VIENNA
| EVERYTHING TO GIVE: Iranian women register as volunteers to act as a human shield to protect Iran’s nuclear facilities in Bushehr, southern Iran, 1,000 kilometers (620 miles) south of Tehran. Thousands of Iranians have been signing up as volunteers in case of a military attack on one of the country’s key nuclear facilities. | |
The five major powers with nuclear arsenals – the United States, Russia, China, Great Britain, and France – are all signatories of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, which binds them to guarantees monitored by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).
India and Pakistan, which have both openly tested nuclear bombs, and Israel, which is thought by experts to have nuclear weapons as well, are not subject to IAEA inspections because they have not signed the treaty.
Analysts remain divided as to whether North Korea’s efforts to develop nuclear weapons have yet produced concrete results.
Iran claims that its nuclear program is entirely oriented toward generating energy and says it is willing to accept inspections, but the United States in particular has asserted that Iran is trying to buy time to build a bomb and has demanded that it give up all its uranium enrichment activities.
Benn Tennenbaum, an expert at the Federation of American Scientists, thinks Iran will need “several years” to develop a bomb if they only have the gas centrifuge program that is known to be in place. Even if it is fairly-well monitored, he said, “they still have the ability to divert some material,” in which case it would take “a few years” to gather enough high-grade uranium to make a bomb.
But he added: “If they have a separate program, they would probably do it very quickly.” And such a program would not be subject to inspection.
“The IAEA is not a judge of the Non-Proliferation Treaty,” explained Mark Gwozdecky, an IAEA spokesman. “We monitor countries’ activities – if there are compliance issues, they are referred to the UN Security Council.” In early 2003, Pyongyang informed the United Nations of its withdrawal from the treaty and expelled IAEA inspectors, leading the agency to send the case of North Korea to the Security Council.
South Korea has recently admitted that it carried out plutonium experiments banned by the treaty.
After the first Gulf War in 1991, the United Nations extended extraordinary powers to IAEA and UN inspectors (UNMOVIC) to monitor Iraq’s weapons-related activities.
And Libya’s case was also referred to the UN but only to provide information, as Tripoli renounced all weapons of mass destruction programs at the end of 2003.
But there have also been good surprises, Gwozdecky said.
After the fall of Ceausescu, Romania’s new leaders alerted the United Nations to possibly suspect activities, while Argentina and Brazil both renounced any nuclear ambitions before signing the non-proliferation accord.
South Africa has been described by the IAEA as a “model of cooperation” for its supervised nuclear disarmament at the end of apartheid in 1993 to 1994.
Kazakhstan, Belarus, and Ukraine all agreed to ban any stockpiling of nuclear weapons on their national territory following the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991.
Experts also note that several highly-industrialized nations – Germany and the Netherlands, for example – have a sufficiently developed technological infrastructure to quickly develop nuclear weapons if they so decided.
“I would be concerned about Japan,” Tennenbaum said. “They have a very large nuclear reactor complex and have enormous stockpiles of spent fuel, more than enough to build many bombs. But they certainly don’t have the desire to build it right now.”
The UN nuclear watchdog postponed Friday discussing Iran's nuclear program as member states were still debating a resolution on how to deal with Tehran's atomic ambitions, an IAEA spokesman said.
"We hope in the next few days to deal with this item," Espinosa Cantellano said, according to the spokesman.
The IAEA board meeting was supposed to end Friday, but there was opposition to a compromise US-European draft resolution which was finalized late Thursday.
The spokesman said no time has yet been set for the debate on Iran to resume.
The United States bowed to pressure from Europe by dropping an ultimatum over Iran's alleged nuclear weapons program but non-aligned nations, as well as Russia and China, apparently feel the wording is still too tough.
TEHRAN – Iran’s powerful former president, Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, said on Monday that he was expecting little of the European Union in Iran’s standoff with the United States over allegations of covert nuclear weapons development. “We can’t place much confidence in the Europeans, even if they are more intelligent than the Americans,” Rafsanjani said. Rafsanjani, who retains enormous influence as head of the Expediency Council, Iran’s final arbiter on legislation, insisted that Tehran would press ahead with its nuclear program, whatever the UN watchdog decided. “It is clear that our goal is the peaceful use of atomic energy,” he said. “We are trying to convince other countries of that so that they do not make ill-founded assessments of us.”
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