ArmsControlWonk.com

Warning: Even more speculative than usual.

The Iranian government has spoken: in response to the the rebuke contained in Friday’s IAEA Board of Governors resolution, Iran has defiantly announced that it will build another ten enrichment facilities:

“We had no plan to build many nuclear sites like [enrichment facility in the central city of] Natanz but it seems that the West do not want to comprehend Iran’s message of peace,” Head of the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran Ali-Akbar Salehi said.

“The West adopted an attitude toward Iran which made the Iranian government to pass the ratification on construction of ten sites similar to the Natanz enrichment facility,” he added.

Very broadly speaking, this is the sort of escalation that many of us (including yours truly) had expected. But matters may not be as simple as they seem. There is another set of possibilities.

A Good News Story in Clever Disguise?

Recall the immediate context: a dispute between Iran and the IAEA about Iran’s obligation to report its decisions to establish new nuclear facilities. The Director-General’s last report to the BoG expressed suspicion about whether there were additional facilities yet to be declared:

14. The Agency further indicated that it still had questions about the purpose for which the facility [at Qom] had been intended and how it fit into Iran’s nuclear programme. The Agency also indicated that Iran’s declaration of the new facility reduces the level of confidence in the absence of other nuclear facilities under construction and gives rise to questions about whether there were any other nuclear facilities in Iran which had not been declared to the Agency.

This mistrust ran so deep that even after the Iranian side denied having additional facilities, the IAEA followed up with a letter asking, in effect, “Are you sure? Is that your final answer?”

16. Iran stated that it did not have any other nuclear facilities that were currently under construction or in operation that had not yet been declared to the Agency. Iran also stated that any such future facilities would “be reported to the Agency according to Iran’s obligations to the Agency”. In a letter dated 6 November 2009, the Agency asked Iran to confirm that it had not taken a decision to construct, or to authorize construction of, any other nuclear facility which had not been declared to the Agency.

That’s where matters stood on November 16, the date of the report. Friday’s BoG resolution appealed to the Iranians to respond to the letter:

5. [The Board of Governors] Calls on Iran to confirm, as requested by the Agency, that Iran has not taken a decision to construct, or authorize construction of, any other nuclear facility which has as yet not been declared to the Agency;

Well, now we have an answer to that appeal, after a fashion:

Upon the Iranian government’s decree, the AEO should begin the construction of five of the enrichment facilities over the next two months.

It should also propose locations for the remaining five enrichment plants within a two-month period.

“We have determined the location of five sites upon the president’s decree. Our enrichment sites will be constructed in the heart of mountains,” Salehi said.

Press statements are not the same thing as formal notifications, but the notifications should be arriving in Vienna shortly, if they haven’t already. If five sites really have already been selected, then undeclared plans to build them have been in place for awhile. Judging by how the Iranian side has framed its activities at Qom, construction may already have been underway for some time.

One way to see it, then, is that the Iranian side has seized the opportunity to get tough by coming clean, or to come clean by getting tough. In the two-level game of international diplomacy and Iranian domestic politics, this sort of Janus-faced response may be as close to a win-win outcome as ever happens.

How Many Enrichment Sites?

Not entirely by coincidence, the question of how many Qom-like enrichment sites Iran may have planned has been the subject of some wonk-jousting lately. Writing at the Bulletin, Ivan Oelrich and Ivanka Barzashka of FAS find Qom — which is due to hold 3,000 IR-1 centrifuges — too small to serve as a standalone HEU factory. They judge Qom (a.k.a Fordow) to be capable of producing roughly enough HEU for a bomb once every four years once it is at full capacity. This underscores the possibility “that Iran has a number of similar secret facilities—along with the required uranium hexafluoride conversion plants—and that Fordow is simply the only one to have been discovered… It also is possible that Fordow was the first of several planned secret facilities, and that, with its discovery, Iran has put further plans on hold.”

(This perspective appears close to the views of Gary Milhollin and Valerie Lincy of the Wisconsin Project.)

David Albright and Paul Brannan of ISIS dispute this view, judging Qom at full capacity to be capable of producing enough HEU for one to two bombs every year, depending on how capable the IR-1 machines really are. (Earlier this year, Ali Akbar Salehi put the figure at 2.1 kg SWU.)

Oelrich and Barzashka do not specify their assumptions, but may be using a SWU figure that is too low. Going by their previous analysis, they also may be using a 25 kg HEU figure per bomb, which is almost certainly too high. So on the narrow question of Qom’s potential, put me in the ISIS camp.

Whether Iran has been planning or preparing more hidden enrichment plants and other fuel cycle facilities is a separate question, though. We’ll probably have a better understanding in the coming weeks and months.

Why Was the IAEA So Insistent?

I don’t know, but my guess is, the IAEA Secretariat and the P5+1 knew something, and were hinting to the Iranians that they ought to come clean voluntarily, before the end of the year. After all, according to a story that appeared in the New York Times earlier this fall, the November 2007 NIE “listed more than a dozen suspect locations” in Iran. So the Intelligence Community seems to have had some pretty good leads for awhile now.

Recall that some of the more intriguing passages in the Key Judgments of the NIE relate to covert sites. The NIE defined “nuclear weapons program” — the thing it judged to have stopped in Iran in late 2003 — as “nuclear weapon design and weaponization work and covert uranium conversion-related and uranium enrichment-related work.” (Emphasis added.)

“Work,” in this context, presumably includes the planning and construction of facilities. Was that work resumed by the time that the NIE was issued? The answer is hedged: “We assess with moderate confidence Tehran had not restarted its nuclear weapons program as of mid-2007.” (Emphasis added.)

Finally, the Key Judgments include a view, also hedged, that Iran would return to building covert uranium conversion and enrichment facilities if it were to decide to produce HEU for weapons:

We assess with moderate confidence that Iran probably would use covert facilities—rather than its declared nuclear sites—for the production of highly enriched uranium for a weapon. A growing amount of intelligence indicates Iran was engaged in covert uranium conversion and uranium enrichment activity, but we judge that these efforts probably were halted in response to the fall 2003 halt, and that these efforts probably had not been restarted through at least mid-2007. [Emphasis added.]

If Qom is any example, the doubts expressed in the NIE had less to do with not knowing the whereabouts of the covert facilities, and more to do with doubts about the exact purposes of the facilities under observation. On that point, we might infer from the recent IAEA report and BoG resolution that there has been less doubt lately.

Viewed in this light, Iran’s “defiant” disclosure might be a voluntary foreclosure of its ability — probably already compromised — to use a network of covert sites to build the Bomb. If that’s so, then intelligence has secured some of the margin of security that negotiations seemingly could not.

Comment [12]

[Update. I’ve come to the conclusion that the first third of this post is in error, alas. I continue to differ with the view of the New York Times that the resolution is “largely symbolic” — so far, it looks pretty consequential for a symbol — and I don’t know what the Times means by “evidence” in this context, but the resolution is not part of a noncompliance process. It appears that the legal basis for future sanctions emanating from the Security Council will be the previous finding of noncompliance.]

If you follow nonproliferation closely enough, you might have been puzzled by Saturday morning’s news reports about GOV/2009/82, the new resolution of the IAEA Board of Governors referring the matter of Iran to the Security Council for the second time in almost four years.

On one hand, writing in the Washington Post, Glenn Kessler and Joby Warrick reported that the resolution found Iran to be in “breach of its obligation” and “will be referred to the U.N. Security Council, which has the authority to enact sanctions.”

On the other hand, writing in the New York Times, Helene Cooper and William J. Broad wrote that the resolution was “largely symbolic” and “falls short of the diplomatic step of finding Iran in formal ‘noncompliance’ or violation of its nonproliferation commitments, which would provide strong evidence to bolster the drive for a new round of sanctions.”

It will come as no surprise to nonpro wonks that the Times is in error. GOV/2006/14, which referred Iran’s case to the Security Council in 2006, invoked essentially the same language and procedures as yesterday’s resolution. Neither used the word “noncompliance,” preferring “breach of obligation.” More to the point, though, both instructed the IAEA Director-General to report the resolution to the SC.

[Update. It’s not quite so clear-cut; see the comment from Mark Fitzpatrick below.]

Regular ACW readers know that GOV/2006/14 has already led to five SC resolutions, including three rounds of sanctions. As the Bard instructed us:

What’s in a name? that which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet.

(No need to dwell on what he wrote about lawyers.)

Safeguards Enforcement for Dummies

Enforcement of IAEA safeguards is a two-step process. First, the IAEA Board of Governors by a two-thirds vote must refer a case of noncompliance to the UN Security Council. Second, the SC acts as it sees fit. (It’s actually four steps, if one counts the reports of safeguards inspectors and the IAEA Director-General.) This process is defined in Article XII, Paragraph C of the Statute of the IAEA, which reads, in part:

The Board [of Governors] shall call upon the recipient State or States to remedy forthwith any non-compliance which it finds to have occurred. The Board shall report the non-compliance to all members and to the Security Council and General Assembly of the United Nations.

Purely on its own authority, the BoG can also suspend assistance, recall equipment and materials, or suspend the membership of a stubborn non-complier. But the SC, per Article 24 of the UN Charter, has “primary responsibility for the maintenance of international peace and security” conferred upon it by the Member States.

As John Carlson, the director-general of Australia’s Safeguards and Non-Proliferation Office, pointed out in the May 2009 Arms Control Today, the BoG had referred five cases of noncompliance to the Security Council at the time of writing: Iraq in 1991, Romania in 1992, North Korea in 1993, Libya in 2004, and Iran in 2006. Now there have been six referrals.

SC action is not automatic; no sanctions were imposed against Romania or Libya, whose governments were seen as actively cooperating with the IAEA. But in the other cases, it was more or less a foregone conclusion, and that’s certainly the case this time around. What it takes to get a two-thirds vote in the Board of Governors is not altogether different from what it takes to get a successful vote in the Security Council. That goes double if the sponsors of the BoG resolution include all five permanent members of the SC. The real question is what exactly the SC resolution will involve.

Preview of Coming Attractions

In practice, then, Friday’s resolution does two things. First, it fulfills a procedural requirement, as described above. Second, it makes a statement of intention. The permanent members of the Security Council are signaling that they’re going to act in that format. It’s a good question just how strong or credible that signal is, but that’s what it is — a signal. That’s how officials described it to the Post: as a “clear message” to Iran.

Glancing over the current composition of the SC, I’d guess that once a text is agreed to, Libya will vote against, Turkey will abstain (as it did in the BoG, according to Mark Heinrich of Reuters), and the rest will vote for. (The P5 and Japan voted for in the BoG.) How tough a resolution it will be is another matter; as in 2006, hints are coming from the Iranian side that NPT withdrawal could be on the table.

One final thought. For comparison to the Iran resolutions, see the very gentle GOV/2004/18, which referred Libya’s noncompliance to the SC “for information purposes only.” It used the word “noncompliance” and even mentioned Article XII, Paragraph C by name. The irony is, GOV/2004/18 was largely symbolic. GOV/2009/82, for better and for worse, is not.

Update. In another echo of 2006, Iranian officials are announcing the suspension of voluntary cooperation with the IAEA.

Update. Mark Fitzpatrick writes:

[T]he NYT article wasn’t wrong in reporting the absence of a Board finding of noncompliance, as was the case in the 24 Sept. 2005 resolution (GOV/2005/77). The first operative clause of that resolution said: “Finds that Iran’s many failures and breaches of its obligations to comply with its NPT Safeguards Agreement, as detailed in GOV/2003/75, constitute non compliance in the context of Article XII.C of the Agency’s Statute.” The Feb 2006 resolution didn’t include this language because the only purpose was to forward to the UNSC a noncompliance finding that had already been made. This time I believe the Board should have made a similar explicit finding of noncompliance, using that term. I expect that the drafters omitted it in order to get a larger number of yes votes, and to try to preserve some (very) small prospect of a deal on the TRR fuel.

— Mark Fitzpatrick · Nov 29, 04:45 AM ·

Thanks to Mark for this important clarification. Whether it makes a great material difference is another question, since Iran is already in the dock of the Security Council. Perhaps, though, we should add this distinction to our qualms about how strong a signal this resolution really is.

Update. Another gesture of defiance.

Comment [13]

The Iran-IAEA LEU-for-TRR-fuel deal is running out of time, President Obama says. And as the LEU-TRR deal goes, it’s pretty safe to say, so goes the West’s preferred strategy of engagement and de-escalation of tensions.

This is just the latest episode in the month-long miniseries, “Negotiating over the Airwaves.”

Matters are actually looking up a bit since the low point of early November (see LEU-TRR: Dialogue of the Deaf, November 3, 2009). Around that time, IAEA DG ElBaradei went public with his role, telling Roger Cohen of the International Herald Tribune that Presidents Obama and Ahmadinejad “are talking through me,” but “total distrust” had led Iran to insist on “guarantees” and simultaneous swaps of LEU and TRR fuel. The latter change would eliminate the benefits of the deal from the perspective of the P5+1, especially the Western parties, since Iran would retain enough LEU for breakout.

Escrow

One way out of the impasse, ElBaradei suggested to Cohen, was an escrow proposal:

“There are a lot of ideas,” ElBaradei told me. “One is to send the material” — Iran’s uranium — “to a third country, which could be a friendly country to Iran, and it stays there. Park it in another state, then later bring in the fuel. The issue is to get it out, and so create the time and space to start building trust.”

ElBaradei elaborated further during a November 6 appearance on Charlie Rose, suggesting that Turkey could play the escrow role:

[The] IAEA will take custody of the material when it goes back until it comes back to Iran. So there is a lot of built-in guarantees. But the Iranians still would like to see the material stay in Iran until they get the fuel.

Well, that will not diffuse the crisis, because to get the material out of Iran will diffuse this perception that Iran has material that could be used for nuclear weapon. It will give Barack Obama the space, you know, to negotiate in a calmer environment.

I have been proposing — and everybody has been trying to be creative — I have been proposing to get the material into a third country. Turkey, for example, a country where Iran has full trust, you know, and keep it there until they get the fuel.

Shortly afterward, unnamed U.S. officials told the New York Times that they had “all but lost hope” that Iran would accept this idea.

Fuel Swaps

On November 9, the Iranian media took Tehran’s position public. It consists of two simultaneous swaps of LEU and fuel involving 400 kg LEU each, something well short of the Geneva agreement-in-principle or the Vienna compromise draft:

Sources close to nuclear negotiations told Press TV on Sunday that the proposal would envisage a two-staged, simultaneous exchange under which the UN nuclear watchdog, for each phase, seals 400 kg of Tehran’s low enriched uranium (LEU) inside the Iranian territory until the 20 percent enriched uranium required by the research reactor is delivered to the exchange site.

According to an anonymous Iranian source quoted by ISNA, by unveiling the escrow idea, ElBaradei was trying to “take advantage” of an upcoming visit by President Ahmadinejad to Turkey in hopes of reviving a compromise proposal that Tehran had already rejected, and would not revisit.

Glimmers of Light

If you are inclined to think that the LEU-TRR agreement is a good idea, the good news is that fuel-swap and escrow are compatible, providing both sides with an additional measure of reassurance. Just for example, instead of sending its LEU straight to Russia all at once, Iran can park it on Turkish soil, where a friendly government will be in power for the foreseeable future. Once fresh TRR fuel arrives, the Iranian LEU would move on to Russia, where it would be reflagged. Exchanging the TRR fuel for the LEU in phases ought to be possible — in Turkey. That’s one idea, anyway. (I’m not claiming that this proposal has been discussed.)

Optimists can take heart, too, from small signs of movement. During the Ahmadinejad visit to Ankara, the Turkish Foreign Minister told Bloomberg that the escrow idea was under discussion. In a November 9 press conference in Turkey that aired on national TV in Iran, Ahmadinejad made positive comments about Turkish involvement, comparing it to existing arrangements for natural gas exports. He added that Iran was now in a position to export “surplus” nuclear fuel.

The next day, a newspaper considered close to the office of the Supreme Leader reasserted the Iranian position, but then allowed that even if 1,200 kg LEU were to leave Iran, over 500 kg would remain.

In a televised address on November 11, Ahmadinejad added a new rationale for LEU export, telling Iranians that “Iran’s nuclear conditions are stabilized and we’ve entered the phase of nuclear interaction and cooperation,” extending even to “Iran’s contribution to a world fuel bank.”

Just yesterday, Turkey’s Energy Minister told journalists that his country is ready to store Iran’s LEU. That’s where matters stand for now, with Iran’s leaders seemingly negotiating with public opinion or with each other to find their way to a deal. The IAEA Board of Governors, which must approve the deal, meets for the last time this year on November 26. That’s the last stop before this train enters a long, dark tunnel.

Update: Edited for clarity.

Comment [16]

Well, I guess Mark Hibbs isn’t going to be getting a building pass to the VIC.

That VIC, of course, is the Vienna International Center, home to the IAEA. Hibbs has a long piece on the vicious infighting within the IAEA over whether to release information collected by the IAEA documenting alleged weaponization activities by Iran (“Iran plant disclosure may prompt IAEA to focus on weapons data,” Nucleonics Week 50:39, October 1, 2009, pp 1, 12-14).

Although the proximate cause of the fight is one or more of three documents drafted by the Department of Safeguards and disputed by Department of External Relations and Policy Coordination (EXPO), Hibbs details how this particular fight is the culmination of a series of disputes that reflect the profound differences in background, mission and temperament:

In the interest of leadership continuity, some delegates to the IAEA General Conference held last month said that IAEA Director General Mohamed ElBaradei, who leaves the IAEA at the end of November, should raise the Iran weaponization allegations at the November board meeting before he is succeeded by Yukiya Amano, a Japanese diplomat. “If ElBaradei takes the initiative on this it will be easier for Amano to manage it afterwards,” one delegate said.

During preparations by the IAEA and the board for a routine board meeting held last month, sources close to the IAEA said that senior officials in two departments, responsible for verification and diplomacy, respectively, had strongly disagreed over whether data obtained by the IAEA concerning alleged nuclear weaponization activities by Iran is authentic. That disagreement, the sources suggested, prevented the IAEA secretariat from reporting the allegations in detail to the board in September.

[snip]

Officials at the Department of External Relations and Policy Coordination, or Expo, which is the diplomatic arm of the agency, have raised concerns that evidence may be faked, as Iran has charged.

Both IAEA departments are routinely involved in collective decision making about what the IAEA reports on a quarterly basis to the board of governors about an ongoing investigation into Iran’s nuclear program. That probe was prompted in 2003 by IAEA findings that Iran had repeatedly failed to disclose nuclear activities.

In recent years the two departments have differed about how to handle sensitive allegations that member states have been engaged in activities that would constitute safeguards violations. According to officials from IAEA board member states, these cases included South Korea (NW, 2 Dec. ’04, 12) and, last year, Syria. After the US and Israel in 2008 claimed that Syria had built an undeclared reactor, Expo officials argued that the IAEA had no mandate to request a special inspection in Syria; officials in other departments disagreed (NW, 9 Oct. ’08, 4).

Since 2003, when the IAEA determined that evidence brought forth by the US suggesting Iraq had resumed nuclear weapons work was fabricated, officials at Expo and at the Office of the Director General have been wary that the US has tried to manipulate the IAEA during its investigation of Iran, according to officials from IAEA states.

Golly, the IAEA can’t enjoy having its linens washed in public.

Safeguards v. EXPO is a little like the Beatles or the Stones, Blur or Oasis, and — where I grew up — Cubs or Cardinals. (For the record: Beatles, Blur, Cubs.) The two bodies are represented by two, um, strong-willed figures: Olli Heinonen, a Finn, and Tariq Rauf, a Pakistani-born Canadian.

On the other hand, this is more serious than normal, healthy sparring. Internal dissension is the predictable result of suppressing information that deeply divides the Agency between Safeguards and EXPO. Having a Director-General with one foot out the door — note that Hibbs reports ElBaradei isn’t back in Vienna until October 5 — doesn’t help, either.

Long knives and leaks

The ongoing war between Safeguards and EXPO is quite nasty. You remember the allegations that Tariq Rauf was a Russian spy? I don’t place any credence in such allegations. I am uncomfortable even mentioning them because they seem so obviously intended to slander by those who bring them up. But the fact is, when you hear cracks about someone being handled from Moscow Centre, you know the long knives are out.

Nasty internal fights also produce lots of leaks.

After the initial rounds of reports by Reuters Louis Charboneau and AP’s George Jahn that a report on Iran’s alleged nuclear weapons experiments “has been sitting in a drawer” at the IAEA “for close to a year,” the IAEA issued a strongly worded rebuttal.

Not long after, a “Vienna-based diplomatic source close to the IAEA” told Gareth Porter that the “documents … have not met [ElBaradei’s] rigorous standards of evidence.”

Golly, I wonder which side that might be.

Now, someone has provided Hibbs “some information” on the document in question. Some very, very specific information:

Earlier this month, Platts was provided some information given by IAEA states to the agency on Iran’s alleged R&D activities. If the information is authentic, it would imply that since the mid-1980s and until a few years ago, Iran’s civilian nuclear energy development program, including its uranium enrichment program, has at times been linked with organizations and individuals in Iran involved in carrying out nuclear weaponization studies, experiments, and procurement work.

The information obtained by the IAEA establishes a chronology of both alleged military and civilian nuclear activities and procurement beginning in 1984 until the middle of this decade. The information is specific to locations, organizations, and individuals in Iran. Some data investigated by the IAEA suggests that Iran’s top political leadership was apprised of certain activities and that some activities that would be appropriate for a nuclear weapons research program appear to have coincided with acute concern about external military threats faced by Iran. The data also appears consistent with US intelligence conclusions that by about 2003, Iran had shelved nuclear weapons-related activities.

Platts has agreed not to reveal any details of these allegations. The evidence is included in two official IAEA confidential documents compiled by the Department of Safeguards. The data was derived from numerous sources, including information that the IAEA obtained on its own in Iran and that some officials believe to be authentic, according to sources. Sources close to the matter said last month that the IAEA’s information on alleged weaponization activities goes beyond data previously obtained by US intelligence from a laptop computer in Iran and thereafter provided to the IAEA. The authenticity and significance of the laptop data has been widely debated, both inside and outside the IAEA, sources said.

Golli, I wonder which side that might be.

Comment [4]

There has been a lot of back-and-forth on the blog, especially in the comments, about the ongoing revelation of Iran’s enrichment facility near Qom. A couple of points:

1. Iran has unequivocally violated its safeguards obligations

James Acton laid this out in exquisite detail. The short version is this:

US officials said they new about the facility for “several years” and that construction began “before” March 2007. If ISIS is right about the identification, satellite images suggest tunneling began prior to March 25, 2005.

At the time Iran began construction of the facility, therefore, it was obligated to notify the IAEA “as soon as the decision to construct, to authorize construction or to modify has been taken.”

It was only in in March 2007 — after Iran began construction on its undeclared facility — that Iran attempted to unilaterally alter the Subsidiary Arrangement to its safeguards agreement. Such an alteration requires consent of both parties and the IAEA has been screaming to high-heaven that it does not consent as I blogged at the time.

Iran also seems to have tried a novel argument — that it never submitted the subsidiary arrangement to its parliament, the Majlis. But, as James points out, “Iran—like every other state—modifies its Subsidiary Arrangements regularly, without asking for parliamentary ratification.”

Any way you look at it, Tehran is in violation of its safeguards agreement. Furthermore, the manner in which the facility was constructed and then revealed, clearly suggests that Iran had no intention to declare the facility — until it was clear that the jig was up.

2. The location of the facility itself is the matter of some debate.

The United State only noted that the facility is “near the city of Qom” — although subsequent press reporting notes that the facility is about 100 miles from Tehran.

ISIS has zeroed in on a facility; their guess is as good as mine. It is worth noting that we shouldn’t expect any overt nuclear signatures in the images — the intelligence community monitored the site because it was suspicious, but didn’t conclude it was nuclear until they received some other information. So, externally, the site will just look suspicious.

Unless Washington, Tehran, Vienna, or the like confirm “that’s it,” we’re just guessing. It is fun, though.

3. Where do we go from here?

I suspect the Iranians will allow the IAEA to inspect the facility, but they will continue to resist the Additional Protocol, which would give the IAEA considerably more access to other suspect sites, and Code 3.1 of their Subsidiary Arrangement.

They will probably start digging another hole in the ground someplace else — assuming they weren’t digging multiple facilities. Welcome to enrichment whack-a-mole where, if you miss, Iran gets the bomb.

Comment [17]

Today’s The letter from Iran to the IAEA is indeed a worrying development. As Jeffrey points out, our worst fears have been realized. Iran has – using the fact that IAEA inspectors cannot venture beyond declared strategic points – constructed a new enrichment facility. National technical means combined with human intelligence, however, seems to have averted the worst outcome, the establishment of a parallel fuel cycle.

However, two serious questions remain:

First, the unclassified US talking points state that the facility would be capable of producing about a weapons worth of material per year. A 3,000 centrifuge facility using Iran’s antiquated IR-1 centrifuges would be able to produce about one and a half weapons worth of high enriched uranium per year (39 kilograms with tails set to 0.4 per cent and 34 kilograms with tails set to 0.3 per cent). If equipped with more advanced centrifuges, the facility becomes quite lethal. The last generation of SNOR designs, for instance, if installed in Qom, could easily produce up to 80 kilograms worth of weapons grade uranium per year. The centrifuges would require little room, about 30 meters square, and draw very little power.

In practice, the facility would probably have three product areas: one for low enrichment, one for intermediate enrichment, and one for enrichment up to weapons grade. In a later briefing, US White House officials said the size of a facility would be about right “for a bomb or two a year”. They also said that the facility was “very heavily protected, very heavily disguised”.

Second, the facility would need to be supplied between 18 and 40 metric tons of natural uranium hexafluoride gas per year. An attempt to divert this from Esfahan, Iran’s only declared conversion facility, would entail a diversion of about seven to 16 per cent of its total capacity. I don’t have to do MUF calculations on that. A diversion that big would, with an extremely high probability, be detected by the IAEA. Indeed, I almost dare to say that detection is assured. This means that Iran would need to set up a clandestine conversion facility somewhere in order to bypass safeguards. There is nothing in the US speaking notes on that. But it seems like that the US intelligence community is keeping an eye on this.

Finally, we are definitely looking at a safeguards violation. It’s worth recalling that Iran did upgrade its subsidiary arrangements to oblige them to report facilities to the IAEA when they were at the design stage. They did this in 2003. They unilaterally pulled out of this arrangement in 2007. As James Acton correctly points out, the arrangement entered into force through simple exchange of letters. As in any contract, the principle pacta sunt servanda prevails (just put that term in Google).

A state can no more pull out of a contract than you can get out of, say, a mobile phone contract before it expires. It takes two parties to terminate an agreement. And the IAEA never accepted Iran’s withdrawal.

Not that it matters. It would seem like construction started at some time before March 2007. That is, at a time when even Iran itself considered itself bound by Code 3.1.

This is going to be very difficult to explain away, even by Iran’s highly talented spin-doctors.

Comment [52]

Six bucks or not, Andreas Persbo and Mark Hibbs have a must read profile of outgoing IAEA Director-General Mohamed ElBaradei in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists:

The IAEA after ElBaradei. As ElBaradei’s tenure reaches its close, a deep and troubling divide has opened up on the IAEA Board of Governors between advanced nuclear states, including most of the states with nuclear weapons, and developing and non-aligned IAEA member states that make up a majority of the membership. On highly publicized issues such as Iran and Syria, consensus—essential to the demonstration of firm political will by the board—has evaporated. Once, decision making had taken place in a climate of unanimity. But after the IAEA’s confrontation with the United States over Iraq and the Iranian nuclear program, sources say, the willingness of board members to compromise on critical issues has disappeared. A few sources assert that ElBaradei contributed to the loss of board consensus by hammering away on the need for fairness and equity in international nuclear matters—such as the nuclear weapon states responsibility to disarm as called for in the NPT. But most sources—including some former U.S. diplomats—tell us that it was the Bush administration’s unilateral approach to issues that poisoned many board deliberations, not actions taken by ElBaradei. Others blame the lack of boardroom agreement on the failure of member states to adjust to a multipolar world after the Cold War’s superpower standoff ended.

[snip]

When the Board of Governors began looking for a successor to ElBaradei last fall, most advanced nuclear states deliberately sought a candidate who would scale back the IAEA’s ambitions, diplomats from these countries tell us. They settled on Yukiya Amano, Japan’s ambassador to the IAEA, a career diplomat not known for taking risks or assuming a high profile. Most nonaligned and developing countries supported Abdul Samad Minty, a South African nuclear diplomat who was intensely opposed by most advanced nuclear members. Unlike previous board elections, the 2009 contest was acrimonious and Amano was elected in June by a mere one-vote majority.

In July, Amano tried to reassure member states that didn’t endorse him that he would heed their interests and that he wouldn’t emphasize the nonproliferation agenda of advanced nuclear countries to the detriment of other states’ development goals. The negative reception by developing states to ElBaradei’s fuel-cycle initiative underscores just how many of these countries have a deepseated fear that additional nonproliferation initiatives are intended to prevent them from enjoying the benefits of nuclear technology. It will be difficult for Amano to restore consensus, but if the IAEA is to fulfill its current mission—to say nothing of additional responsibilities—rebuilding trust on the board must be his top priority.

Comment [14]

Just a short note from Amman about the IAEA report on Iran …

In February, after the last IAEA DG report came out, I warned readers not to buy IAEA DG Mohamed ElBaradei’s analysis that “the pace of installing and bringing centrifuges into operation [in Iran] has slowed quite considerably since August…”

Quite the opposite. I hypothesized that Iran was accelerating installation by working on many cascades at once. That meant, in the short term, Iran might bring fewer cascades on-line, but that in the long-term they would bring cascades on-line in big bunches:

… I suspect the Iranians are actually scaling up their installation work. Here is my hypothesis:

Initially, the Iranians were building one cascade at a time, like a succession of small art projects. They had limited experience installing cascades and probably a small number of trained personnel. So, in the Board Reports, one would see a pattern: a few cascades, one or two under vacuum and a handful under installation. In the next report, the cascades under vacuum testing would have become operational, while a few more of the ones under installation had graduated to vacuum testing.

Now, Iran seems to have shifted to mass assembly. Installation on all the cascades in the second module has proceeded more or less simultaneously. So instead of small, but steady, increases in the number of centrifuges, I would expect the installation to resemble a step function in the future — with each increase being relatively large. Hence, the nine cascades about to brought into operation.

Looking at the IAEA report, and the chart I created, I think it is pretty clear that my hypothesis is correct: The Iranians are going faster now.

Comment [12]

Cross-posted from Verification, Implementation and Compliance.

The monitors have been switched off. The cameras are being removed from their mounts, and the seals are broken. The guesthouse just off the main site no longer houses the IAEA three-person team or the four-person US experts group. By now, the equipment is probably being packed into boxes by the former North Korean hosts, after which it will be carefully catalogued and transferred to storage in some building on the sprawling Yongbyon site. There, it will gather dust until the next time inspectors visit the facility. That is, if there will be a next time.

North Korea threatens to restart the facility, and there have been some educated guesses as to how fast this could be done. These guesses range from a couple of weeks, to six months, to possibly longer. Undeniably, it will take a year to get the entire facility back in order again, but some critical processes, such as the reprocessing of spent fuel, might get up and running by the summer of 2009. And this is possibly why the Russian Foreign Minister is about to visit Pyongyang quite soon, and why the Chinese are placing frantic phone calls to Washington DC.

But what are the North Korean’s required to do to get the plant up and running again? Despite wishes to the contrary, the agreed minute on disablement was never released to the wider arms control community. However, some details were nevertheless leaked, quite possibly since some involved principals on the US side felt that the disablement steps were wholly inadequate.

The first disablement action was to unload the 5MWe reactor, and transfer spent fuel to the cooling pond. This action does not appear to have been completed. The North Korean’s would now speed up their unloading operations, and transfer the remaining spent fuel rods to the cooling pond. It is possible that they would then ask the director of the Fuel Manufacturing plant to transfer the fresh load of fuel (pictured) to the GCR for reloading.

However, a number of immediate tasks would need to be completed before then. First, the reactor’s director would need to instruct his people to repipe the secondary cooling system and, obviously, rebuild the cooling tower, or jury-rig the system somehow. This is not likely to be completed before summer, so do not expect to see steam rising over Yongbyon until autumn. Naturally, the construction of the tower can be tracked by satellite. The reactor also needs to have its control rod mechanism reconnected.

At the reprocessing facility, work may progress slightly faster. The drive mechanism between the spent fuel receiving building and the hot cells need to be reconnected, and two steam lines would need to be re-attached and pressure-tested. Moreover, the drive mechanism for fuel cask transfers needs to be replaced, as well as some hot-cell doors. After these tasks are completed, the reprocessing facility is mostly ready for action. This can be done fairly soon, possible before July. The start of a reprocessing campaign can be detected through the release of radionuclides into the atmosphere.

The Fuel Fabrication Plant has also undergone some ‘disablement’. In order to get the plant back in operation, the site director needs to reinstall all three uranium ore concentrate dissolver tanks, all seven uranium conversion furnaces, metal casting furnaces and the vacuum system, and eight machining lathes. Again, this is something that can be done in a matter of months.

The pressing question is, of course, what happens next? The ejection of IAEA monitors and US experts will lead to a substantial degradation in knowledge of ground truth. While the North is unlikely to substantially add to its fissile material stockpile in 2009, larger scale production may be likely in the coming year. Of course, a new nuclear test cannot be ruled out. It’s very likely, even, that the test site director has already received instructions to elevate his level of readiness.

Personally, I find it very difficult to see any easy way out of this predicament.

Comment [19]

I’ve been struggling to say something witty about the race to succeed Mohamed ElBaradei as IAEA Director-General.

Mark Heinrich at Reuters sums it up pretty well:

The International Atomic Energy Agency failed to agree on a new chief on Friday, with Japanese frontrunner Yukiya Amano falling one vote short of the required two-thirds majority.

He consistently outpolled South Africa’s Abdul Samad Minty in five rounds of voting by the nuclear watchdog’s board of governors. But neither was seen as broad-based enough to replace Mohamed ElBaradei, who steps down in November after 12 years.

So, instead, I just made baseball cards for the candidates. Enjoy

Comment [24]