by Reaching Critical Will, a project of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom. The full toolkit is here.
Since December 2002, when Iran’s previously unreported development of a nuclear site at Natanz (uranium enrichment plant) became public knowledge, Iran has been under fire from key players in the international community. Iran agreed to allow enhanced inspections by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the agency responsible for inspections of nuclear facilities of all states parties of the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). As Iran is a member of the NPT, it has a Comprehensive Safeguards Agreement with the Agency. By November 2004, then-IAEA Director General Mohammed ElBaradei announced there was no evidence that Iran was pursuing a nuclear weapons programme.
However, the IAEA did report a number of violations of Iran’s obligation to declare and report certain nuclear material and activities, indicating that Iran has been less than forthcoming “with respect to the reporting of nuclear material, its processing and its use, as well as the declaration of facilities where such material had been processed and stored.” Though Iran implemented the necessary corrective measures, there continued to be concerns that Iran had pursued designed studies and other work related to the development of nuclear weapons.
It is on this basis that the UN Security Council passed its first sanctions resolution against Iran in December 2006, which required Iran to suspend all enrichment and reprocessing activities. Since then, the Security Council has passed several additional sanctions resolutions and key governments have passed unilateral sanctions against the country as well.
During this time, however, the IAEA continued to find that there has been no diversion of nuclear material from Iran’s civilian programme to a military programme. In addition, a 2007 National Intelligence Estimate—a consensus report of all 16 US intelligence agencies—stated: “We judge with high confidence that in fall 2003, Tehran halted its nuclear weapons program.” Finally, as former CIA director Ray McGovern noted in a recent article, both US Defense Secretary Leon Panetta and Israel’s Defence Minister Ehud Barak have recently stated that Iran has NOT made the decision to build a nuclear weapon.
But these statements have gone under- or un-reported in the mainstream press. Similarly, the 2007 National Intelligence Estimate has been deliberately undermined by government officials in the US, Israel, and Europe and by leading newspapers ever since it was released. And recent IAEA reports have been used to register “concern” with Iran’s pursuit of a “nuclear weapons capability”—despite the fact that under the NPT countries are entitled to fully develop nuclear technology for peaceful purposes.
In fact, the NPT actually encourages the development of a civilian nuclear sector. It is considered an “inalienable right” for all members to develop nuclear energy programmes. As nuclear physicist Yousaf Butt noted recently, “Under the NPT, it is not illegal for a member state to have a nuclear weapons capability—or a ‘nuclear option’.” If a country has a fully developed civilian nuclear sector, he explains, it, “by default, already has a fairly solid nuclear weapons capability. For example, like Iran, Argentina, Brazil, and Japan also maintain a ‘nuclear option’—they, too, could break out of the NPT and make a nuclear device in a few months, if not less. And like Iran, Argentina and Brazil also do not permit full ‘Additional Protocol’ IAEA inspections.”
WILPF has been criticizing this aspect of the NPT since it was negotiated in 1968. A treaty aimed to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons should have prohibited the research of nuclear weapon technology, outlawed the production and stockpiling of enriched uranium, and established a programme for the phase-out, rather than promotion, of nuclear power. As the Treaty stands now, however, Iran is not in violation of its commitments. The sanctions imposed on Iran by the UN Security Council and unilaterally by several governments seem to have been designed to serve other interests. “The IAEA’s supposedly neutral role of an international inspectorate is being fundamentally undermined by the political games and warmongering of the Western countries most interested in a new war in the Middle East and regime change in Iran,” argues Butt.
Yet as countless experts have pointed out, the sanctions and aggressive posturing toward Iran over its nuclear programme will only strengthen domestic support for the government and possibly even inspire the government to decide to build a nuclear weapon after all. As lawyer Andrew Lichterman writes in a forthcoming publication for Reaching Critical Will, “A long-term policy of the world’s most powerful state to prevent nuclear weapons proliferation by world-wide deployment of powerful military forces ultimately backed by nuclear weapons, a policy that in the view of much of the world has in practice been used as a stalking horse for hegemonic power politics, is far more likely to perpetuate arms racing than to end it.”
Iran has indicated that it is receptive to a negotiated settlement, but not one that demands it abandon its uranium enrichment programme. In 2010, Brazil and Turkey negotiated a solution with Iran in which Iran would trade about half of its low-enriched uranium for medical isotopes. However, the US government rejected this deal, saying it impeded with the “process” undertaken by the UN Security Council.
There is still time for a diplomatic solution, but the harsh sanctions passed at the end of 2011 by the US Senate with a vote of 100-0, over President Obama’s objections, mean that the administration’s hands are somewhat tied. It will be difficult to engage with Iranian officials in good faith with these sanctions as a backdrop. However, diplomacy is the only option. As Lichterman points out, “no country has the right to declare threats to peace and to its interests that lie in the future, far outside any reasonable concept of present or imminent attack, by conducting a war of aggression.”
– February 2012