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Iran Is Challenged over Nuclear Program
By David E. Sanger
International Herald Tribune
February 22, 2008The International Atomic Energy Agency said Friday that it had confronted Iran for the first time with evidence supplied by the United States and other countries that strongly suggested the country had experimented with technology to make a nuclear weapon, but that Iranian officials dismissed the documents obtained from an Iranian scientist as "baseless and fabricated."
The exchange was contained in an 11-page report in which the UN agency painted a mixed picture of Iran's activities, saying it had answered a number of longstanding questions about its nuclear activities but continued to defy the United Nations Security Council by refusing to halt the enrichment of uranium. Still, the amounts of uranium that the agency reported that Iran has produced so far was small - roughly a tenth of the amount that would be required to produce enough fuel for a single nuclear bomb.
The agency's report was published at a time when the Bush administration's efforts to increase greatly the pressure on Iran are in enormous disarray.
A National Intelligence Estimate published in early December concluded, to the surprise of many in the White House, that Iran had suspended its work on weapons design in late 2003, apparently in response to growing international pressure. That report immediately undercut President George W. Bush's effort, in his last year in office, to rally other nations to impose harsh financial sanctions on Iran for continuing to produce uranium fuel. Russia and China, both of which have deep commercial relationships with Iran, have made clear they would not go along with severe sanctions, and a watered-down set of new sanctions is now headed back to the Security Council.
U.S. allies in Europe have expressed puzzlement about the intelligence estimate, and some have suggested its timing was intended to reduce the chances that Bush could take military action against Iran's nuclear sites in coming months, a notion intelligence officials deny. In recent weeks, the director of U.S. national intelligence, Mike McConnell, told Congress he now has regrets about how the intelligence estimate was presented, saying it had failed to emphasize that Iran is moving ahead with the hardest part of any bomb project: producing the fuel. Designing a crude weapon is considered a far easier task.
It was the evidence that Iran was secretly working on such a design for many years that is now at the heart of the confrontation between Iran and the IAEA, which is based in Vienna.
Since 2005, the nuclear agency has urged the United States and other countries to allow it to confront Iran with evidence obtained on a laptop computer that once belonged to an Iranian technician with access to the country's nuclear program. But Washington refused until a few weeks ago, and only agreed on Feb. 15, the report said, to allow original documents to be shown to the Iranians. In the report issued Friday, the agency described some of that evidence in public for the first time, "all of which the Agency believes would be relevant" to research and development of nuclear weapons.
The most suspicious-looking document was a diagram showing what appeared to be the development of a warhead. "This layout has been assessed by the agency as quite likely to be able to accommodate a nuclear device," the IAEA wrote. But that does not prove it was a nuclear warhead, and Iran argued that its missile program used "conventional warheads only."
The report referred to other documents drawn from the laptop - though the source of the material was never mentioned - that included documents describing how to test "high-voltage detonator firing equipment" and technology to fire several detonators at once, which is required to trigger a nuclear reaction by forcing a nuclear core to implode. The report also described work on whether a detonation could be triggered in a 400-meter-deep shaft from a distance of 10 kilometers, or about 6 miles, leading to suspicions that the Iranian scientists were already thinking about nuclear testing. But it is unclear whether the shaft would have been wide enough for a nuclear weapon.
In a briefing for reporters and nuclear experts Friday, a senior IAEA official said that the agency had reached no independent conclusions about whether the documents added up to an effort to build a nuclear weapon, or whether those efforts were suspended more than four years ago, as the National Intelligence Estimate concludes.
"At this point in time we don't make any conclusion" about the documents, the official said.
David Albright, a former weapons inspector who runs the Institute for Science and International Security, said: "The issue now is whether this is symptomatic of a comprehensive nuclear weapons effort, or just individual projects. Is it part of a plan to design and develop a weapon that can fit on a nuclear missile? And if so, why are so many pieces missing?"
UN council weighs sanctions
The Security Council has begun formal consideration of a new resolution on Iran's nuclear program that would impose restrictions on cargo to and from Iran, travel bans, the freezing of assets for people involved in the program and tightened monitoring of Iranian financial institutions, Warren Hoge reported from the United Nations, New York.
Britain and France introduced the measure Thursday but said they would leave it open for "further substantive comments" from other council members next week before pushing for a vote in March.
The tactic was adopted to meet objections from the council members Indonesia, Libya, South Africa and Vietnam. They said they wanted to await the conclusions of the report by Mohamed ElBaradei, director general of the IAEA, which was made public in Vienna on Friday, before committing themselves to a final text.
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