv on April 30. (Jim
Hollander/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock)
Yet by walking away from the deal, the Trump administration may lose its
most important instrument for gauging whether Iran is telling the truth
or not, according to former U.S. and U.N. officials and experts
familiar with the IAEA’s oversight role. Many experts believe a collapse
of the agreement will trigger a suspension of the unique, wide-ranging
access accorded to the U.N. nuclear watchdog over the past three years.
In effect, by rejecting the deal as inadequate for preventing Iran from
getting the bomb, Trump could make it harder for U.S. officials to
detect a secret Iranian effort to build nuclear weapons, the former
officials and experts said.
“We know more about Iran’s program with the deal than without it,” said
former CIA director Michael V. Hayden, echoing an assessment voiced by
current Director of National Intelligence Daniel Coats during
congressional testimony earlier this year. Hayden, author of a new book accusing
the Trump White House of politicizing intelligence, said the Israeli
revelations about Iran’s past nuclear research bolster the case for
keeping the essence of the accord intact.
“The Iranians lie. They cheat,” Hayden said. “That’s why you need to have the best possible verification regime in place.”
Critics of the deal contend that its shortcomings outweigh the benefits
of the IAEA’s intrusive oversight. Some argue that the agreement is
inadequate for containing Iran’s long-term nuclear ambitions because
several key restrictions are set to be phased out in 10 to 15 years.
Others, including former officials of the watchdog group, fault the IAEA
itself, saying the agency has not been sufficiently aggressive in
demanding access to Iranian military facilities and fuller explanations
about Iran’s past nuclear weapons research.
But U.N. officials say the pact’s transparency provisions have helped
prevent war by replacing suspicions with hard facts. Yukiya Amano, the
IAEA’s director general, told the agency’s 35-nation board of governors
that Iran has complied so far with every request made by his inspectors.
A collapse of the deal, he warned, would be “a great loss for nuclear
verification.”
“The IAEA now has the world’s most robust verification regime in place
in Iran,” the Japanese diplomat said in remarks after the board meeting
in March. “As of today, I can state that Iran is implementing its
nuclear-related commitments. It is essential that Iran continues to
fully implement those commitments.”
As the world organization responsible for preventing the spread of
nuclear weapons, the U.N.-affiliated IAEA has a long history with Iran,
much of it troubled.
When Western intelligence agencies discovered that Iran was secretly
building uranium enrichment plants — one at Natanz, in 2002, and another
at an underground facility called Fordow in 2009 — the IAEA sent in its
teams to investigate. In the years that followed, the agency confronted
Iran repeatedly over what U.S. officials described as a clandestine
nuclear-weapons research program that Iran apparently ended in 2003.
Iran has consistently denied that it ever sought to acquire nuclear
weapons and says its programs are directed toward energy production and
medical research.
The IAEA was not a participant in the negotiations over the Iranian
nuclear deal, but it has been an indispensable partner in its
implementation. Since 2015, the agency’s inspectors have recorded and
certified Iran’s compliance with each of several key components of the
agreement. They confirmed, for example, that Iran had shipped out or
eliminated 95 percent of its stockpile of enriched uranium, and
dismantled or idled two-thirds of its centrifuge machines used in making
nuclear fuel. Inspectors watched as Iran poured concrete into its
partially completed nuclear reactor at Arak, bending to international
concerns that the facility could become a future source of plutonium for
nuclear bombs. They verified that Iran had halted uranium-enrichment
activities at Fordow, the underground facility originally built inside a
mountain as protection against airstrikes.
But the most demanding task for the agency’s inspection teams is the
daily monitoring of Iran’s nuclear sites. Iran has for years allowed
IAEA inspectors to visit its nuclear facilities and even granted
permission for the installation of a few video cameras. But since 2015,
the agency has enjoyed unparalleled access to every facet of Iran’s
current nuclear program, from its uranium mines to the factory where it
built its centrifuges.
Ahmadinejad listens to a technician during a visit to Natanz on April 8, 2008. (Iran Presidency Office/AP)
The new oversight duties have meant an expanded IAEA presence in Iran
itself. For the first time ever, the agency keeps a small cadre of
inspectors inside Iran every day of the year, so it can handle the
heavier workload and quickly respond to any reports about suspicious new
sites.
IAEA inspectors have roamed through a total of 190 buildings around the
country, while also making 60 “complementary access” calls — agency
jargon for visits to facilities that are not part of Iran’s declared
nuclear program.
Back at headquarters, specialists pore over terabytes of data collected
by inspectors and transmitted to the Austrian capital over secure
communications channels. In a large underground room beneath the IAEA’s
office tower, banks of TV monitors flicker with live images from inside
Iran’s sole functioning uranium enrichment plant. Computers keep tabs on
the tamper-proof electronic seals placed by IAEA officials on more than
2,000 pieces of equipment, from storage bins to uranium-processing
machines.
Each week, packages from Iran arrive at the IAEA’s laboratory complex in
Seibersdorf, a village south of Vienna flanked by towering wind
turbines and endless swaths of golden rapeseed. Some of the packets
contain samples of uranium, which are tested to ensure that Iran is
abiding by its promise to make only low-enriched fuel used in generating
electricity, and not the highly enriched material that can produce a
nuclear explosion.
Other parcels contain cloth swabs that inspectors carry with them when
making their rounds. The swabs are used to scoop up dust from inside
Iran’s nuclear facilities as well as from stair rails, window fixtures,
vehicles and other random objects. Scientists in the Seibersdorf lab use
million-dollar electronic microscopes and other sensors to scour the
swabs for the tiniest traces of plutonium or highly enriched uranium
that could point to a hidden weapons program.
Lab officials are not permitted to discuss their work publicly because
of confidentiality agreements as well as the diplomatic sensitivity
surrounding the Iran nuclear file. To ensure impartiality, the samples
that arrive in Seibersdorf are stripped of identifying information, so
the scientists never know the origins of the material they’re testing.
But,
collectively, the IAEA’s oversight provides priceless, real-time
information that can give U.S. officials confidence that Iran is
honoring its commitments — or proof that they are not — said Ernest
Moniz, a physicist and former energy secretary under the Obama
administration who helped design the Iran’s deal’s verification
mechanisms. Unlike the accord’s more ephemeral provisions, the IAEA’s
expanded oversight role is permanent under the terms of the agreement,
Moniz said.
“No other country has this kind of oversight. Iran has it forever,”
Moniz said. “I don’t think this has been fully appreciated. The IAEA has
increased its boots on the ground dramatically, and that’s being
supplemented by advanced technology. They are collecting unbelievable
amounts of data.”
Yet, even to ardent supporters of the agreement, last week’s revelations
by Israel’s prime minister suggest that the IAEA has still more work to
do.
In his televised speech from Tel Aviv, Netanyahu displayed thousands of
captured documents and computer disks that he said contained a trove of
details about “Project Amad,” Iran’s defunct weapons research program.
The materials appear to show Iranian scientists conducting feasibility
studies on the detonation of nuclear bombs and the mounting of warheads
on Iran’s largest missiles.
Netanyahu said the records prove that Iran has consistently lied about
its nuclear program when it signed the 2015 deal, and thus can’t be
trusted to live up to its current agreements. The Israeli leader has
argued that the pact should be either drastically changed — in part, to
eliminate the agreement’s sunset provisions that would allow increased
production of low-enriched uranium in the future — or completely
scrapped.
U.S. and U.N. officials have known about Iran’s pre-2003 nuclear weapons
program for more than a decade. In 2007, a major assessment by the U.S.
intelligence community concluded that Iranian leaders had ordered the
research, only to shut down the program in 2003 after the U.S. overthrow
of Iran’s archival, Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein. Technical studies
may have continued until as recently as 2009, U.S. officials have said.
Officials familiar with the Israeli revelations say the documents
contain additional details about Iran’s weapons initiative, while again
exposing Iran’s failure to come clean about its nuclear past.
“Iran has to explain it,” said Olli Heinonen, a former IAEA official who
once led the agency’s oversight mission in Iran and confronted its
leaders when the reports of secret nuclear research first came to light.
“It looks to me that Iran was not absolutely forthcoming in addressing
the concerns,” Heinonen said. “But there was political pressure to get
the agreement implemented, so they went with the light touch.”
A critic of the Iran deal, the Finnish diplomat said he is troubled by
Iran’s apparent decision to retain records from its illicit research. “A
country that has a peaceful nuclear program doesn’t need to have this
documentation,” said Heinonen, now a senior adviser on science and
nonproliferation for the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a
Washington think tank.
Technically, Iran was not required to destroy its records under the 2015
deal. But proponents of the pact agree that Iran should be compelled to
address the revelations about its nuclear past, in a formal proceeding,
led by the watchdog agency that is best positioned to get answers: the
IAEA.
“Real pressure needs to be put on the Iranians to explain the situation,
and the IAEA has to be the point of the spear,” said Moniz, the former
Energy secretary. “This is an opportunity to use the tools of the
[nuclear agreement] to apply that pressure. Unfortunately, those tools
could go away instantaneously if the president decides to walk away from
the deal.”