IAEA Cites Iran On Uranium Work
Report Says Weapons Effort Is Cloaked
By Glenn Kessler
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, September 9, 2003; Page A09
Inspectors for the United Nations recently concluded that Iran has attempted to produce highly enriched uranium without properly disclosing it, which would be a serious violation of its nuclear nonproliferation agreements, according to a confidential report by the director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency.
The 10-page report, which recently began circulating among nonproliferation specialists in Washington, is written in bland diplomatic prose and buries many of its conclusions. But experts who have read the report said it provides damning evidence that Iran has quickly and secretly attempted to build a crash nuclear weapons program, and then tried to mislead U.N. investigators with contradictory and implausible explanations.
"As you read this report, the vastness and sophistication of the Iran program becomes apparent," said Joseph Cirincione, director of the nonproliferation project at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. "Anyone looking at this has got to conclude this is a nuclear bomb program."
In a speech yesterday in Vienna before the IAEA's 35-nation board of governors, Director General Mohamed ElBaradei urged Iran "to show proactive and accelerated cooperation, and to demonstrate full transparency by providing the Agency with a complete and accurate declaration of all its nuclear activities."
ElBaradei said "information and access [from Iran] were in some instances slow in coming, piecemeal and reactive, and at times the information provided has been inconsistent with that given previously."
The Bush administration has accused Iran of having a secret nuclear weapons program -- which Iran has vehemently denied -- but it has had trouble winning support for an IAEA resolution that would send the matter to the U.N. Security Council. But experts said the conclusions by the U.N. experts could help win support for tougher action against Iran.
"The significance is, this is a more objective measure of Iran's noncompliance," said Michael Levi, a nuclear physicist at the Brookings Institution.
Late last month, it was disclosed that IAEA investigators found traces of highly enriched uranium on some of the equipment examined in Iran. The Iranian government said the traces were residue already on the equipment when it was received from another country. But the report goes further and says the experts determined that Iran could not have built its massive gas centrifuge enrichment facility at Natanz, about 300 miles south of Tehran, without having first tested the equipment covertly with nuclear material.
"This is an egregious violation of their nonproliferation agreement," Levi said. "You are not allowed to enrich uranium secretly."
The report also says that in June, the IAEA board urged Iran not to introduce any nuclear material into the facility "as a confidence-building measure" while questions were being raised about Iran's nuclear ambitions. But just days later, on June 25, Iran began using nuclear material anyway in one machine and last month it expanded testing in other machines -- making it difficult to determine whether enriched uranium had been in the facility before June.
The report raises many questions about Iran's conflicting explanations for its programs, including its inability to provide original copies of design documents that might explain how Iran built such sophisticated equipment without secretly using nuclear material. The report also suggests that Iran provided an implausible explanation for why it is building a heavy water reactor that could be used to produce weapons-grade plutonium, but which Iran says is for medical and industrial purposes.
© 2003 The Washington Post Company
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