Crisis escalation
After the International Atomic Energy Agency’s (IAEA) Board of Governors meets in the week beginning 6 March and discusses the latest report on Iran by Director General Mohammed ElBaradei, the report will be sent without further ado to the UN Security Council for deliberation. The Board itself does not need to take any further action on the matter, having already sent all previous IAEA reports and resolutions on Iran to the Security Council, and having laid out the steps it deems necessary for Iran to take. The 4–6 February Board meeting put into operation the two-stage strategy decided by the permanent members of the Security Council when they met in London on 30 January – that is, reporting the Iran file to the UN in New York, but giving an extra month for further diplomacy before the Security Council takes any action.
But Iran has not used that month to help its case. Tehran instead ended cooperation with the IAEA that goes beyond the strict legal requirements of its Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) safeguards agreement, began small-scale uranium enrichment at the pilot enrichment fuel plant at Natanz, and threatened to resume larger-scale enrichment. Meanwhile, Tehran refused Russian requests to stop the enrichment work while talks proceed over a joint venture to enrich uranium in Russia – a proposal that has no basis as long as Tehran insists that enrichment also take place in Iran.
ElBaradei’s report
ElBaradei’s report, presented on 27 February, details the outstanding questions surrounding Iran’s nuclear programme and Iran’s repeated denials of IAEA requests for documents and information. Although it says that the IAEA has not seen any diversion of nuclear material for nuclear weapons purposes, the report describes the 15-page document Iran received from the network of Pakistani nuclear scientist AQ Khan for the casting of uranium metal into hemispheres as being ‘related to the fabrication of nuclear weapon components’.
ElBaradei had threatened that if Iran failed to provide further access to suspect sites and officials involved in the nuclear programme he would have to conclude by March that IAEA investigations have reached their limit. To ensure that Vienna still has a role and that the matter is not turned over exclusively to New York, however, he stopped short of that conclusion.
Enrichment timeframe
Iran began its small-scale enrichment on 11 February by feeding uranium hexafluoride into one centrifuge machine, and then, four days later, into ten centrifuges connected in a mini-cascade. Once this is working well, the enrichment will be expanded to 20 centrifuges, then to a full 164-machine cascade. This latter step should take two months at a minimum to complete, but more realistically 4–6 months, given the need to reassemble the cascade and to ensure all the machines are properly balanced. It then will take at least several more months to operate the cascade to ensure it is working smoothly and producing enriched uranium. By mid-August at the earliest, but more likely by December, if there are no major technical hurdles Iran may be able to duplicate the cascade. Iran would then seek to complete the entire 984-centrifuge pilot plant facility. Under Iran’s safeguards agreement, the IAEA is allowed to monitor the work at Natanz.
Iran has also suggested, but probably only as a bargaining tactic, that it may begin installing the first of the 3,000-machine modules planned for the buried commercial-scale enrichment facility at Natanz. Iran is known only to have less than 1,300 centrifuges on hand, however, and it would take many more years to produce and install the 50,000 centrifuges planned for the larger facility.
The pilot plant, like the commercial-scale facility, is configured for low-enriched uranium production. But, if reconfigured, and when completed, it could theoretically produce one weapon’s worth of highly enriched uranium in 2.2–2.7 years. Of most immediate concern to Western governments, however, is that once Iran masters centrifuge technology it could install additional cascades in clandestine facilities where any indicators, already hard to detect, would be masked by the pilot plant. Apprehensions about this ‘sneak-out’ scenario explain why the US and Britain, France and Germany (the ‘EU-3’) reject suggestions, including from ElBaradei, that Iran limit itself to the pilot plant.
Iran already has sufficient uranium feed material for a nuclear weapons programme. The 85 metric tons of uranium hexafluoride produced to date at Esfahan is enough, when enriched, for over a dozen nuclear weapons. Despite earlier analysis that this UF6 was too contaminated for use in enrichment, IAEA and government sources now say this is not a significant obstacle for Iran.
Security Council moves
Once it receives ElBaradei’s report, the Security Council will have a number of options before it. Although the most likely first step is a Security Council Presidential Statement repeating the IAEA Board’s call on Iran to restore the suspension, the UK and France, who remain in the lead, are considering seeking a hard-hitting resolution that would be more commensurate with the seriousness and speed at which Iran is moving toward achieving its enrichment objective.
Under this logic, the Security Council’s first resolution should be adopted under Chapter VII of the UN Charter, making the suspension of enrichment mandatory. This would create a new legal imperative for Iran and pave the way for subsequent enforcement actions. But to have the strongest impact, any resolution will need to be unanimous, and both Russia and China oppose a Chapter VII resolution. Apart from them, Iran has no friends on the Council, ten of whose 15 members supported the IAEA Board resolution last September to find Iran in non-compliance. The key decisions will be made among the permanent members at the senior-most level.
If Russia and China cannot be persuaded to support a Chapter VII resolution, the Security Council will probably follow an escalatory course, perhaps starting with a Presidential Statement featuring a 15–30 day deadline for compliance, followed by a non-binding resolution, probably with another 30-day deadline, with explicit steps Iran must take and a forewarning of consequences to follow. Russia will also insist that all negotiation options be thoroughly explored before the Security Council proceeds down a path that will lead to sanctions. This is why the UK, France and Germany agreed to Iran’s request for a ministerial meeting on 3 March – not to offer any new proposals but to show that the EU-3 have not closed the communications channels. These talks proved inconclusive.
Legal measures first
One step all UNSC members may accept is a resolution strengthening the IAEA’s inspection authority for any country found in non-compliance of safeguards. This would create a new legal requirement for Iran to implement the safeguards Additional Protocol and to allow increased IAEA access, including interviews with scientists and military officials. Iran could no longer legitimately claim a legal distinction between the verification measures required under the NPT and the additional voluntary steps demanded by the IAEA Board to date as ‘confidence building measures’.
Creating new legal obligations is necessary to pre-empt any move by Iran to withdraw from the NPT. Currently, any country that withdraws from the NPT after giving 90 days’ notice faces no legal restriction on producing nuclear weapons using the technology and equipment it obtained as an adherent to the treaty. Russia and China should be able to accept a resolution saying that the acquisition of nuclear weapons by a country that leaves the NPT is a threat to international peace and security. So as not to wait until it is too late, the Western allies will want the trigger in such a resolution to be Iran’s pursuit of a uranium enrichment or plutonium reprocessing capability. Russia and China are very reluctant, however, to call Iran’s current activity a threat to ‘international peace and security’ with the Chapter VII implications for enforcement this entails.
Iran’s predictable defiance of additional inspection authority for the inspectors would place it in a further status of illegality and an exceptionality that previously applied only to Iraq. In addition to the peril this would create for Iran’s economy and its national security, such exceptionality and status as an pariah state would affect its sense of national pride and regional status.
Other legal and diplomatic sanctions the Security Council may consider include restricting Iran’s participation in UN bodies and other multilateral organisations. Advocates argue that this would be a justifiable, symmetrical response to Iran’s pullback from the Additional Protocol and its refusal to provide the cooperation the IAEA has repeatedly requested. Iran’s access to nuclear cooperation from the IAEA, of which Iran has been a major recipient, could be the first benefit to be cut off.
Targeted political and economic sanctions
In a next step, the Security Council could restrict travel by Iranian leaders and those involved in the nuclear industry. Visa restrictions on Iranian sports, cultural and scientific bodies could also be considered. Denying Iran’s participation in the football World Cup would be the political sanction most likely to get the attention of the entire Iranian nation, but US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice in late January said sanctions that target the Iranian people, rather than their government, should be avoided.
Early sanctions limited to the nuclear area would probably prohibit Iranians from studying abroad in nuclear-related fields. A ban on all nuclear and dual-use commerce with Iran would mainly affect Russia, with its $840 million Bushehr reactor deal and desire for additional reactor projects with Iran worth billions more. Russia might see merit, however, in a carefully worded resolution that protected Russia’s contractual exposure if it has to halt nuclear fuel to Bushehr on the basis of UN action. There will be a push to ban arms sales to Iran. Russia, however, will be reluctant to accept a measure that would deprive its arms industry of the recent five-year $5 billion deal to supply Tor M-1 surface-to-air missile systems.
For its part, China will not want to accept any economic sanctions that threaten its energy security needs, given China’s dependence on Iranian hydrocarbons (underscored by a $70bn deal over 30 years to purchase 250m tons of liquefied natural gas from Iran). China blocked Security Council action against Sudan because of its oil interests there, although the matter was not forced to a vote. Ultimately, China – which rarely exercises its veto – will try to ensure that it is not isolated in the Security Council, and that it remains in step with Russia.
Sanctions outside the Security Council
Whether or not the Security Council can take effective steps, the Europeans can bring economic pressure to bear on Iran. The EU’s $15bn in trade with Iran, and government control over investment credits Iran needs for its natural gas development, petroleum refinery and other bottleneck sectors, are a way to influence the traders who were key backers of the Iranian revolution. Iran already faces de facto sanctions. Switzerland’s two largest banks have stopped new operations with Iran, based on an internal risk assessment, and banks in several other European capitals have reportedly done the same. The G-8 could, at the St Petersburg summit on 15–17 July, also impose political and economic sanctions.
Other options
Many Security Council members today do not understand that the timeline for Iran’s enrichment programme does not allow for the usual methodical course of Security Council deliberations. Although Iran probably cannot produce a nuclear weapon for 5–10 years, the real deadline facing the world is 6–10 months, a timeline that coincides with the US Congressional election cycle. Facing pressure from both the right and left of the political spectrum over the appearance of having sub-contracted the Iran issue to Europe to deal with, the Bush administration will be under pressure to take matters into its own hands if the UN process does not produce results before the election campaign gathers momentum in September. Similarly, Israel may feel compelled to consider action of its own, if diplomacy does not prevent Iran from proceeding to master enrichment capability.
In the US there is widespread support in both political parties to keep military options alive in order to maximise diplomatic leverage. The downsides to military action, however, are huge, including the difficulty Iran could make for the US plan to draw down forces in Iraq and the impact air or other military strikes would have in triggering an all-out pursuit of nuclear weapons that could perhaps bring Iran to the bomb faster than it might otherwise. Many hope for a clean solution, via technological sabotage, to ensure that the components to an Iranian weapons programme do not work. This too has downsides, however, if intelligence operations misfire, as reportedly was the case with a CIA effort to lead Iranian weapons designers astray, which may only have enhanced their design database.
Regime differences?
If there is to be a negotiated settlement, the US will have to be a central player. Only Washington can bring to the table the security guarantees, economic incentives and sense of status that, combined with the disincentives to be discussed by the Security Council, stand a chance of altering Iran’s strategic cost-benefit analysis. But a negotiated solution requires a serious negotiating partner, and the present regime shows no sign that anything matters to it more than obtaining the capability for producing nuclear weapons. Despite disagreements over tactics among the leadership, it is hard to find differences among them over this objective.
