IAEA’s Iran Report Flawed

For those of us who keep a close eye on nuclear proliferation, the following analysis raises more than just a couple red flags concerning the IAEA’s whitewashing of Iran’s nuclear ambitions.  So, if you’ve got some time on your hands, I submit the following for your perusal:

Holes and Questions In The IAEA’s Iran Report

By Steve Schippert | February 28, 2008 – ThreatsWatch.org

While Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad hails the latest IAEA report on the Iranian nuclear weapons program as another “great victory” against the United States and the West, significant holes and questions remain. On several “outstanding questions” the IAEA had on the Iranian program, the UN nuclear watchdog agency’s Director ElBaradei was satisfied with the Iranian response. But even some of those seemingly settled issues raise significant questions from within themselves. And a gaping hole remains in the form of indications of the “administrative interconnections” among the Iranian enrichment program, high explosives testing and missile re-entry design programs as well as “their possible link to nuclear material.”

These interconnections are extremely significant, so much so that they individually and cumulatively render any and all previous questions – described in the latest IAEA report as “no longer outstanding at this stage” – moot points. As was clearly stated in the aftermath of the December National Intelligence Estimate which stated that “in fall 2003, Tehran halted its nuclear weapons program,” there are three components to a nuclear weapons program: enrichment, warhead design, and delivery systems.

If these three programs are not only in existence but “administratively interconnected,” as the IAEA report indicates, little comfort can be drawn from questions settled to Mohamed ElBaradei’s satisfaction on Polonium-210, a uranium mine, procurement activities and equipment contamination. To do so would be an inability or unwillingness to see the forest for the trees.

The following paragraphs will analyze the IAEA report and the issues it addresses as well as the questions that arise or remain unsatisfactorily addressed. The analysis will proceed in the topical order addressed by the IAEA report of February 22, 2008.

Reason #1,000,001 the U.N. is Considered a Joke

Makes ya’ wonder how many of those IAEA reports concerning Iran’s nuclear program have been fudged to allow Russian corporations to do business with them…

Top U.N. Nuclear Watchdog a Russian Spy, Defector Says in New Book
By Jeff Stein, CQ National Security Editor – CQ Politics.com

The top U.N. official responsible for monitoring the clandestine nuclear programs of Iran and Pakistan is a Russian spy, according to a new book on Moscow’s espionage operations in the United States and Canada.

The official is identified only by his Russian code name, ARTHUR, but other sources identified him as Tariq Rauf, 54, a Pakistani-born Canadian who is chief of verification and security-policy coordination at the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).

The job “puts him in direct contact with both inspectors and countries around the globe,” a Canadian online magazine reported last year. “Rauf is responsible for ensuring IAEA scientists get into countries such as Iran and negotiating the access they need to completely verify the use of nuclear material.”

The allegations appear in “Comrade J: The Untold Secrets of Russia’s Master Spy in America After the End of the Cold War” by former Washington Post reporter Pete Earley, author of two previous books on Russian spying in the United States.

The book amounts to a blistering memoir by Sergei Tretyakov, a former top Russian intelligence operative stationed in New York and Canada during the 1990s, first with the communist-era KGB and then its successor, the SVR.

Earley writes, but Tretyakov does not confirm in the book, that he worked as a double agent for the FBI for three years before he defected to the United States in 2000.

Rauf called Tretyakov’s allegation “nonsense.”

He had “never” worked “for any intel types whatsoever. I am a impartial loyal international civil servant,” he said by e-mail from the IAEA’s headquarters in Vienna on Friday.

But in the first of two telephone conversations earlier in the day, Rauf was far less dismissive, declining an opportunity to flatly deny the allegations. He refused to say whether he knew or had ever met Tretyakov, who worked under diplomatic cover.

Request Denied!

Ahmadinejad – The environmentalist of Iran… Poor fellow, he was just trying to insure the environmental safety of his Arak nuclear power plant, when those big, bad, mean men at IAEA shut the door in his face…

Iran denied aid to build reactor
November 22, 2006
The Jerusalem Post – AP
VIENNA, Austria

Thirty-five nations agreed Wednesday to deny Iran’s request for technical help in building a plutonium-producing reactor – at least for now – but left room for Teheran to renew its request, diplomats said.

Two diplomats said a committee of the International Atomic Energy Agency would forward a summary of its three days of deliberations on hundreds of requests for technical aid from member countries to Thursday’s board meeting noting that “no decision was taken” on Teheran’s call for aid for its Arak reactor.

The two diplomats – from countries on opposing sides of the issue – had different interpretations of the decision, reflecting the depth of the dispute. They both demanded anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the issue with the media.

A European diplomat said the tentative agreement effectively meant that Iran’s request was turned down. Another diplomat, from a developing nation, said it meant that the issue remained on the table and could be revisited at a future meeting of the IAEA technical aid committee.

Denying Iran help with Arak – where it is seeking agency assistance to make sure the reactor is environmentally safe – would do little to slow construction of that facility or affect Teheran’s other potential avenue to weapons production – uranium enrichment. Still, it would maintain at least symbolic pressure, even with a Security Council deadlock over how to sanction Teheran for its nuclear defiance.

Chief US delegate Gregory L. Schulte described Arak as being “capable of producing plutonium for one or more nuclear weapons each year” once completed, likely in the next decade.

“Given past board decisions, continued questions about Iran’s nuclear program, and the risk of plutonium being diverted to use in a weapons, the United States joins with others who cannot approve this project,” he said.

Okay, Would You Believe Plutonium Fuel Rods???

I wonder what fabrication Ahmadinejad is going to come up with to explain why he needs plutonium to power his nuclear reactors… It will probably be along the lines of, “well, we wish to produce lots of electricity at tremendous rate of speed… It is, how you say? Like using nitrous oxide in race car to make go fast!!!”

Plutonium Found in Iran Waste Facility
Nov 14, 2006
By GEORGE JAHN
Associated Press Writer

VIENNA, Austria: International Atomic Energy experts have found unexplained plutonium and highly enriched uranium traces in a nuclear waste facility in Iran and have asked Tehran for an explanation, an IAEA report said Tuesday.

The report, prepared for next week’s meeting of the 35-nation IAEA, also faulted Tehran for not cooperating with the agency’s attempts to investigate suspicious aspects of Iran’s nuclear program that have lead to fears it might be interested in developing nuclear arms.

And it said it could not confirm Iranian claims that its nuclear activities were exclusively nonmilitary unless Tehran increased its openness.

“The agency will remain unable to make further progress in its efforts to verify the absence of undeclared nuclear material and activities in Iran,” without additional cooperation by Tehran, said the report, by IAEA chief Mohamed ElBaradei.

Such cooperation is a “prerequisite for the agency to be able to confirm the peaceful nature of Iran’s nuclear program,” it added.

As expected, the four-page report made available to The Associated Press confirmed that Iran continues uranium enrichment experiments in defiance of the U.N. Security Council.

Both highly enriched uranium and plutonium can be used to make the fissile core of nuclear warheads, and Iran is under intense international pressure to freeze activities that can produce such substances.

But Tehran has shrugged off both Security Council demands that it stop developing its enrichment programs and urgings that it cease construction of a heavy water research reactor that produces plutonium waste. It insists it wants enrichment only to generate nuclear power and says it needs the Arak research reactor to produce isotopes for medical research and cancer treatment.

Earlier Tuesday, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said Tuesday that Iran would soon celebrate completion of its nuclear fuel program and claimed the international community was ready to accept it as a nuclear state.