Iran Demands Entry to Nuclear Club
March 09, 2004
Asia Times
Safa Haeri
Iran on Sunday surprised the international community, and above all the United Nations' nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), by seeking to join the world's atomic club, calling on its members for a prompt entry.
"We want Iran to be recognized as a member of the nuclear club, that means Iran be recognized as a country having the nuclear fuel cycle, and enriching uranium. This is very difficult for the world to accept," Hassan Rohani, the secretary of the Supreme Council for National Security (SCNS), announced ahead of an important meeting this week of the IAEA. Five countries are officially inside that club - the United States, Russia, China, Britain and France.
The UN agency meets in Vienna to tackle Iran's and Libya's nuclear programs, which have been fed by a global black market linked to the father of Pakistan's atom bomb, Abdul Qadeer Khan. The governing board will consider two resolutions during the meeting, expected to last until Friday.
The first is Libya's long-secret atomic-weapons program, which Tripoli has agreed to dismantle under the supervision of the IAEA. The second issue is Iran, long accused by Washington, among others, of using its atomic-energy program as a front to build a bomb.
Tehran insists that its nuclear program is entirely peaceful and has called on the IAEA to leave it alone. "The case concerning Iran's peaceful nuclear activities should be completely closed at the IAEA board of governors and removed from its agenda," Rohani said on state television on Sunday.
He added that it was time for the IAEA, which launched an intensive investigation into Iran's nuclear program 13 months ago, to confirm the Islamic Republic's innocence.
The "request" for membership to the atomic club by Rohani, who handles the complicated, complex and controversial issue of Iranian nuclear activities and who conducts the difficult and tortuous talks with the IAEA, means that Iran has the capacity of making nuclear weapons, a potential that most US and European experts and intelligence services put at between three and five years to achieve.
Whatever the reasons that motivated Tehran's move, diplomats and experts say that Rohani's declaration not only will not appease international concerns about Iran's determination to set up a nuclear arsenal, but also convince the United States and the European Union to increase pressures on the Islamic Republic to stop all its atomic projects, or face drastic international sanctions.
In a report to be published at the end of this month, David Albright, a former UN weapons inspector and president of the Institute for Science and International Security, a US-based non-profit research organization specializing in nuclear matters, will disclose that Iran has the capacity to produce enough enriched uranium to build some 30 nuclear warheads a year.
In Tehran on Sunday, Rohani told the inaugural session of the Assembly of Experts, a body made up of 82 senior clerics that has the power to elect or dismiss the leader of the regime: "We have two goals ahead of us that we must achieve. One is closing Iran's nuclear dossier with the IAEA and bringing the board of governors to take it out of their agenda, and the other is to have Iran recognized globally as a nuclear country."
As Rohani was briefing the Experts, a hardline newspaper warned the IAEA to be "more realistic in its dealings with Iran or the whole game would be jeopardized", and an unidentified Iranian diplomat in Vienna threatened that Iran would resume uranium enrichment and revise its agreement to cooperate with the international nuclear watchdog if the dispute is not resolved in line with last October's agreement.
The envoy was referring to an accord signed on October 21 in Tehran between Rohani with the foreign ministers of Britain, France and Germany under which Iran agreed to sign the Additional Protocol to the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and suspend enriching uranium in return for getting access to advanced nuclear technologies for peaceful purposes, like the construction of nuclear-powered electrical plants.
"Iran will not wait forever to restore its legitimate national right to pursue peaceful nuclear activities and will not accept that the IAEA continue its double-standard policies toward Iran," the diplomat added, quoted by Mehr, a news agency close to the ruling conservatives.
At the same time, and in an obvious coordinated campaign aimed at intimidating the IAEA's board of governors, Mohsen Rezai, the secretary of the powerful Expediency Council that is chaired by former president Ayatollah Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, said cooperation with the IAEA would become more difficult if the IAEA decided to limit Iran's peaceful and civilian nuclear activities.
Rohani, in his lengthy and detailed report to the Assembly of Experts, explained why he had to bow to the IAEA's demand to sign the Additional Protocol, revealing that in the event that Iran did not obey, "it would face the same fate as Iraq", meaning a possible military invasion of the country authorized by the UN Security Council.
"The pressures applied on Iran were so great that most of the world's leading industrial nations conditioned trading with us to the signing of the protocol, as seen in the Azadegan oilfields that the Japanese refused to develop," the SCNS influential secretary told a bewildered assembly. (See Japan, Iran sign major oil deal, US dismayed , February 20.)
However, Rohani expressed the hope that because of Iran's "clear-cut and full" cooperation with the IAEA, the board would not take the case to the Security Council for economic sanctions. "Even the Americans have indicated that they would not insist on the matter," he added.
Diplomats in Vienna said a draft resolution prepared by the US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand does not mention the Security Council and balances criticism of Iran with praise for granting the IAEA access to sites and agreeing to suspend all activities linked to the enrichment of uranium.
The IAEA will also discuss technology and equipment for enriching uranium sold to Iran by Pakistan's Khan. According to a report by Malaysian police based on the apparent confession of a wealthy Sri Lankan who serves as a middleman, Khan sold Iran a number of centrifuges for US$3 million. But Tehran has constantly denied the accusations, saying that it obtained second-hand material on the black market, with no information about its origin.
IAEA inspectors who found traces of aluminum enriched with new equipment known as P-2 say Iran concealed this equipment from them, but the radical daily Keyhan on Sunday accused the agency of "gross lies and total dishonesty", reiterating that Iran had told inspectors about all of its activities and installations.
In a sharp-tongued comment, Hoseyn Shariatmadari, a high-ranking intelligence officer appointed by Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei as editor, said that although the October 21 agreement with the foreign affairs ministers of Europe's big three was a choice between bad and worse, the IAEA, under pressure from the "US and Zionist circles has gone far beyond honesty in dealing with the Islamic Republic".
Quoting Khamenei as having warned the IAEA and the leading powers "not to try to challenge Islamic Iran's right to possess nuclear technology", Shariatmadari called on the authorities to be ready for "the big showdown" and urged lawmakers elected to the next Iranian parliament not to approve the protocol if the IAEA failed to accommodate Iran.
The additional protocol, which allows IAEA inspectors to carry out "instant" and unrestricted inspections of all Iranian nuclear installations and projects, has not yet been approved by the outgoing Iranian majlis (parliament).
According to Mehr, continuing accusations against Iran, despite its cooperation with IAEA inspectors, has irked the Iranian delegation, which has accused the agency of dealing with Iran in an "illogical manner ... There is nothing permanent. We signed the additional protocol ... and when to resume is in the hands of our system [the ruling Islamic establishment]," Rohani said at the assembly on Sunday, reiterating that Iran's atomic projects, like an electric plant that is under construction at the Persian Gulf port of Booshehr, with assistance from Russia, are for civilian purposes.
But Washington insists that Iran's ruling ayatollahs want to use atomic installations, and Booshehr, for advancing military aims.
The IAEA's latest report on Iran said that agency inspectors had unearthed designs and parts for the advanced P2 uranium enrichment centrifuge, capable of producing bomb-grade uranium at twice the speed of Iran's first generation P1 centrifuges. The agency also uncovered experiments in the creation of plutonium, which can also be used as the explosive in nuclear weapons, and polonium, which can spark a chain reaction in a nuclear weapon.
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