Archive for October, 2009

Nuclear weapons out of Germany, then Europe?

Posted on: October 28th, 2009 by Ernie Regehr

The new German Foreign Minister has pledged to pursue the removal of the last of US nuclear weapons on German soil. It’s a move that will either signal the beginning of the end of nuclear weapons in Europe or the beginning of a new political quarrel within NATO.

It seems anachronistic in the extreme, not to mention silly, for NATO to get caught up in a serious quarrel over a few hundred, at the most, US nuclear gravity bombs still kept on European soil. But it could happen, as it did at the end of the 1990s – all in the name of trans-Atlantic NATO solidarity. The New York Times today quotes an un-named NATO diplomat as insisting that US nuclear weapons in Europe “are the foundation of [NATO] solidarity. Take them away and what have we left?”[i]

Just because Guido Westerwelle’s pledge is sensible and long overdue doesn’t mean it will be easy to fulfill. And whatever resistance it meets will not come from Washington. A big part of the resistance will rely on the slightly absurd, to be kind about it, solidarity argument[ii] – the idea that, despite massive Europe-North America trade links, myriad cultural and historical ties, as well as broadly shared political values, it is still only the few hundred Cold War nuclear relics that can successfully bridge the Atlantic. Another claim will be that the removal of nuclear weapons from Europe should not be done unilaterally but should be coordinated with substantial reductions in Russian tactical nuclear weapons – as if 200 less warheads in Europe will suddenly reverse the Russian strategic calculus.

Nuclear weapons in Europe are still obviously championed in some influential circles, but a more likely scenario is that this German move to remove US nuclear weapons from its territory will indeed be the beginning of the end of nuclear weapons in Europe (outside of France and the UK).

Mr. Westerwelle, the leader of the German Free Democrats and Foreign Minister in the new German coalition led by the continuing Chancellor Angela Merkel, has long been an advocate of disarmament, and in this move he has the support of four of the six parties with members in the Bundestag.[iii]

There are similar pressures in the Dutch Parliament[iv] and the Belgian Senate is about to consider a proposal to ban nuclear weapons within its territory.[v] NATO strategic doctrine is now under review and, given that the alliance leader is now firmly and publicly committed to entering a path that leads to zero nuclear weapons, it should be expect, or demanded, that a new NATO Strategic Concept will no longer describe nuclear weapons as essential to its security or essential to transatlantic solidarity. And a NATO doctrine modified in that way will pave the way to the removal of nuclear weapons from the five non-nuclear weapon states that still host them (Belgium, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, and Turkey).

eregehr@ploughshares.ca

Notes

[i] Judy Dempsey, “Ridding German of US Nuclear Weapons,” New York Times, 29 October 2009.http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/29/world/europe/29iht-letter.html.

[ii] The current NATO Strategic Concept insists in paragraph 63 that “nuclear forces based in Europe and committed to NATO provide an essential political and military link between the European and the North American members of the Alliance. The Alliance will therefore maintain adequate nuclear forces in Europe.” [NATO. 1999. The Alliance’s Strategic Concept, Approved by the Heads of State and Government participating in the meeting of the North Atlantic Council in Washington D.C. on 23rd and 24th April 1999.http://www.nato.int/docu/pr/1999/p99-065e.htm.]

[iii] “Germany opts for a farewell to NATO nuclear weapons,” Russia Today, 28 October 2009.http://www.russiatoday.com/Politics/2009-10-28/germany-nato-nuclear-weapon.html.

[iv] With the SP, for example, arguing for a non-nuclear NATO strategy. “Nuclear Disarmament: Steps must be taken which inspire confidence,” 27 October 2009. http://international.sp.nl/bericht/37934/091027-nuclear_disarmament_steps_must_be_taken_which_inspire_confidence.html.

[v] “Belgian Senate to Consider Nuclear-Weapon Ban,” Global Security Newswire, 16 October 2009.http://gsn.nti.org/gsn/nw_20091016_3998.php.

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Fewer wars, but no less deadly

Posted on: October 21st, 2009 by Ernie Regehr

The 28 wars now being fought on the territories of 24 countries leave a legacy of squandered potential well beyond their immediately measurable consequences.

Project Ploughshares has been tracking global armed conflict since 1987 and the good news is that the current count of 28 armed conflicts in 24 countries is the lowest on record over the past two decades.[i] Wars were at a peak in the 1990s – reaching 44 armed conflicts in 1994 and 1995, followed by slight declines over the next four years, but then returning to 41 armed conflicts in 1999 and 2000. Since then there has been a steady decline, down to the current low of 28.[ii]

The bad news is that a gradual decline in the number of conflicts does not seem to be matched by a commensurate decline in conflict deaths.

Counting the war dead is clearly a difficult proposition. Many battles and attacks are fought in relative obscurity, and even wars with a high profile, like those in Afghanistan and Iraq, are not followed in detail by war correspondents (local or foreign) who can be present at all the battles, air strikes, and IED (improvised explosive devices) explosions to systematically document the casualties. Nevertheless, local communities, fighting forces, news organizations, and non-governmental groups do make serious efforts to count the dead and to report on them.

The methodology at Project Ploughshares is to monitor such reports in a very wide range of published sources[iii] and to tabulate the results, not for the purpose of publishing specific figures but to place conflicts in one of three broad categories – 1,000-10,000 combat deaths, 10,000-100,000, over 100,000). In the last three years the results have shown total war combat deaths (combatants and civilians) to be just over 50,000 per year. That figure is roughly 10 to 20 percent higher than the previous three years and it is reinforced by a major study carried out on behalf of the secretariat of the “Geneva Declaration,” a 2006 Declaration on Armed Violence and Development endorsed by more than 90 states. That 2008 study, The Global Burden of Armed Violence, estimates that from 2004 through 2008, on average, about 52,000 people were killed each year in armed conflict.[iv]

According to the Ploughshares tabulation, about 80 percent of the direct war deaths in 2008 occurred in six countries (ranked highest to lowest in combat deaths): Iraq, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Somalia, and India.

While 1,000 people are killed each week by fighting, most deaths in war are not combat deaths. They are deaths by hunger, disease, and the denial, through the chaos and disruption of war, of the basic essentials for living. The Geneva Declaration study estimates that these war-related deaths are currently at an average of about 200,000 per year – bringing annual war deaths to about 250,000 per year, or closer to 1,000 deaths per day.

Indeed, such estimates are most certainly conservative. Direct combat deaths are likely to be seriously underestimated – there is obviously no systematic way to be comprehensive in finding out about them all, or in publicly reporting them. And counting indirect deaths – those that are a consequence of war conditions rather than the result of direct violence – is even more daunting.

A detailed study by the International Rescue Committee[v] of deaths in the Democratic Republic of Congo found that in the ten years from 1998 to 2007 there were 5.4 million excess deaths (that is, deaths not explained by normal life expectancy rates and so attributed to the devastatingly harsh and extraordinary conditions imposed by ongoing war). Of those, fewer than 10 percent were judged to be the result of direct violence. More than 90 percent were deaths from preventable causes, but which were not prevented because of the presence of armed conflict. By that estimate, annual war-related deaths would actually have been more than double the estimates of 52,000 direct and 200,000 indirect deaths each year of the last decade – in other words, the costs in human lives are probably greater than 1,500 every day.

Of course, another feature of current wars is their durability. Some 21 of the 28 current armed conflicts (that is, 75 percent) have been ongoing for more than 10 years. Of those, 10 are more than 20 years old; and of those, eight have seen fighting for more than 30 years. In four conflicts the fighting has been between five and ten years, and in only three is the fighting of less than five years’ duration.

And throughout, the impact on families and communities in these perennially war-torn societies quite literally becomes immeasurable. Schools remain closed, medical clinics cannot be built or operated, crops cannot be planted, markets can’t function, homes must be fled. The Geneva Declaration study does try to measure the impact and puts it this way: “Armed violence…corrodes the social fabric of communities, sows fear and insecurity, destroys human and social capital, and undermines development investments and aid effectiveness. The death and destruction of war – which ebbs and flows from year to year and is concentrated in a few countries – reduces gross domestic product growth by more than two percent annually, with effects lingering many years after the fighting ends.”[vi]

eregehr@ploughshares.ca

Notes

[i] See the latest report at: http://www.ploughshares.ca/libraries/ACRText/ACR-TitlePage.html.

[ii] An armed conflict, or war, is defined for the purposes of this tabulation as a political dispute in which has turned to armed combat involving the armed forces of at least one state, or one or more armed factions, in which at least 1,000 people have been killed by the fighting during the course of the conflict. A fuller definition is available at: http://www.ploughshares.ca/libraries/ACRText/ACR-DefinitionArmedConflict.htm.

[iii] Link to sources: http://www.ploughshares.ca/libraries/ACRText/ACR-Sources.html.

[iv] The Global Burden of Armed Violence, Geneva Declaration Secretariat, Geneva 2008, 162 pp.

http://www.genevadeclaration.org/resources-armed-violence-report.html.

[v] Reported in The Global Burden of Armed Violence, p. 31.

[vi] The Global Burden of Armed Violence, p. 1.

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Does nuclear energy lead to the bomb?

Posted on: October 13th, 2009 by Ernie Regehr

A new CIGI study, “From Nuclear Energy to the Bomb,” offers a clear and compelling review of one of the central challenges of disarmament diplomacy.

This study[i] comes out of the Nuclear Energy Futures project of CIGI and provides a clear account of the real and potential links between a state’s peaceful nuclear energy capacity and the capacity to acquire a nuclear weapon. Its conclusions?

The scientific knowledge acquired through a basic nuclear energy program – that is, one that does not involve uranium enrichment or reprocessing of spent fuel – provides the basic foundation of scientific knowledge  and, especially, the core personnel and infrastructure on which a nuclear weapons program can be pursued. But that doesn’t mean that the steps toward weaponization are thereafter simple. Hiding the pursuit of a bomb from inspectors of the International Atomic Energy Agency is, fortunately, a major challenge, and increasingly so. And mastering the knowledge, technology, and manufacturing capacity to build a warhead is neither simple nor speedy.

But the sobering reality is that, given time and intention, more and more states will be able to do it. Acquiring uranium enrichment or spent fuel reprocessing capacity for energy purposes represents a further and significant step toward bomb-making capacity. Author Justin Alger concludes that “a state’s capacity to make the leap from power production to assembling a nuclear device is typically considered a matter of time rather than ability.”

But before coming to that clear conclusion, the paper takes you through a careful review of the proliferation risks and challenges linked to nuclear energy production. Here is Mr. Alger’s own account of the main findings:
• “Nuclear energy and weapons are inextricably linked by the scientific principles that underscore both, but beyond this basic understanding the intricacies of the technical relationship between the two are complex.

• “A once-through nuclear program provides a basic foundation in nuclear science and reactor engineering for a nuclear weapons program, but does not provide knowledge of sensitive fuel cycle technology or bomb design and assembly.

• “A peaceful nuclear energy program does, however, provide a state with much of the expertise, personnel, infrastructure and camouflage it would need to begin work on a weapons program should it chose to do so.

• “Acquiring a peaceful nuclear energy infrastructure does enhance a state’s capacity to develop nuclear weapons, but capacity is only one consideration and of secondary importance to other factors that drive state motivations for the bomb.”

The paper’s final comment is particularly important: “Understanding the technical connection between peaceful nuclear energy and nuclear weapons is important, but it is only one consideration. The motivation of states to acquire nuclear weapons, rather than their technical capacity to do so, is the more important concern.”

In the end, preventing the proliferation of nuclear weapons will not be achieved by denying states either the knowledge or the materials to build them. Any state with an emerging industrial capacity and a scientific community will in time be able to gain access to nuclear materials and technical capacity – after that it’s political. It becomes a political and security calculation.

In a recent discussion at George Washington University, US Defence Secretary Robert Gates made the same point with regard to Iran: “…[T]he question is, can we…in a limited period of time bring the Iranians to a conclusion that…Iran is better off without nuclear weapons than with them, and not just in the security sense, but economically and in terms of their isolation in the international community….[T]he only long-term solution to this problem…is the Iranians themselves deciding [that] having nuclear weapons is not in their interest….[M]y hope…has been that…we could, through…both carrots and sticks, persuade them of a smarter direction for Iran.”[ii]

And, of course, that political calculation is influenced by a myriad of considerations, not the least of which is the progress, or lack of it, made by the rest of the international community in pursuit of the now broadly declared objective of a world without any nuclear weapons.

Pursing that goal is, of course, not without its conundrums. A significant number of industrializing states, with even modest regional hegemonic ambitions, will become increasingly reluctant to permanently forswear nuclear weapons if they see other states indefinitely retaining nuclear arsenals and using them to wield added influence within the international community. On the other hand, states that already have nuclear weapons will remain reluctant to disavow and eliminate them if they are convinced that other states are bent on acquiring them.

On the plus side, diplomacy bent on eliminating nuclear weapons is currently on the ascendancy – and this study of the links between nuclear energy and the bomb is a timely contribution to those efforts.

eregehr@ploughshares.ca

Notes


[i] Justin Alger, From Nuclear Energy to the Bomb: The Proliferation Potential of New Nuclear Energy Programs, Nuclear Energy Futures Paper No. 6, September 2009, Centre for International Governance Innovation. Available at: http://www.cigionline.org/sites/default/files/Nuclear_Energy_Futures%206.pdf.

[ii] Transcript, Conversation with Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates to Discuss American Power and Persuasion Oct. 5, 2009, at George Washington University with Frank Sesno and Christiane Amanpour. Available at:http://www.gwu.edu/staticfile/GW/News%20and%20Events/2.%20This%20Week%20at%20GW/Sidebar/clintongatestranscript.pdf.

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Afghanistan: in search of a “high-level political settlement”

Posted on: October 8th, 2009 by Ernie Regehr

It’s hard to dispute the prevailing conclusion that all options in Afghanistan have become bad.[i] That includes the option that still earns only occasional and grudging mention – negotiation. But what distinguishes this option from all the others is its inevitability.

In his recent and widely dissected assessment of the Afghan security assistance mission, Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the new US Commander in Afghanistan, raises the prospect of ending the war through reconciliation with insurgents – not as inevitability, but as likelihood:[ii]

“Insurgencies of this nature typically conclude through military operations and political efforts driving some degree of host-nation reconciliation with elements of the insurgency. In the Afghan conflict, reconciliation may involve [Government of Afghanistan]-led, high-level political settlements.”

A “high-level political settlement” was supposed to have been negotiated in Bonn in late 2001 and was to be the foundation on which the International Security Assistance Force[iii] was originally mounted in 2002. The war that has ensued is not a consequence of some parties to that agreement defecting from it but of the fact that it never was a comprehensive, inclusive agreement involving all the key stakeholders. Michael Semple, the European Union’s special representative in Afghanistan in 2004-2007, puts it this way in his new report for the United States Institute of Peace:[iv]

“It is now widely understood that the Bonn Accords did not constitute a peace agreement. They needed to be supplemented by a strategic pursuit of reconciliation in order to bring all Afghan parties to the conflict into the peaceful political process.”

That “strategic pursuit of reconciliation” has not happened. After the overthrow of the Taliban government, the Bonn process, confirmed through two loya jirgas, that extraordinary and enduring Afghan institution for national consensus building, produced a new institutional and governance framework. Ahmed Rashid, the noted Pakistani journalist, describes Afghanistan’s constitution, approved in 2003 at the second loya jirga, as “one of the most modern and democratic in the Muslim world.”[v]

Despite that, Afghanistan’s growing insecurity[vi] is confirmation that the post-Bonn political/legal order in Afghanistan did not become inclusive and has not earned the undivided loyalty of the Afghan population. The recent election has only added to that failure.

The international community’s prevailing response to that failure has not included new political/diplomatic efforts to rebuild a basic national consensus behind its public institutions; instead, the focus has been on militarily defeating those outside the consensus. But the resort to war, as Gen. McChrystal confirms with considerable force, has neither defeated the opposition nor delivered the expected modicum of security. Enduring and fundamental conflict, along with pervasive distrust, has over time transmuted into a conventional wisdom, resignation, that the war is failing badly and that the options are getting worse.

William R. Polk, a prominent American academic and advisor to Democratic Presidents, has written an open letter to President Obama pointing out that when foreign forces exit a counterinsurgency war, “almost always, those who fought hardest against the foreigner take over when he leaves.”[vii] The longer the effort to defeat an entrenched insurgency by sheer force, even when force is supplemented by enlightened hearts-and-minds counterinsurgency tactics, the more difficult it is to find a moderate middle ground.

There have certainly been reconciliation efforts in Afghanistan, but most are more properly described as cooption efforts – essentially attempts to entice moderate Taliban to switch sides. These efforts are designed to support the basic military effort, not to replace it. And those efforts at high-level negotiation that have been tried, like those hosted by the Saudis,[viii] have not enjoyed the committed support, political and material, of the international community.

Negotiations will come, because that is how the vast majority of insurgencies end. And the basic objectives of those negotiations will necessarily have to remain modest; that is, to end the fighting over state control and for whatever influence and benefit control over Kabul affords. The objective in Afghanistan, not unlike in Canada, is not to find enduring political harmony. Like Canada, Afghanistan is a place of enormous regional, geographic, and ethnic diversity in which political consensus will always be elusive – at best, cobbled together through informal, temporary, and often issue-specific coalitions. That means the objective is to rebuild institutions and power-sharing arrangements capable of mediating, without resort to violence, the myriad of political conflicts that are endemic to contemporary states.

By now all the major contenders in the Afghanistan war should be convinced, if the truth be told, that it is a war they “can’t win, won’t lose, can’t quit, and can’t afford.”[ix] If and when that reality sinks in, the point of the ensuing negotiations will be the limited objective of a ceasefire to open the way to further negotiations and reconciliation processes to address regional security concerns, to promote inter-communal reconciliation and power sharing at the national level, to set public parameters for respect for basic rights, and to develop ongoing support for peacebuilding efforts at the local level.

It is not a matter of negotiating with one monolithic Taliban. The insurgency has multiple strands. And while reconciliation must ultimately be Afghan-led, it will not necessarily be Afghan Government-led. The time has come for such efforts to garner as much international support and encouragement as is now reserved for assistance to military and police forces.

eregehr@ploughshares.ca

Notes

[i] Jeffrey Simpson, “Despite our setbacks, all quiet on the Afghan front,” Globe and Mail, 7 October 2009. http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/opinions/despite-our-setbacks-all-quiet-on-the-afghan-front/article1314266/.

[ii] “Commander’s Initial Assessment,” 30 August 2009. Commander, NATO International Security Assistance Force, Afghanistan, and US Forces, Afghanistan. Available at http://media.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/politics/documents/Assessment_Redacted_092109.pdf.

[iii] Originally approved by UN Security Council Resolution 1386 (2001).http://daccessdds.un.org/doc/UNDOC/GEN/N01/708/55/PDF/N0170855.pdf?OpenElement.

[iv] Michael Semple, Reconciliation in Afghanistan, United States Institute of Peace Press, 2009, p. 89.

[v] Ahmed Rashid, Descent into Chaos (Viking, 2008), p. 217.

[vi] Among many accounts of this growing insecurity is the most recent report of the UN Secretary-General, “The situation in Afghanistan and its implications for international peace and security,” 22 September 2009 (A/64/364-S/2009/475).  http://daccessdds.un.org/doc/UNDOC/GEN/N09/515/77/PDF/N0951577.pdf?OpenElement.

[vii] William R. Polk, “An Open Letter to President Obama.” The Nation, 19 October 2009.http://www.thenation.com/doc/20091019/polk.

[viii] Pakistani journalist Amir Mir, “Saudi peace initiative for a Taliban-Karzai truce fruitless so far, Middle East Transparent, 22 December 2008. http://www.metransparent.com/spip.php?page=article&id_article=5046&lang=en.

[ix] This felicitous phrase, or close to it, was offered by A.J.R. Groom of the University of Kent, not in the context of Afghanistan, in a recent public lecture at the Centre for International Governance Innovation. A related paper, “Roadmaps after the ‘peace’,” was first published in Milica Delevic Djilas and Vladimir Deric (eds), The International and the National, Belgrade Centre for Human Rights, Belgrade, 2003,

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“Coming Clean” – where the pressure on Iran belongs

Posted on: October 1st, 2009 by Ernie Regehr

One welcome result of the discovery that Iran has been secretly building another uranium enrichment plant has been to refocus diplomacy more on demands for transparency, and less on the hitherto favored but largely ineffective demand that enrichment be suspended.

Today’s talks in Geneva between Iran and the P5[i] plus Germany, hosted by the European Union, appear to have been a relatively positive start to a new focus on diplomacy. They produced a commitment to talk again and, notably, a confirmation from Iran that the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) will be given access to the newly disclosed enrichment site.[ii]

How soon and how much access (e.g. in addition to entering the site, access to personnel, blueprints, supplier invoices, and so on) are important details yet to come, but this attention to openness and transparency is where the emphasis needs to be.

The formal UN Security Council demand is on Iran[iii] to suspend all proliferation sensitive activity, notably uranium enrichment, and to comply with IAEA requests for information and access related to verifying such suspension. The Security Council has also emphasized transparency through its calls on Iran to ratify the Agency’s Additional Protocol, a supplement to safeguard agreements granting much more extensive and effective access to nuclear facilities. But the Council’s political energy has been heavily focused on suspending enrichment.

The problem with that obsession with ending Iran’s enrichment activity is twofold. In the first place, if it is done under safeguards, which it now is, it is a perfectly legal activity. Second, getting Iran to suspend its enrichment program without getting the kind of broad access offered by the Additional Protocol would end up being a pyrrhic victory – it would temporarily pause an activity that is already subject to IAEA inspection (and thus ongoing confirmation that it is not linked to a weapons program) but would do nothing to improve the IAEA’s capacity to confirm that there are no further unreported, or clandestine, nuclear programs underway.

So now the focus is turning to transparency. The Washington Post’s report on today’s (October 1) meeting says the six countries (P5 plus Germany) told Iran that a generous incentive was on the table “if Iran would open its nuclear program to inspection”[iv] – there was no reference to suspending enrichment.

In US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s appearance on CBS last Sunday she reasserted Iran’s right to pursue peaceful nuclear development that is appropriately safeguarded and did not refer to the call for a suspension of uranium enrichment.[v] The Obama Administrations shift to transparency was discussed in this space last April,[vi] noting an Administration Official’s comment that, “frankly, what’s most valuable to us now is having real freedom for the inspectors to pursue their suspicions around the country.”[vii]

The International Atomic Energy Agency’s (IAEA) reports on Iran[viii] have repeatedly confirmed that none of Iran’s declared nuclear activity and no declared nuclear materials have been diverted to military purposes. The problem is in developing confidence that there is no undeclared, or clandestine, nuclear weapons program – and the development of such confidence depends on significant increases in Iranian transparency.

In other words, if Iran is going to “come clean,” as President Obama put it,[ix] on all of its nuclear activity, it will have to ratify the IAEA Additional Protocol. Indeed, as noted before, the Additional Protocol should be compulsory for all states,[x] but at a minimum the Security Council should make the Additional Protocol one of its chief demands on Iran.[xi] Before the current stalemate, Iran did allow inspections in line with the terms of the Additional Protocol (even though it did not ratify it), but “since early 2006,” the IAEA’s 2007 report notes, “the [IAEA] has not received the type of information that Iran had previously been providing, pursuant to the Additional Protocol and as a transparency measure. As a result, the Agency’s knowledge about Iran’s current nuclear program is diminishing.” [xii]

That is not a good thing. In the meantime analysts are increasingly acknowledging that a full suspension of enrichment will be all but impossible to achieve.

Professor Peter Jones, an Iran and Middle East expert at the University of Ottawa’s Graduate School of Public and International Affairs, wrote in the Globe and Mail this week that it is “difficult to see how a complete cessation of enrichment can be achieved – Iran has simply gone too far for that.” He suggests that an acceptable compromise would be to allow a small and fully inspected research-scale enrichment facility.[xiii]

Over at ArmsControlWonk.Com, an extraordinarily helpful nonproliferation blog, there is a similar recognition that “suspension is not the answer.” One idea explored there is the multilateralization of uranium enrichment in Iran.[xiv] A multilateral enrichment facility on Iranian soil that would fully engage Iranian engineers and scientists would also have the effect of keeping them away from covert endeavors. To have international personnel working alongside Iranians, supported by an intrusive inspection regime, would be “the best way to prevent Iran from getting a bomb.”

News out of Geneva that Iran is prepared to send its enriched uranium to Russia for the production of fuel for the small Iranian reactor that produces medical isotopes is a further indication that stopping uranium enrichment in Iran is no longer the objective of the international community. Sending its enriched uranium out of the country, all monitored by the IAEA, obviously means, of course, that it will not be stored for some possible future plan to enrich it further to weapons grade.[xv]

Ambiguity and secrecy are both fundamentally inimical to nuclear nonproliferation, but both have been two constants in Iran’s nuclear programs to date. Moving from ambiguity to certainty – to transparency and demonstrable confidence that Iran’s nuclear activities are pursued exclusively for non-weapons purposes – will obviously require major changes on the part of Iran. But it will also require the P5 and the UN Security Council to get focused on the core requirement of transparency and to move beyond the enrichment suspension deadlock. There is now evidence that is beginning to happen.

eregehr@ploughshares.ca

Notes

[i] The five permanent members of the Security Council – China, France, Russia, UK, and US.

[ii] Steven Erlanger and Mark Landler, “Iran Agrees to More Nuclear Talks with US and Allies,” New York Times, 2 October 2009. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/02/world/middleeast/02nuke.html.

[iii] S/RES/1737, 23 December 2006.http://daccessdds.un.org/doc/UNDOC/GEN/N06/681/42/PDF/N0668142.pdf?OpenElement.

[iv] Glenn Kessler and Colum Lynch, “US, Iran Hold Bilateral Talks,” Thye Washington Post, 1 October 2009.http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/10/01/AR2009100101294.html.

[v] “Face the Nation” (CBS), 27 September 2009.

http://news.google.ca/news?hl=en&source=hp&q=Iran+nuclear&rlz=1R2ADBF_enCA332&um=1&ie=UTF-8&ei=yUfBSo6MCpXh8Qbohc2pAQ&sa=X&oi=news_group&ct=title&resnum=1.

[vi] “A Welcome Shift on Iran,” 14 April 2009.  http://www.cigionline.org/blogs/2009/4/welcome-us-shift-iran.

[vii] David E. Sanger, “US May Drop Key Condition for Talks With Iran,” The New York Times, 14 April 2009.http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/14/world/middleeast/14diplo.html.

[viii] Report by the Director General, “Implementation of the NPT Safeguards Agreement and relevant provisions of Security Council resolutions 1737 (2006), 1747 (2007), 1803 (2008) and 1835 (2008) in the Islamic Republic of Iran, 19 February 2009, International Atomic Energy Agency (GOV/2009/8).http://www.iaea.org/Publications/Documents/Board/2009/gov2009-8.pdf.

[ix] “Obama Demands That Iran ‘Come Clean’ on Nuclear Work, 28 September 2009, Global Security Newswire. http://www.globalsecuritynewswire.org/gsn/nw_20090928_9676.php.

[x] For example, Canada urged the 2005 NPT Review Conference to make “the Additional Protocol, together with a comprehensive safeguards agreement, …the verification standard pursuant to Article III.1” for fulfilling “the obligations of that section of the Treaty.” Canadian statement to the 2004 NPT PrepCom on “Implementation of the Provisions of the Treaty Relating to the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, Safeguards and Nuclear Weapon Free Zones Issues” (http://www.dfait-maeci.gc.ca/arms/2004nptcluster2-en.asp).

[xi] UN Security Council Resolution 1737 (2006) “calls upon Iran to ratify promptly the Additional Protocal,” but does not demand it in the same way that it demands that Iran suspend proliferation sensitive nuclear activities, including uranium enrichment. (http://daccessdds.un.org/doc/UNDOC/GEN/N06/681/42/PDF/N0668142.pdf?OpenElement)

[xii] Report by the Director General, “Implementation of the NPT Safeguards Agreement and relevant provisions of Security Council resolutions 1737 (2006) and 1747 (2007) in the Islamic Republic of Iran,” 15 November 2007, International Atomic Energy Agency (GOV/2007/58).http://www.iaea.org/Publications/Documents/Board/2007/gov2007-58.pdf.

[xiii] Peter Jones, “Dealing with Iran will require diplomacy with a hard edge,” The Globe and Mail, 30 September 2009. http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/opinions/dealing-with-iran-will-require-diplomacy-with-a-hard-edge/article1304592/.

[xiv] Geoffrey Forden, “Paradox: Now is the Time to Deal,” 25 September 2009. http://armscontrolwonk.com.

[xv] Steven Erlanger and Mark Landler, “Iran Agrees to Send Enriched Uranium to Russia,” New York Times, 2 October 2009. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/02/world/middleeast/02nuke.html?ref=world.

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