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Light at the end of Iran tunnel

It is no secret in international relations that Washington has, as a matter of strategic policy, sought to work up the ‘Iran nuclear issue’ into a casus belli. Unfortunately for the United States, Britain, and their newfound ally, France, the International Atomic Energy Agency is making major progress towards resolving the issue. The IAEA’s latest report indicates that Tehran is making a renewed attempt to clarify the handful of questio ns that remain about the recent history of its atomic energy programme. ‘History’ is the operative word here, because all IAEA reports to date have confirmed that all safeguarded nuclear material in Iran remains fully accounted for. What the IAEA has so far been unable to do is construct a complete picture of Iranian activity in the nuclear field since Tehran started work in the late 1980s to obtain components for its enrichment programme from the international market. In particular, the IAEA wanted ‘assurances’ that Iran had not started developmental work on the relatively modern P-2 centrifuge when it obtained design blueprints for the machines in 1996 (rather than in 2002, as the Iranian authorities have maintained). The latest report by the agency’s Director General confirms that the P-2 timeline emerging from recent corroborative evidence the Iranians have provided is “consistent” with what the IAEA has learnt elsewhere.

Predictably, the Bush administration is harping on Iran’s failure to suspend its nuclear enrichment programme — as demanded by the United Nations Security Council — even though Tehran is actively cooperating with the IAEA to resolve the issues that led to its file being sent to the U.N. in the first place. The P-2 aside, the outstanding issues are clearly the product of Anglo-American hyperbole and bluster. Much has been made of Iran’s possession of a document on the casting of uranium into hemispherical shapes, something Tehran voluntarily disclosed to the IAEA in 2005 along with the explanation that the document was neither sought from the A.Q. Khan network nor acted upon. The contents of the document were shared with the IAEA more than two years ago and all the U.S. has been able to do is try and make an issue out of Iran’s refusal to hand over a copy. With Tehran now providing the document to the agency, that pretext for confrontation has also disappeared. What remains is the spurious, ‘WMD’-style allegation made by Washington that the Iranian military is directing a secret nuclear programme known as ‘Green Salt.’ Iran, as a non-nuclear-weapon state party to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty that has repeatedly asserted it is not pursuing a nuclear weapons programme, has the sovereign right under international law to enrich uranium for peaceful purposes. If the U.S wishes to use the United Nations to go after Iran, it must prove the existence of clandestine military nuclear facilities that everybody knows do not exist.

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