In the midst of the war on Iran, American and Iranian diplomats met this weekend to determine how best to keep Iran from getting a nuclear weapon. As I note in the attached piece, “U.S.-Iranian Nuclear Talks: Three Headaches,” that RealClearDefense posted over the weekend, achieving the objective won’t be easy.
Besides disagreeing about what has already supposedly been agreed to regarding inspections and the disposition of Iran’s enriched uranium, there are two other issues that have yet to be joined.
First, the United States and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) lack a baseline inventory of how much enriched uranium Iran has, where it might be, and the location of all of its enrichment centrifuges. To get this baseline is to allow for comprehensive, intrusive, country-wide inspections like those the United Nations authorized after the war with Iraq.
Second, controls over Iran’s spent power reactor fuel at Bushehr need to be tightened. The reactor and its spent fuel storage pools need to be placed under IAEA near-real time surveillance, using sensors and cameras that can send images and data securely every few minutes to a site outside of Iran.
In addition, the spent fuel, which contains more than 200 bombs’ worth of weapons-usable plutonium, needs to be removed to a third country.
It’s unclear if the United States and Iran can agree on these points. What is clear, however, is these are minimal conditions for keeping Iran nuclear weapons free.
U.S.-Iranian Nuclear Talks: Three Headaches
Although nuclear talks with the Iranians will resume today, there are already major disputes as to what’s been agreed to so far. Beyond these disputes, two additional major issues—the need for country-wide, intrusive inspections and for tighter controls over Iran’s spent reactor fuel—have yet to be joined.
First, the disputes.
The administration says Tehran has agreed to International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) inspections of Iran’s bombed uranium enrichment sites. Iran insists there is no such agreement.
The White House says it wants to destroy Iran’s stockpiles of highly enriched uranium. Iran says it will only blend it down.
Administration officials insist Iran has no inalienable right to enrich. Iran insists it has it and intends to exercise it.
The administration wants Iran to ship the bulk of its enriched uranium to a third country. Iran says it will never allow this material to leave its soil.
Resolving these disputes constitutes the first headache. Then, there’s what’s yet to be discussed.
The first bit missing is the need for country-wide, intrusive inspections. It’s estimated that Iran has built between 30,000 to 40,000 gas centrifuges. Iran only needs a few hundred centrifuges to convert the enriched uranium it’s already has into weapons-grade uranium. Might Iran have hidden this many or more centrifuges at undeclared sites? What of its extensive stockpile of enriched uranium? Do we know where all of this material is? Neither the IAEA nor any US allied intelligence agency can say for sure.
The only way to get the answer is to conduct comprehensive, intrusive nuclear inspections of all of Iran. These inspections should be similar to that imposed on Iraq after it lost the second Gulf War. Neither the United States nor Iran have yet joined this issue.
Yet another worrisome matter is Iran’s power reactor at Bushehr. It has produced enough plutonium to fuel more than 200 nuclear warheads. The amount of time and effort to extract this plutonium from the spent fuel and convert it into warheads is roughly the same as what Iran would need to do to produce uranium bombs.
Unfortunately, routine IAEA nuclear safeguards inspections only occur every 90 days—a period within which Iran could divert the stored spent fuel containing weapons usable plutonium and chemically strip this material out from other radioactive byproducts in the spent fuel. Even increasing onsite inspections to one a month, would still leave more than enough time for Iran to divert and convert the spent fuel into nuclear weapons plutonium cores.
A fix here would be to subject Iran’s reactors and their spent fuel storage sites to near real-time surveillance. More than 30 countries already authorize the IAEA to conduct such surveillance of their nuclear facilities. It entails installing cameras and sensors that send images and data in a secure manner every few minutes to a station located outside of the inspected country. If the lights go off, if the cameras’ view is blocked, or if the sensors or cameras fail, IAEA officials would know within minutes—not months or days—and could dispatch inspectors to the site immediately.
The good news is Iran agreed in 2015 to allow such surveillance of its enrichment plant at Natanz. At the time, the Obama Administration, though, failed to ask for such surveillance of Iran’s power reactor at Bushehr. The IAEA subsequently asked Iran to permit such surveillance of the reactor. Iran refused. So far, Trump’s negotiators haven’t publicly raised the issue.
The second missing bit is the need to remove Iranian reactor spent fuel laden with weapons usable plutonium. Russia offered to take back Iran’s spent fuel when it contracted to build Bushehr. The Iranians, however, never availed itself of Moscow’s offer. U.S. negotiators should demand it. The United States and Iran’s neighbors could help pay for removing the spent fuel either to Russia or Kazakhstan, which has already offered to take Iran’s enriched uranium.
Unfortunately, none of these nettlesome issues have been properly joined. Given Iran’s contrarian nuclear disposition, ignoring these issues is a prescription for mischief. At the very least, the United States should clarify what making Iran nuclear weapons free actually requires.
Will Washington get all that it asks for? Probably not. But if it pulls its punch on what’s necessary to denuclearize Iran, it will have even less luck keeping Iran’s neighbors—e.g., Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Turkey, and Egypt—from following Iran’s model. In that case, the United States will have to face not just a near-nuclear armed Iran, but a Middle East full of nuclear Iran wannabes. Our security headaches then will be far harder to cope with.
To read the full piece, click here.