Iran pursued nuclear bomb plan
FINAL REPORT BY UN WATCHDOG INTENDS TO COMPLETE DECADE-LONG ATTEMPT TO DETERMINE PROGRESS TOWARDS DESIGNING WARHEAD
Tehran was actively designing weapon as recently as 2009, final report by United Nations inspection agency says
Iran was actively designing a nuclear weapon until 2009, more recently than the United States and other western intelligence agencies have publicly acknowledged, according to a final report by the United Nations nuclear inspection agency.
The report, based on partial answers Iran provided after reaching its nuclear accord with the West in July, concluded that Iran conducted “computer modelling of a nuclear explosive device” before 2004. It then resumed the efforts during president George W. Bush’s second term and continued them into President Barack Obama’s first year in office.
But while the International Atomic Energy Agency detailed a long list of experiments Iran had conducted that were “relevant to a nuclear explosive device”, it found no evidence that the effort had succeeded in developing a complete blueprint for a bomb.
In part, that may have been because Iran refused to answer several essential questions and appeared to have destroyed potential evidence in others.
The report, issued in Vienna Wednesday evening to the 167 countries that make up the board of the agency, is intended to complete a decade-long attempt to determine what kind of progress Iran made towards the technological art of designing a warhead that could fit atop a nuclear missile.
More important
The completion of the report is one of the steps that Iran had to take — along with dismantling centrifuges and shipping nuclear fuel out of the country — before sanctions will be lifted under the nuclear deal.
Obama and his secretary of state, John Kerry, concluded this year that it was more important to secure a deal that will, if carried out fully, prevent Iran from gaining the material to build a bomb for at least 15 years than to make it admit to past activities. So, the report’s publication allows the deal to go through, no matter how inconclusive the final result.
But Iran’s refusal to cooperate on central points could set a dangerous precedent as the UN agency tries to convince other countries with nuclear technology that they must fully answer queries to determine if they have a secret weapons programme.
The agency’s bottom-line assessment was that Iran had made a “coordinated effort” to design and conduct tests on nuclear weapon components before 2003 — echoing a US national intelligence estimate published in 2007 — and that it had conducted “some activities” thereafter.
‘Feasibility studies”
“These activities did not advance beyond feasibility and scientific studies” and the acquisition of technical capabilities, the agency concluded. The efforts ended after 2009, or just as Obama was taking office and accelerating the sanctions and cyber-sabotage programme against Iran’s nuclear facilities that ultimately brought Iranian officials to the negotiating table.
Tehran officials gave no substantive answers to one-quarter of the dozen specific questions or documents they were asked about, leaving open the question of how much progress they had made.
The report, titled “Final Assessment of Past and Present Outstanding Issues Regarding Iran’s Nuclear Programme,” will not satisfy either critics of the nuclear deal or those seeking exoneration for Iran. Instead, it draws a picture of a nation that was actively exploring the technologies, testing and components that would be needed to produce a weapon someday. However, it does not come to a conclusion about how successful that effort was.
Diplomats said the inspectors met “experts” in Iran, but would not say if they met the leader of the nuclear effort, Mohsen Fakhrizadeh. One diplomat said Iran had said it feared that the scientists could be assassinated if they were identified.
The agency said inspectors were able to visit two workshops.
Time and again, the IAEA seemed close to rejecting Iranian arguments that its experimentation was for civilian purposes. The inspectors found that Iran’s nuclear programme was “suitable for the coordination of a range of activities relevant to the development of a nuclear explosive device” and that its experiments had “characteristics relevant to a nuclear explosive device.”
In one or two areas, notably a document provided by Western intelligence agencies indicating that Iran was looking at how to make uranium metal, a step needed for a weapon, it found “no indication of Iran having conducted activities” related to the document.
Starting around mid-2004, thousands of pages of detailed evidence of Iran’s suspected research on how to design a weapon were collected by intelligence agencies in the United States, Israel and Europe, and eventually turned over to the agency’s inspectors here in Vienna.
Surprising finding
In 2007, the US intelligence community had warned the Bush administration about a surprising finding: While Iran once had a full-scale weapons development effort underway, it suspended the project sometime in late 2003, shortly after the US invasion of Iraq.
As the deal got closer last spring, Obama and Kerry had to make a crucial decision: whether it was worth jeopardising the deal by insisting that Iran must admit to its past activities. From all indications since then, the president seems to have decided that it was more important to get commitments about limiting future activities than to force Iranian officials to admit to a past the country insists never happened.
Kerry, pressed on the question of Iranian disclosure of past activities by Judy Woodruff on PBS NewsHour, said: “They have to do it. It will be done. If there’s going to be a deal, it will be done.” But weeks later, he said US intelligence agencies already had “perfect knowledge” of Iran’s activities, suggesting that a public confession was not necessary.
The result was a carefully designed diplomatic compromise.