The Hindu : International : U.S. demands Iran dismantle all nuclear facilities

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Wednesday, May 04, 2005

International

International

U.S. demands Iran dismantle all nuclear facilities

David E. Sanger

NPT meet fears Teheran may circumvent obligations

UNITED NATIONS: The gulf between Iran and the United States widened considerably on Monday when the Bush administration, at the opening of a conference on the future of the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty, demanded that Iran dismantle all the ``equipment and facilities'' it has built over the past two decades to manufacture nuclear material.

The demand, made by Stephen Rademaker, Assistant Secretary of State who spoke at the opening of the conference in the chamber of the General Assembly on Monday afternoon, has been made before by the United States. But it came only two days after Iran threatened to resume some production activities in coming weeks.

As part of Iran's negotiations with the European Union over the future of its nuclear programme — which it insists is solely intended for electricity production — Iran has demanded that it must be allowed to install 3,000 centrifuges, which enrich uranium. If enriched at a low level, that uranium could fuel a nuclear power plant. But the centrifuges could also produce enough highly enrichment uranium to manufacture nuclear weapons.

Focus on loopholes

Mr. Rademaker's statement was intended to focus the conference on loopholes in the 35-year-old treaty, which he charged that Iran and North Korea have exploited. ``Today, the treaty is facing the most serious challenge in its history due to instances of non-compliance,'' he said.

Though the International Atomic Energy Agency has said it has yet to find concrete evidence of a weapons programme in Iran, Mr. Rademaker expressed no doubts about what Iran has done, or how it got the help.

``For almost two decades Iran has conducted a clandestine nuclear weapons programme, aided by the illicit network of A.Q. Khan,'' Mr. Rademaker said, referring to the head of Pakistan's nuclear research laboratory, who was at the centre of a huge black-market network in nuclear technology.

Mr Rademaker offered the administration's first public confirmation that Mr. Khan has also traded in nuclear weapons designs — a reference to a Chinese design for a nuclear weapon that the Khan network provided to Libya — though he stopped short of saying that Iran had also been given that design.

``We assume that what the Libyans got the Iranians also got,'' a senior American intelligence official said recently. ``But can we prove it? Not yet.''

The Bush administration has long demanded that North Korea dismantle all of its nuclear facilities, and in Washington, Mr. Bush's aides have argued that the then President Bill Clinton erred in 1994 by signing an accord with the North that did not require the country to dismantle its facilities and ship all of its nuclear material out of the country. The North has refused to do so, pulled out of the NPT in 2003, and now asserts that it has reprocessed its stockpile of spent nuclear fuel into nuclear weapons.

At the conference here, there is considerable concern that Iran will follow the same model.

Mr. Rademaker described the American demands by saying that any solution ``must include permanent cessation of Iran's enrichment and reprocessing efforts, as well as dismantlement of equipment facilities related to such activity.''

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