Daniel Horner

The organizers of a planned 2012 conference on creating a zone free of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) in the Middle East have chosen a Finnish diplomat as the coordinator and Finland as the host country, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said in an Oct. 14 press statement.

The long-awaited announcement, which named Jaakko Laajava, Finland’s undersecretary of state for foreign and security policy, as the coordinator, is the first major decision on the conference since the parties to the nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) agreed during their 2010 review conference to hold the meeting. (See ACT, June 2010.)

Under the terms of the review conference’s final document, the conveners of the 2012 meeting are the secretary-general and the three countries that had co-sponsored a 1995 resolution calling for a Middle Eastern WMD-free zone—Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Ban’s Oct. 14 announcement was a joint statement by him and those three countries.

In statements at the United Nations that day, the announcement was welcomed by several countries, including Qatar on behalf of the Arab Group. According to the 2010 NPT Review Conference final document, the decisions on the host country and coordinator are to be made “in consultation with the States of the region.”

In an Oct. 24 interview, a U.S. official called the decision “a big landmark on the road to 2012” and said it showed that the countries involved could work together to reach agreement. Egyptian Ambassador to the United Nations Maged Abdelaziz, in an Oct. 27 interview, also welcomed the decision.

In July, Canada, Finland, and the Netherlands were announced as candidates to host the conference. Interviews in August with diplomats involved in preparing for the meeting strongly indicated that Finland was the front-runner. (See ACT, September 2011.) However, the final decision apparently was more complicated.

Package Deal

The three co-sponsors pushed for the two elements to be linked, that is, for the coordinator to be from the host country. In the interview, the U.S. official said it was important to have this arrangement because the coordinator will have to work very closely with officials from the host country. Having a coordinator from a different country could lead to inefficient “separate tracks,” he said.

The Arab Group had insisted, as one of its conditions, that the coordinator be someone of at least the ministerial level. The group ultimately accepted Laajava after “thorough consultations” with Ban and the three co-sponsors, Abdelaziz said. One factor influencing the countries in the group was that they did not want to delay the process, which needs to be “rapidly moving,” he said.

The U.S. official also said that, after multiple meetings on the issue, the participants were determined to reach agreement on the coordinator and host because they “didn’t want to lose all the momentum [they] had gained.” On the question of Laajava’s diplomatic stature, he said that “though not everyone knows who he is, he can get the job done” and is a better choice than someone who would make “a splashy headline but wouldn’t be able to deliver.” Abdelaziz also said Laajava was a “good candidate” with “the right qualifications.”

Even with a key issue now settled, Abdelaziz and the U.S. official were cautious about predicting when the conference would take place. Abdelaziz said the timing is “an open question” because of the amount of preparation still required. At such conferences, the participants typically work out 75 to 80 percent of the final document beforehand, he said. It would be a mistake to hold the conference too early and risk having “fighting at the conference,” he said.

The U.S. official also emphasized the importance of having the conference “done right.” He suggested that a reasonable guess would be that it would be held in the second half of 2012.

Upcoming Forum

A potential indicator of the prospects for the conference, the U.S. official said, is an International Atomic Energy Agency forum, scheduled for Nov. 21-22, to discuss the experiences of existing nuclear-weapon-free zones and how they “could be relevant to the Middle East,” as the agency’s Sept. 2 announcement put it.

Emphasizing that the forum had no “direct link” to the 2012 meeting, the U.S. official said it was an opportunity to discuss many of the issues that will figure prominently there without “infus[ing] the forum with all the politics” of next year’s event. The forum has the potential to show that the countries involved in the issue can have “a constructive dialogue” or, alternatively, that they have “a long way to go,” he said.

Abdelaziz said another important element for the 2012 event is increased involvement by nongovernmental organizations. He noted that the section of the 2010 NPT Review Conference final document dealing with the Middle East meeting encourages involvement by these groups.

Peter Crail

Following U.S. accusations on Oct. 11 that elements of Iran’s government conspired to assassinate the Saudi ambassador to the United States, members of Congress reiterated calls to increase sanctions on foreign firms doing business with Iran.

Obama administration officials insisted that they were taking steps to strengthen sanctions against Iran in response to the alleged plot and Iran’s nuclear program.

Lawmakers particularly insisted that the United States penalize foreign firms making purchases through the Central Bank of Iran (CBI). Many countries, including U.S. allies in Europe and Asia, rely on oil imports from Iran and make payments through the CBI. Cutting off access could have implications for global oil markets.

“Our best hope for slowing the Iranian nuclear train is to bring its financial machinery to a grinding halt,” Rep. Howard Berman (D-Calif.), the ranking member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, told the panel during an Oct. 14 hearing.

“Sanctioning banks and companies in other countries that do business with Iran’s central bank would have a uniquely powerful impact on the Iranian economy,” Berman added.

In August, more than 90 senators signed a letter to President Barack Obama calling on the administration to sanction the CBI. Sen. Mark Kirk (R-Ill.) has threatened to introduce legislation to do so if the administration did not take that step by the end of the year. (See ACT, September 2011.)

Members of Congress pressed administration officials in hearings Oct. 13 and 14 on U.S. efforts to toughen sanctions against Iran and the prospect of sanctioning the CBI. The officials said that they were focused on implementing the existing sanctions and would seek international cooperation to cut off the CBI from the global financial system.

“We are engaged in an effort to develop the multilateral support that would be…critically important in having action against the CBI be really effective,” Undersecretary of the Treasury for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence David Cohen told the House committee during the Oct. 14 hearing. Cohen said current sanctions were having a serious impact on Iran’s financial sector and that many foreign banks already were cutting relationships with Tehran. “Iran is now facing unprecedented levels of financial and commercial isolation,” he told the committee.

Congress also is mulling additional efforts to target other countries doing business with Iran, in particular with Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. Legislation introduced in the House and Senate would sanction foreign firms purchasing oil or gas from Iran if the Guard was involved in the transaction, with the Senate bill extending this prohibition to include any transaction in which the Guard was involved.

The Guard has become increasingly involved in many aspects of Iran’s economy, including its energy sector.

The House foreign affairs panel is expected to take action on its bill early this month. That bill also would place greater limitations than current law on the president’s ability to waive the sanctions and eliminates such waivers in some cases. The Obama administration, like the two previous administrations, has sought to maintain waiver provisions for such sanctions to preserve diplomatic flexibility and to prevent the sanctions from causing friction with diplomatic partners.

Former National Security Council staffer Gary Sick said in an Oct. 13 e-mail to Arms Control Today that sanctions have a role as “bargaining chips” if the United States is willing and able to lift them in return for improvements in Iran’s policies, such as accepting additional International Atomic Energy Agency safeguards. “That gives us an exceptional array of tools we could use,” he said, adding that the “greatest failing of our diplomatic track” has been that the United States has not used such leverage in negotiations.

During congressional testimony, U.S. officials said the administration still is adhering to a “dual-track approach” of negotiations and sanctions, as is the so-called P5+1, a group comprising the five permanent members of the UN Security Council (China, France, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States) and Germany.

In an Oct. 21 letter to Iranian nuclear negotiator Saeed Jalili, EU High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy Catherine Ashton, who represents the P5+1, said the six countries would be willing to meet with Iran “within the coming weeks” if Iran is ready to “engage seriously in discussions” on the nuclear issue.

The last meeting between the two sides, in January, ended without agreement for follow-on talks. In a Jan. 22 statement, Ashton said that “the Iranian side was not ready” for constructive talks, having demanded the lifting of sanctions and recognition of a right to enrich uranium as preconditions for progress. She said those preconditions “are not a way to proceed.”

In Oct. 6 remarks to the First Committee of the UN General Assembly, Iranian UN ambassador Mohammed Khazaee said that his country was ready to engage in “serious and constructive negotiation” without preconditions.

Peter Crail

International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) Director-General Yukiya Amano told the agency’s governing board Sept. 12 that he would soon “set out in greater detail” the basis for IAEA concerns regarding suspected Iranian work to develop a nuclear warhead. The IAEA has expressed frustration over the past three years that its efforts to investigate such suspicions have been stonewalled by Iran, which maintains that charges of warhead development are “baseless and false.”

A Sept. 2 IAEA report on Iran’s nuclear program said that the agency was “increasingly concerned about the possible existence in Iran of past or current undisclosed nuclear related activities…including activities related to the development of a nuclear payload for a missile.” The report said that the agency continues to receive new information regarding such activities from “many member states” and from its own investigation and that such information is “broadly consistent and credible in terms of technical detail, the time frame in which these activities were conducted and the people and organisations involved.”

For the past several months, the United States has called on Amano to provide his “best assessment” of the evidence of Iran’s suspected warhead development work. (See ACT, July/August 2011.) In a Sept. 14 statement to the board, U.S. Permanent Representative to the IAEA Glyn Davies said the only way for Iran to resolve the issues is through Tehran’s “complete, immediate, and expansive cooperation.”

In June, Amano provided such an assessment of suspicions that Syria was building an undeclared nuclear reactor in support of a nuclear weapons program, a judgment that resulted in the IAEA board’s referral of Syria to the UN Security Council for further action. (See ACT, July/August 2011.) Many countries serving on the board, however, questioned the legitimacy of the referral.

Former IAEA safeguards chief Olli Heinonen told an Atlantic Council audience Sept. 15 that it would be “groundbreaking” if Amano made such an assessment of Iran. Heinonen noted the challenges of piecing together many of the weapons-related activities Iran is believed to have pursued and drawing a clear conclusion. “We just see symptoms which are worrisome,” he said, rather than a Manhattan Project-style effort in which “the entire program is laid out in front of you in a project chart.”

He also said that, for Amano to make a judgment about Iran’s suspected weaponization efforts, he would also need to determine whether the work is part of a program dedicated to building a nuclear weapon or is an effort to slowly collect all of the expertise and technical base to build a nuclear weapon if the decision were made to do so.

According to Heinonen, the best way for the IAEA to get to the bottom of the nature of Iran’s suspected warhead work “would be to talk to the people who really know,” adding that “there may only be a handful of people who really know the goal of the program.”

The agency’s Sept. 2 report said that the “possible military dimensions” of Iran’s nuclear program were discussed by the agency and Iranian officials over the past several months, but it did not provide any further detail. Ali Asghar Soltanieh, Iran’s permanent representative to the IAEA, said in a Sept. 6 interview that Iran hoped that those discussions would continue (see page 8).

Centrifuges Installed at Fordow

The IAEA report also said that, for the first time, Iran has begun installing centrifuges at its Fordow uranium-enrichment plant, a facility that was first publicly revealed by France, the United Kingdom, and the United States in 2009 and that Iran failed to declare to the IAEA until that year.

Last June, Iran announced that it would soon begin using the plant to produce uranium enriched to 20 percent uranium-235 to produce fuel for research reactors and that it would triple such production through the use of more-advanced centrifuge designs it has been developing. The Sept. 2 IAEA report said that as of Aug. 20, Iran had installed one of two centrifuge cascades designated for the production of 20 percent-enriched uranium. A cascade is a series of interlinked centrifuges.

Although the report did not specify the type of machine being installed, diplomatic sources confirmed that the centrifuges are IR-1 machines, a crash-prone design Iran currently uses at its commercial-scale Natanz enrichment plant. The improved designs Iran has been developing, called the IR-2m and IR-4, are believed to enrich uranium three times faster than the IR-1.

The advanced designs Iran intended to install at the Fordow plant appear to be in the final stages of testing and development. Iran told the IAEA in January that it would install two 164-centrifuge cascades at its Natanz pilot plant, one for each of the new centrifuge designs. (See ACT, March 2011.) The recent IAEA report said that such installation remained ongoing as of late August, with roughly half of the machines installed. Iran has been testing smaller cascades of the newer designs for some time, but it is not known to have operated a full set of machines.

Centrifuges enrich uranium by spinning at high speeds to increase the concentration of the fissile isotope U-235 in a uranium-based gas. Most nuclear power reactors run on uranium enriched to about 4 percent U-235 while weapons-grade levels are generally around 90 percent. Davies said in his Sept. 14 statement that “it is important to keep in mind that production of near-20 percent [enriched uranium] completes 90 percent of the work necessary for production of highly enriched uranium,” used for weapons. He added that should Iran decide to use its stockpile of 20 percent-enriched material to produce weapons-grade uranium quickly, IAEA safeguards might provide “some warning...but that will come too late.”

Iran says that it is producing uranium enriched to 20 percent U-235 both for its Tehran Research Reactor, which is running short of fuel, and for additional research reactors it would like to build. In the Sept. 6 interview, Soltanieh said the medical isotopes produced in these reactors would not only be used for domestic demand, but also would be exported to other countries in the region. The IAEA has sought clarification of Iran’s plans to construct additional reactors, but Iran has not been forthcoming. Iran is also not believed to be capable of safely producing fuel for the Tehran reactor. The recent IAEA report said that as of Aug. 10, Iran had not yet installed equipment to fabricate the reactor fuel but had produced a fuel rod that would be shipped to the reactor for testing.

In 2009, Iran agreed “in principle” to a U.S.-initiated plan under which Iran would ship out most of its 4 percent-enriched uranium in return for fuel for the Tehran reactor, but rejected it shortly thereafter. The two sides have since been at odds over details of the proposal. The official Islamic Republic News Agency (IRNA) quoted Atomic Energy Organization of Iran (AEOI) Director Fereydoun Abbasi Aug. 29 as saying that Iran would no longer negotiate over the so-called fuel-swap, stating, “The United States is not a safe country with which we can negotiate a fuel swap or any other issue.” Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, however, contradicted this stand in a Sept. 13 Washington Post interview, stating that Iran’s production of 20 percent-enriched uranium would be halted if it received fuel for the reactor.

Iran’s decision to produce 20 percent-enriched uranium at its Fordow plant is the second time that Tehran has formally revised its intentions for the facility, which Iran originally claimed was a pilot plant that would carry out research and development (R&D) and enrich uranium to up to 5 percent U-235.

Western governments have charged that the facility was constructed as part of a weapons program, declaring it “inconsistent with a peaceful program.” (See ACT, October 2009.) Since the facility was first revealed in 2009, the IAEA has asked Iran to provide information that would allow the agency to clarify details regarding its construction, including its original purpose, its timing, and the decision to build the facility on an existing military site. The Sept. 2 IAEA report said that Iran has provided some information since the agency’s last report in May but that additional information is still needed.

Iran also appears to have postponed a 2009 decision to construct 10 additional uranium-enrichment plants. In the Aug. 29 article, IRNA quoted Abbasi as saying that Iran would not need such facilities for the next two years. Iran announced last year that studies on the location of the 10 new sites had been completed and that construction of the first such site would begin early this year. Soltanieh said in the interview that this was an “updated decision” determined on the basis of “the political environment of the whole world and also the technical requirements.”

IAEA Visits Centrifuge Workshop

Prior to the week-long IAEA board meeting, Iran allowed agency safeguards chief Herman Nackaerts access to additional facilities that the IAEA has not been able to visit on a regular basis, including an R&D facility for its improved centrifuges and the site of a heavy-water plant and a heavy-water reactor under construction at Arak. IAEA officials welcomed this development, and Amano told the agency’s board Sept. 12, “Iran demonstrated greater transparency than on previous occasions.” It was the first time the agency has been able to inspect the heavy-water production facility since 2005.

Iranian officials have described such access as a significant level of transparency. In the Sept. 6 interview, Soltanieh said that, by allowing access to the centrifuge R&D workshops, Iran was doing something “unprecedented in the history of the IAEA.”

Heinonen, however, in his Atlantic Council comments said the additional access Iran provided did not qualify as a major improvement in transparency. Referring to the IAEA’s access to the centrifuge R&D site, he said, “This kind of workshop visit is a very limited addition to what you need to know,” stressing that visiting the facility is not enough and that measures such as discussions with technicians are needed to get a full accounting of the role such facilities play in Iran’s nuclear program.

Heinonen also noted that Iran is already legally obligated to allow inspections of the other sites Iran allowed Nackaerts to visit.

Western governments have expressed concern that the Arak heavy-water reactor is far better suited for plutonium production for nuclear weapons than for the production of medical isotopes Iran claims the plant is intended to make.

According to the semi-official Iranian Students News Agency (ISNA), Abbasi said Sept. 5 that Iran was prepared to allow the IAEA “full supervision” over its nuclear activities for a period of time if sanctions were removed. “We have proposed that the agency keep Iran’s activities and nuclear program under full supervision for five years, providing the sanctions are lifted,” ISNA quoted him as saying. Abbasi indicated, however, that such supervision would not include implementing an additional protocol to its IAEA safeguards agreement, which provides the agency with more extensive access to all nuclear-related facilities. Soltanieh said in the interview that Iran demonstrated such “full transparency” during the visit by Nackaerts. “If you say, which one first, which one next, we have already taken this step.” He added, “Now it is their turn” to take action by lifting sanctions.