Saudi Arabia Exempt From Nuke Inspections
By GEORGE JAHN, Associated Press Writer
VIENNA, Austria - Board members of the U.N. atomic watchdog agency approved a deal Thursday that exempts Saudi Arabia from nuclear inspections, despite serious misgivings about the arrangement in an era of heightened proliferation fears.
Although the Saudis resisted Western pressure to compromise and allow some form of monitoring, the board of the International Atomic Energy Agency had no choice but to allow it to sign on to the agreement.
Called the small quantities protocol, the deal allows countries whose nuclear equipment or activities are thought to be below a minimum threshold to submit a declaration instead of undergoing inspection.
There is little concern the Saudis are trying to make nuclear arms, but diplomats accredited to the meeting said Riyadh's resistance to inspections — and any new deals limiting the IAEA's powers to investigate — were disconcerting at a time of increased fears countries or terrorists might be interested in acquiring such weapons.
With the deal approved, delegates focused on a report on Iran, to be presented later Thursday to the closed board meeting and given ahead of delivery to The Associated Press.
It says Iran has acknowledged working with small amounts of plutonium, a possible nuclear arms component, for years longer than it had originally admitted and receiving sensitive technology that can be used as part of a weapons program earlier than it initially said it did.
The agency has no authority in North Korea, the other main proliferation concern since being kicked out in December 2002. Senior U.S. delegation member Cristopher Ford warned Pyongyang that unless it abandoned "its pursuit of nuclear weapons ... we will have to consult with our allies and partners on other options" — diplomatic jargon for referral to the U.N. Security Council.
The Saudis insist they have no plans to develop nuclear arms — and no facilities or nuclear stocks that warrant inspection.
As such, they qualify for the protocol, which has been implemented by 75 nations, most of them small and in politically stable parts of the world and which puts the onus on the nations to truthfully report that they have nothing to inspect.
But the timing of the deal for the Saudis comes amid persistent tensions in the Middle East and concern about Iran's nuclear ambitions. It also coincides with an agency push to tighten or rescind the protocol, as suggested in a confidential IAEA document prepared for the board and also made available to AP on Tuesday.
While the Saudi government insists it has no interest in nuclear arms, in the past two decades it has been linked to prewar Iraq's nuclear program and to the Pakistani nuclear black marketeer A.Q. Khan. It also has expressed interest in Pakistani missiles capable of carrying nuclear warheads, and Saudi officials reportedly discussed pursuing the nuclear option as a deterrent in the volatile Middle East.
The Saudis have resisted pressure from the United States, the European Union and Australia to either back away from the small quantities protocol or agree to inspections, as reflected by a confidential EU briefing memo given to the AP earlier this week by a diplomat accredited to the agency who insisted on anonymity because he was not authorized to release it.
It quoted the Saudi deputy foreign minister, Prince Turki bin Mohammed bin Saud al-Kabira, as telling EU officials in Riyadh that his country would be "willing to provide additional information" to the IAEA "only if all other parties" to the protocol did the same.
Diplomats inside Thursday's closed meeting said the Saudis repeated those conditions as part of debate over their deal.
The report on Iran does not prove or disprove that Tehran had weapons ambitions. But its details are significant as the agency tries to piece together the puzzle of nearly 18 years of a clandestine nuclear program first revealed in February 2002.
The IAEA first said that Iran produced small amounts of plutonium as part of covert nuclear activities in November 2003.
The agency has not linked the laboratory-scale experiments to weapons, nor has it done so for other parts of the program — including ambitious efforts to be able to enrich uranium. But it criticized Tehran for not voluntarily revealing its plutonium work and other activities that could be linked to interest in making nuclear arms.
Plutonium can be used in nuclear weapons but it also has uses in peaceful programs to generate power — which is what Iran says is the sole purpose of its nuclear activities.
The document says that while Iran had said its plutonium experiments were conducted in 1993 "and that no plutonium had been separated since then," Iranian officials revealed two months ago that there had been linked experiments in 1995 and 1998.
Focusing on shipments of equipment for uranium enrichment, the report said Tehran earlier this year provided documents showing that in at least two instances some components arrived in 1994 and 1995.
Those dates "deviate from information provided earlier by Iran," said the report, saying one particular delivery had earlier been said to have reached the country in 1997.
Such discrepancies are important as the agency tries to establish how long Iran has been trying to assemble a program for enrichment, which can generate both fuel for power and weapons grade uranium.
The report also outlined discrepancies about when Iranian officials said the first meetings with nuclear black marketeers were.
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